The rumor of Google’s interest in Mandiant barely had time to run! Mountain View formalized the acquisition of the cybersecurity company on March 8, for the modest sum of 5.4 billion dollars. Microsoft, also in the ranks, is being beaten at the post.
Cybersecurity: the cloud finally up to the challenge?
The interest of big technology companies in cybersecurity companies is not a surprise and should even turn into a trend. They allow cloud services like Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon’s AWS and here Google Cloud to expand their offering, for example to enable end-to-end security.
Samsung victim of a cyberattack
Cybersecurity has become a must with the accumulation of media cases in recent years. The cyber component of the Ukraine-Russia war further reinforces this urgent need for security. This expansion of Mountain View’s cloud offering is expected to drive the industry’s already impressive growth.
In his communicatedGoogle is already sharpening the business case for its hardened cloud, “ businesses must be able to quickly detect and respond to adversaries, analyze and automate threat intelligence to extend threat detection across the organization, orchestrate and automate remediation, validate their protection against known threats, and visualize their IT environment to identify and simulate new threats “.
Mandiant is an ideal candidate to meet the expectations of Google Cloud. Created in 2004, it notably contributed, under the aegis of FireEye and with the help of Microsoft, to uncovering the vast SolarWinds cyberattack.
The company is well-known for its reports on cyber campaigns, including those carried out by state actors. the wall street journal specifies that American intelligence relies, among other things, on Mandiant to study the practices of pirates from Russia, China, or elsewhere.
For Google only one obstacle, the regulators
This explains why Google has put its hand in its pocket. At $5.4 billion, the deal is the second largest in Mountain View history. The takeover of Motorola Mobility, at the top of the ranking for 12.5 billion dollars, ended in failure.
A fate Mandiant should avoid. The company will be directly integrated with Google Cloud, which Kevin Mandia, its CEO, welcomes, “ Google Cloud shares our mission-driven culture to bring security to every organization “. The Mandiant brand should survive elsewhere.
An important step remains, the validation of the operation by the regulatory authorities. Relations between its latest and Google are not in good shape and difficulties could arise on this side. Otherwise, the deal should be concluded this year.