Google Cloud targets Amazon in Bitium buy

Google Cloud has moved to boost its market share against Amazon in the lucrative cloud, buying Santa Monica cloud-services firm Bitium.

Bitium connects employees’ computing devices to a company’s cloud-based applications, with an emphasis on both cybersecurity and ease of access — key considerations in this age of rampant hacking and complicated, time-sucking countermeasures to prevent phishing and other attacks.

“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 said in

a blog post Tuesday.

“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,” Lakshminarayanan said.

First-quarter data from 2017 showed Amazon Web Services with a third of the global market for the data storage and artificial intelligence-boosted processing that make up the cloud, according to Synergy Research Group. Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba and Oracle grew faster than Amazon in the quarter, but trail far behind on revenue, Synergy reported.

The cloud-computing market is expected to expand to $162 billion in 2020 from 2015’s $67 billion, according to an April report in Forbes.

Google did not respond to the question of how much it’s paying for Bitium.