Google Cloud has acquired a company called Bitium for an undisclosed sum, and this company is soon expected to become a part of the Google Cloud team.

Bitium was founded in 2012 and it provides identity and access management service for its customers. With this product, customers can give their employees a single access credential for using multiple applications like Google apps, Office 365, CRM, marketing tools, social media and more.

Also called as single sign on (SSO), this product gives customers greater security than before as IT administrators have a centralized process to control employees’ identity throughout the organization. At a time when insider activity is becoming an increasing cause of breaches, this is definitely a product that can control that.

In addition, customers need to remember only one set of username and password details to access all applications. As a result, this product from Bitium offers a high level of security and flexibility for organizations to manage their employee access and identity.

From an organization’s point of view, it’s a great way to reduce nefarious and “shadow IT” activities by its employees, as they can readily access many cloud-based applications.

These advantages are what caught Google’s attention too.

With this acquisition, Google plans to continue the good work that Bitium is doing, but all that will now happen under Google’s name. Going forward, Google plans to extend this application to its partners as well. At the same time, it plans to keep this application open for third-party providers, so that they can integrate it along with Google Cloud and G suite.

The larger reason for this acquisition is to take on competition from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Repeatedly, research has shown that cloud security is one of the factors that deter companies from moving to the cloud, With such an identity and access management system, cloud security is greatly increased as the chances for employees to access unauthorized content is greatly reduced. Google hopes that such an increased security can enthuse more customers to opt for Google Cloud over that of AWS and Azure.

Overall, this looks like a good move for Google as it can get the much-needed edge that it’s looking for against its stronger opponents – Amazon and Microsoft.

But, how it translates will be interesting and time will best judge the impact of this acquisition on Google’s customer base and profitability.

 

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