Google's identity services now cover more apps including Office 365

Google is expanding its single sign-on umbrella to cover a number of new third-party offerings including Microsoft's productivity juggernaut Office.

Google Identity Platform, which comprises a number of solutions including Google Sign-In, now supports logins for hundreds of apps in the Google Apps Marketplace, and in a blog post the company noted that the offering has now been expanded to cover some big names including Office 365, Facebook at Work, Concur, Box and Slack among others.

The idea is to give businesses a single place in which they can manage identity and security across all their apps, and to bolster mobile security in particular, when combined with Google Apps mobile management tools to deal with things like password strength and lock screen requirements.

Google notes that all this can work to further tighten mobile security in conjunction with hardware-based measures like biometric sensors, and software such as Google's Smart Lock.

Security smarts

Shashank Gupta, Google Apps for Work Product Manager, commented: "Our Google Smart Lock features are available to all Google Accounts, including those used at work, and we provide identity services and enterprise mobility management (EMM) as part of Google Apps for Work at no additional cost."

As we've seen recently, Google is also pushing a new smartphone-based authentication concept which could eliminate passwords. While this is being pitched for consumers, as we noted in a recent feature, there's potential for using a similar approach when it comes to business logins.

• Check out our review of Google Apps for Work 2016