Google makes second largest acquisition ever: $5.4 billion for Mandiant

Google has announced a massive $5.4 billion deal to acquire cybersecurity firm Mandiant, Inc. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval, but Google says it expects the deal to close later this year. If the deal goes through, it would be Google’s second largest acquisition ever, standing between the $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility deal and the $3.2 billion purchase of Nest. Mandiant will join the Google Cloud division.

Mandiant was founded in 2004 and is a security consulting and threat research company. He is building an automated threat monitoring system called the Mandiant Advantage Platform. Mandiant was a key investigator investigating many of the world’s largest security incidents such as the SolarWinds supply chain attack, the Log4j vulnerability, and the Pulse Secure VPN vulnerabilities.

Google has vast experience in securing its own cloud. In addition to increasing the number of Google security officers on site, the goal of this deal is to bring more security know-how to the site with security consulting services. The blog post shows what the full Google Cloud security offering would look like:

• Consulting services. Mandiant’s proven global experience in comprehensive incident response, strategic preparedness and technical assurance helps clients mitigate threats and mitigate business risk before, during and after an incident.
• Threat Detection and Analysis: Mandiant’s experience in detecting and responding to advanced attackers offers customers useful insights into current threats.
• Automation and response tools. Google Cloud Chronicle’s security tools, Siemplify and Mandiant Automated Defense solutions help clients analyze, prioritize and optimize threat response, and use the Mandiant experience as a virtual extension of their teams.
• Testing and Validation: Mandiant Security Validation helps customers continually test and measure the effectiveness of their cybersecurity controls across cloud and on-premise environments and complements the Google Cloud Trust Center to help ensure risk management is robust.
• Managed Protection: The Mandiant Managed Detection and Response Service acts as a seamless extension of client security groups, providing continuous monitoring, event triage, and threat hunting that is independent of client endpoints and network tools.

The major acquisition of Google Cloud is somewhat unexpected as the division is a distant third behind Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud computing market. Canalys has a 7% market share for Google in the global cloud computing market, 19% for Microsoft Azure and 32% for Amazon Web Services.

A 2019 report by The Information claimed that Google’s management had given the 13-year-old cloud division an ultimatum: reach number two in the cloud market by 2023 or risk losing funding. Google Cloud is unprofitable despite having $20 billion in revenue this year . In a recent call, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said Google is on a “long-term road to Google Cloud profitability.”