Google Cloud will buy Elastifile, which provides enterprise file storage for the cloud, for an undisclosed amount. The move will integrate Elastifile with Google Cloud Filestore, and the companies expect it to close later this year.

The deal follows Google Cloud’s June announcement that it will purchase data analytics provider Looker for $2.6 billion. Elastifile is Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s second acquisition in a little more than a month (the company also announced a merger with security startup Chronicle during this time), and it comes as the new cloud boss works to grow Google’s market share — especially among enterprise customers.

“Elastifile delivers an essential piece for Kurian,” said Scott Sinclair, a senior analyst at ESG. “Modern enterprises have an insatiable appetite for data. They have massive data volumes, and extracting value from file data is essential to staying competitive. Elastifile offers Google a file storage offering with the features, performance, and scale necessary for the realities of supporting enterprise production applications.”

Elastifile, founded in 2014, is based in Santa Clara, California, and has raised $74 million in four funding rounds.

The company provides scalable cloud-native file storage with intelligent object tiering. It supports Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and earlier this year it launched Elastifile File Service on GCP, a fully-managed version of Elastifile integrated with Google Cloud. Customers including Appsbroker, eSilicon, and Forbes use this service, according to a blog post by Kurian.

Combining Elastifile and Google Cloud will make it easier for enterprises to move their traditional workloads into GCP and to manage and scale newer data- and compute-intensive workloads, Kurian wrote.

“We believe this combination will empower businesses to build industry-specific, high performance applications that need petabyte-scale file storage more quickly and easily,” he said. “This is critical for industries like media and entertainment, where collaborative artists need shared file storage and the ability to burst compute for image rendering; and life sciences, where genomics processing and ML [machine learning] training need speed and consistency; and manufacturing, where jobs like semiconductor design verification can be accelerated by parallelizing the simulation models.”

Sinclair said he expects the acquisition to have broader implications across the industry.

“The competitive response will be interesting to watch over the next few quarters,” he said. “Will the other major public cloud players stay content with their existing offerings, or will we see more moves similar to that of Google’s? There is certainly opportunity for others to bolster their offerings, and I expect they will.”