The proposed deal is Google’s largest ever and eclipses the $23bn offer it made for the cybersecurity company under a year ago
Google LLC announced it is acquire New York-based cloud security platform Wiz for $32 billion, in an all-cash transaction. The deal comes less than a year since Google attempted to acquire the company – which fell apart after Wiz weighed antitrust and investor concerns as reasons for abandoning the potential deal.
However, the new US administration has already signalled a light-touch on AI regulation and despite still engaging in some antitrust initiatives, it is expected this light touch will carry over to the biggest tech companies. The deal will also be a major boon for the VC industry which has not seen windfalls since 2022 – and which predominately supports the new administration. The atmosphere around such deals – and Europe keenly knows – has shifted in favour of the deal.
For its part, Google will be pointing to the fact it still lags AWS and Microsoft on the cloud front – Wiz will join Google Cloud – and it stressed it wants to exploit Wiz’s multicloud capabilities. Wiz delivers an easy-to-use security platform that connects to all major clouds and code environments to help prevent cybersecurity incidents. Organisations of all sizes — from start-ups and large enterprises to governments and public sector organisations — can use Wiz to protect everything they build and run in the cloud.
Wiz’s products will continue to work and be available across all major clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud platforms, and will be offered to customers through an array of partner security solutions. Google Cloud will also continue to offer customers wide choice through a variety of partner security solutions available in the Google Cloud Marketplace.
Google Cloud wants to use Wiz to build a unified security platform that combines Wiz’s Cloud Security Platform with Google Security Operations, securing cloud-native applications at every stage of development, protecting code, CI/CD systems, and infrastructure. It will also use Wiz to provide precise threat intelligence that gives customers visibility into their own systems through the eyes of their adversaries.
This can be done by the way Wiz’s solution scans a customer’s environment, constructing a comprehensive graph of code, cloud resources, services, and applications – along with the connections between them. It identifies potential attack paths, prioritises the most critical risks based on their impact.
