Google completes $5.4bn Mandiant acquisition

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says he plans to ‘reinvent security’ for customers

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said his company plans to "reinvent security" for customers with its blockbuster $5.4 billion acquisition of cyber security vendor Mandiant, which was completed on Monday.

"We believe this acquisition creates incredible value for our customers and the security industry at large," said Kurian in a statement.

Kurian said Google Cloud and Mandiant together will "reinvent how organisations protect themselves, as well as detect and respond to threats."

The acquisition will provide Google Cloud with real-time, in-depth threat intelligence technology and expertise that Mandiant has built from working with the largest organisations in the world on the frontlines of cybersecurity.

Google's $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant was first unveiled in March this year, as Google Cloud continues to invest billions in boosting its cloud security capabilities and overall market share against its cloud competitors.

The Mandiant brand will be retained as part of Google Cloud.

Google to ‘reinvent security'

In a blog post, Kurian said Google Cloud's goal is to democratise security operations with access to the best threat intelligence and built-in threat detections and responses.

"Combining Google Cloud's existing security portfolio with Mandiant's leading cyber threat intelligence will allow us to deliver a security operations suite to help enterprises globally stay protected at every stage of the security life cycle," he said.

With the scale of Google's data processing, novel analytics approaches with AI and machine learning, and a focus on eliminating entire classes of threats, Kurian said the combined companies, "will help organisations reinvent security to meet the requirements of our rapidly changing world."

Kurian's goal is to shift the industry to a more proactive approach focused on modernising security operations workflows, personnel and underlying technologies to achieve an autonomic state of existence, "where threat management functions can scale as customers' needs change and as threats evolve".

Speed and scale

Mandiant is known for delivering frontline expertise and top-notch threat intelligence as a proven first responder to some of the world's largest cyber security incidents.

Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia said his company's goal will remain the same as part of Google Cloud: make every organisation secure from cyberthreats and confident in their readiness.

"Combining our 18 years of threat intelligence and incident response experience with Google Cloud's security expertise presents an incredible opportunity to deliver with the speed and scale that the security industry needs," Mandia said in a statement.

Mandiant's services are spread across 22 countries, helping enterprises and organisations of all sizes prepare for and react to cybersecurity incidents.

Jay Modh, CEO of Google Cloud partner Intuitive Cloud, was bullish about the acquisition.

"This is a win for Google partners who want cloud security to be a differentiator in the market," said Modh. "We're excited to start working closer with Mandiant. … There definitely will be more security service opportunities and even more protection now that we can take to customers."

With the acquisition now complete, Google Cloud and Mandiant aim to deliver an end-to-end security operations suite with even greater capabilities to support customers across their cloud and on-premises environments.

A version of this article first appeared on Computing's sister title CRN.com.