Ping Identity’s new deal logs you into all your cloud apps from your smartphone (exclusive)

Andre Durand, founder and chief executive of identity-management company Ping Identity, respects the idea that we use our smartphones for everything.

Now his company has made mobile devices into a tool for logging you in to all of your cloud-based services in one shot. Rather than building that feature internally, it’s gone and bought a startup called Accells Technologies.

“We can now offer essentially strong authentication from your mobile phone to a cloud with nothing more than a few clicks and a swipe,” Durand said in an interview with VentureBeat. “That’s what’s really kind of amazing with what were doing right now.”

Connecting iOS and Android smart phones and tablets to the login process, without requiring a username and password, is a nice step up. In the past, security-conscious companies who wanted more than just password-access required employees carry around a key fob that displays a pass code that changed every minute. If you didn’t have the key fob and a password, you couldn’t log in.

Meanwhile, Vasco and other companies in the business of those key fobs, or tokens, have been thinking more about using mobile devices like smartphones. Microsoft bought PhoneFactor in 2012, and Duo Security has been taking on some big customers. And Google’s Authenticate app works like a virtual key fob for Google customers who are using two-factor authentication. So it makes sense for Ping, which integrates with lots of software products running in the cloud, like Box, Gmail, Salesforce.com, and Yammer, to tack on a super-simple login system.

Durand declined to say how many people worked at Accells, which was based in Petah Tikva, Israel, a few miles east of Tel Aviv. But he did say that Ping now has an office in Tel Aviv and that it’s expanding its mobile-authentication team.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Ping Identity, which is based in Denver, announced a $44 million round of funding in July.