Google is successful in its effort to buy cloud security company Wiz, it would bolster its cloud security offerings for large organisations, a hotspot for hackers, and help it take on cloud rivals Amazon.com and Microsoft, experts said. Alphabet is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire Wiz, in a deal worth up to USD 23 billion. This acquisition would be Google's most expensive to date, providing it with advanced cybersecurity products designed to defend against ransomware attacks that have been causing substantial damage to large enterprises.
"There is a hot market for cloud security," said Jerome Seguera, a senior intelligence analyst at the cybersecurity firm MalwareBytes, adding that Wiz gives customers "great visibility into their assets in a straightforward way."
Wiz has offered tools which enable organisations to scan their entire infrastructure and specific software for threats.
Google has been expanding its cybersecurity offerings in recent years and 2 years ago, it bought the popular cyber firm Mandiant for USD 5.4 billion.
Marc Bleicher, chief technology officer of the security firm Surefire Cyber said, "I think they are trying to compete with Microsoft and to a smaller extent AWS (Amazon Web Services).”
Bleicher said, "Wiz is one of only a few who address a big chunk of the cloud security market in one platform.”
About Wiz
Wiz was founded in 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic was at its height, primed to benefit from the move towards remote work and the shift by organisations to cloud environments from desktops. Most of the large organisations have also shifted to storing their data on the cloud over the years, but that has come with security risks - especially as companies expand and become more complex.
Headquartered in New York (the US), the company has reportedly grown. Only 2 months ago, at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francsico, Wiz said it was valued at USD 12 billion.
The Wiz buyout talks surfaced as the pace of global dealmaking in cybersecurity has significantly picked up in 2024. There were 120 global cybersecurity deals announced in the first half of this year, accounting for USD 12.4 billion in deal value, compared to 137 such deals last year, or USD 4.8 billion in deal value, according to data from the financial information firm Dealogic.
Dave Dewalt, founder of the cyber-focused venture capital firm NightDragon, said Wiz's growth is the result of strong marketing and being "at the right place, at the right time, with the right product."
DeWalt, former chief executive of cybersecurity firm FireEye, said cloud security is the most important and fastest-growing part of cybersecurity, driven by increasing attacks on large organisations.
"The stakes are exponentially higher in the cloud. So therefore, the security needs to be exponentially stronger, and (there's) more revenue from it," he said, adding that Palo Alto Networks and Crowdstrike had also beefed up their cloud security offerings in recent years.
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Inputs from Reuters
