GCP – Google + Wiz: Strengthening Multicloud Security

Today, Google Cloud announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Wiz to better provide businesses and governments with more choice in how they protect themselves. Together with Wiz, we are excited about the potential to provide customers with a comprehensive security platform that protects modern IT environments.

We wanted to answer a few questions about the acquisition.

Why now?

As we all see in the news every day, and our Mandiant consultants witness on the front lines with our customers, cybersecurity risks continue to accelerate with the number and severity of breaches continuing to grow.

Meanwhile, as more organizations go digital, most deployments are now multicloud or hybrid – introducing complex management challenges. At the same time, software and AI platforms are becoming deeply embedded across products and operations, bringing new and evolving risks for private enterprises, governments, and other public sector organizations.

Traditional approaches to cybersecurity struggle to keep up with this evolving landscape. Organizations with modern IT environments need a cybersecurity solution that spans multiple clouds, as well as hybrid and on-premises environments; that can protect against threats to and from AI models; that can use AI to extend defenses; and that can fully integrate software development and operations into the security portfolio.

What are Google Cloud’s security solutions today?

Today, we help customers detect and respond to attackers through both SaaS-based services and cybersecurity consulting that enable Google to be part of customers’ security teams. This includes:

• Google Threat Intelligence which delivers detailed, timely, and actionable threat intelligence to security teams, so they understand threats and know how to respond.
• Google Security Operations which allows customers to collect security telemetry data, apply threat intelligence to identify high priority threats, and drive response with playbook automation, case management, and collaboration.
• Mandiant Consulting which provides frontline expertise and deep understanding of global attacker behavior to help organizations prepare for and respond to cyber events. Our team regularly responds to some of the world’s largest breaches.

What does Wiz do?

Wiz is different from the services we offer today – it delivers a seamless cloud security platform that connects to all major clouds and code environments to help prevent incidents from happening in the first place.

Wiz’s solution rapidly scans the 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, prioritizes the most critical risks based on their impact, and empowers enterprise developers to secure applications before deployment. It also helps security teams collaborate with developers to remediate risks in code or detect and block ongoing attacks.

In other words, it gives start-ups, enterprises, governments, and public sector organizations the ability to protect themselves comprehensively. Wiz is an innovative leader, creating new categories of cybersecurity solutions in the last 12 months, including code-to-cloud security and cloud-native runtime defense, further strengthening its impact.

How are Wiz and Google Cloud better together?

Wiz and Google Cloud share a vision to improve security by making it easier and faster for organizations of all types and sizes to protect themselves, end-to-end, across all major clouds.

Google Cloud is a leader in cloud infrastructure, with deep AI expertise and a track record of industry-leading security innovation. Bringing this to Wiz will help make their solutions even better and more scalable, helping protect more organizations faster.

This will help spur the adoption of multicloud cybersecurity, the use of multicloud, and competition and growth in cloud computing.

Wiz is already an important Google Cloud partner, and by coming together, we believe we can help customers create a stronger foundation for cloud security with a portfolio that solves tomorrow’s requirements, including:

• Unified Security Platform: A next-generation 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.
• Threat Intelligence: Precise threat intelligence that gives customers visibility into their own systems through the eyes of their adversaries.
• New Threat Protection: Protection against new threats that are emerging with the adoption of AI, including threats to and from models.
• Cybersecurity Professionals:
  • AI Agents: The use of AI-powered cybersecurity agents to act as an extension of security teams.
  • Mandiant: Complementing cybersecurity teams with additional expertise from Mandiant with incident response, strategic readiness, technical assurance, and managed defense.
• Measurable Defense: Ability to measure cyber defense effectiveness by proactively testing and validating the strength of security controls.

What’s the value for Google Cloud customers and partners?

We are aiming to provide customers with better security for enterprise systems and lower the cost of maintaining a strong security posture across their on-premises and multicloud environments.

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. In addition, we are committed to continuing to support packaged applications, SaaS applications, and those running on virtual and on-premises environments.

Google Cloud will continue to partner with other leading cloud security providers in our Marketplace to offer customers choice. We will enable system integrators, resellers and managed security service providers to offer broader solutions and services to our customers, as well as provide new integration opportunities for our technical partners. We will maintain our full and longstanding commitment to industry standards and the open source community.

When will the acquisition close?

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals. For more information, see our joint press release and Wiz’s blog.

We look forward to welcoming the Wiz team and providing better cybersecurity alternatives for businesses and governments around the world.