Google LLC Tuesday said it’s acquiring Santa Monica-based cloud services startup Bitium Inc. as it looks for ways to increase its share of the public cloud market.

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Bitium’s co-founders said they’ll be joining Google’s cloud team.

Founded in 2012, Bitium offers range of identity and access management services. These allow companies to provide their employees with a single login for multiple cloud services. They improve security because users only need to remember a single password for each service they used, rather than writing down multiple passwords for each one. In addition, they give administrators an easier way to control identity and access permissions throughout their organizations.

These are all key considerations in an age where issues such as hacking and ransomware are running rampant, threatening companies of every size across every industry.

Google said it will use Bitium’s technology to augment its own identity and access management offerings. The idea is that by providing better security and convenience in this way, Google’s cloud will be more attractive compared with rival services such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure. The deal is especially interesting because it gives Google an alternative to Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory Service.

“The move from on-premise enterprise applications to the cloud has unlocked new levels of productivity and collaboration for businesses and their partners, employees and customers,” Google Cloud product management director Karthik Lakshminarayanan wrote in a blog post. “With the increase in cloud adoption, there are new considerations about how to manage cloud applications within an organization and to ensure that the right levels of security and user data access policies are in place.”

The move may also put Google in competition with other companies that provide identity access management and single sign on services, such as Okta Inc., Ping Identity Corp. and OneLogin Inc. However, Google said it’s still committed to working with other partners in the market.

In a separate blog post announcing the acquisition, Bitium’s cofounders Scott Kriz and Erik Gustavson said the firm will continue to support its existing customers during the transition. However, they didn’t say what will happen once its technology is fully integrated with Google’s cloud.

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