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Bitium Drops Into Google Apps Marketplace To Give Enterprises Certainty

This article is more than 8 years old.

Bitium is a one of a growing number of vendors offering a cloud-based identity and access management solution. Bitium covers the identity and access management life-cycle: single sign-on, password management, and analytics for small, medium and enterprise businesses.

Google is (at least a part of Google is, anyway) a vendor delivering office productivity solutions to enterprises. Google Apps, Drive and related services have been trying, for the longest time, to get enterprise market share. In the early days that was easy since their number one competitor, Microsoft Office, really had no compelling cloud story. Since then, however, Microsoft has seen massive success with Office 365.

So if you're Google, you're spending lots of time thinking about what you need to do to really get enterprises across the line. And if you're a security vendor, you're well aware that the broader security piece is a very important requirement that enterprises have, but one that is poorly met by Google itself.

Sounds like a match made in heaven? Seemingly so. Bitium, founded in 2012 and already playing in the Office 365 and general cloud space, is today announcing that it is available as an add-on to Google Apps, delivered through the Google Apps marketplace.

Don't be mistaken, this is a big opportunity. Google Apps already has over five million business customers using the suite, and the company is gunning for the massive opportunity that is the total number of business users of Office - literally millions and millions of organizations. And many of those organizations have some specific requirements when it comes to security. Those requirements are increasingly in the spotlight given recent high profile data breaches - security is the theme du jour for enterprise CIOs.

The Bitium app gives Google Apps administrators the ability to manage all of their business’ apps users and groups in one place, leveraging the Google Apps user directory. Once installed, users and groups will automatically sync from Google to Bitium, eliminating the need to manage two separate directories when adding and revoking access to various applications. As an example, Google Apps administrators can now create new accounts with their preferred CRM system or cloud storage provider by simply adding the user to the appropriate group in their Google Control Panel. Administrators will also have access to insights, reports, audit logs and details on app spend to help manage IT costs and not pay for apps they aren’t using regularly. It's a logical offering that, frankly, Google should be delivering itself.

But the reality is, and we've seen this time and time again, that Google doesn't really "get" enterprise. So it relies, and the customer-base relies, on third party partners to fill in the holes. It's not an ideal situation, but for Bitium it is likely a lucrative one.

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