Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has announced the company “has entered into a definitive agreement” to acquire cloud file storage provider Elastifile. Details haven’t been disclosed at this stage, however Elastifile is expected to join Google Cloud later this year – regulatory approval permitting.

Elastifile describes its business model as “enterprise file storage as-a-service for the cloud”. The company’s product is supposed to help organisations to integrate cloud infrastructure into their processes (or migrate workflows there) while “eliminating storage management complexity” and reducing cloud costs. To realise that, Elastifile has “built a unique software-defined approach to managed Network Attached Storage (NAS)” with support for standard storage protocols such as NFS and SMB.

Amongst the main use cases are storage for SAP workflows on cloud infrastructure as a service and file storage for stateful workloads in cloud applications using container orchestrator Kubernetes.

The USP must have worked – not only because of the advertised deal, but because of the investments companies such as Cisco and Dell Technologies Capital have made since Elastifile’s inception back in 2013. Google’s plan is to join teams and “integrate Elastifile with Google Cloud Filestore”.

According to Kurian, the combination “will support bringing traditional workloads into GCP faster and simplify the management and scaling of data and compute intensive workloads. Furthermore, we believe this combination will empower businesses to build industry-specific, high performance applications that need petabyte-scale file storage more quickly and easily.”

Only earlier this year the company launched a fully-managed Elastifile version integrated into the Google cloud called Elastifile File Service on GCP. What the takeover means for Elastifile on AWS remains to be seen. Meanwhile Kurian assures storage providers who could feel threatened by the move that “Google Cloud is committed to our storage partner ecosystem, providing customers the choice of solutions that best fit their needs.”

The acquisition isn’t the first one aimed at getting more businesses to the cloud. In February 2019 data ingestion specialist Alooma was announced to become part of the Google Cloud family, following the purchase of migration expert Velostrata in 2018