On Tuesday, Google announced its acquisition of cybersecurity firm Mandiant for $5.4 billion. The tech giant said the acquisition was being embarked upon as a way of protecting its cloud customers. Although the deal is subject to regulatory approval, Google announced that it will pay $23 per share for the over a decade old company.
When the deal pulls through, it will be the company’s second-biggest acquisition after its acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in 2012. Google plans to include Mandiant under its Cloud Computing Division which is still smaller in terms of growth compared to Amazon Web Services and Azure.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud in a statement said that “Organizations around the world are facing unprecedented cybersecurity challenges as the sophistication and severity of attacks that were previously used to target major governments are now being used to target companies in every industry. We look forward to welcoming Mandiant to Google Cloud to further enhance our security operations suite and advisory services, and help customers address their most important security challenges.”
The Google-Mandiant acquisition is expected to pull through before the close of the year.
Alphabet’s Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat shed more light on why the company is acquiring Mandiant. She said that “It’s an extraordinary player in cybersecurity. It is going to enable us to provide this end-to-end solution in this very important area and, again, it goes to our commitment around cybersecurity but also all we’re doing in the cloud. The investments and the focus — it starts with let’s make sure we have the depth and breadth within industry verticals so that we can address the idiosyncratic needs within each industry, whether it’s finance versus retail versus health care.”
She went ahead to emphasize how Mandiant’s acquisition could help the company compete with rivals such as Azure and Amazon Web Services. “The way we look at it (investments) is we’re obviously not competing with our peers at the scale they were then, we are competing at the scale they are now in a market that is accelerating. We of course remain focused on what is that longer-term path to profitability, but to be really clear, in the near term, we’re continuing to invest across the board to support cloud,” she explained.
Mandiant is already quite a big name in the cloud space. Leading US government agencies are some of the firm’s customers. Mandiant could be Google’s way of coming to the forefront of the cloud business.
Ibhadojemu Lucky Emmanuel is a graduate of Education and Economics from the University of Benin. He has a passion for tech and business and has been writing professionally for over a period of five years. He's written across various topics and segments and knew tech-business was it when he first stumbled on it. He has a great passion for music and arts, and wants to visit as many countries as he can someday.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
