Google has completed the acquisition of cybersecurity firm Mandiant, for $5.4 billion, the company has announced.
The proposed acquisition is part of Google’s efforts to secure its computer systems and had been in the pipeline since March.
“Today we’re excited to share the next step in this journey with the completion of our acquisition of Mandiant, a leader in dynamic cyber defense, threat intelligence and incident response services. Mandiant shares our cybersecurity vision and will join Google Cloud to help organizations improve their threat, incident and exposure management,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote in a blog post.
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Under the deal, Mandiant will operate under the auspices of Google Cloud, though the Mandiant brand will continue to exist.
Google’s move to acquire Mandiant came a year after the company was traded by its former owner FireEye in a $1.2 billion deal with private equity firm Symphony Technology Group.
The internet giant said Mandiant aligns with its cybersecurity goals, and the addition of Mandiant Threat Intelligence—which is compiled by their team of security and intelligence individuals spread across 22 countries, who serve customers located in 80 countries—will give security practitioners greater visibility and expertise from the frontlines.
“Mandiant’s experience detecting and responding to sophisticated cyber threat actors will offer Google Cloud customers actionable insights into the threats that matter to their businesses right now,” Google said.
Google said its Cloud security customers use its cloud infrastructure to ingest, analyze and retain all their security telemetry across multicloud and on-premise environments. The web search giant added that by leveraging its sub-second search across petabytes of information combined with security orchestration, automation and response capabilities, its customers can spend more time defending their organizations.
This is where the Mandiant brand becomes important to Google’s cybersecurity architecture.
“We will retain the Mandiant brand and continue Mandiant’s mission to make every organization secure from cyber threats and confident in their readiness,” Kurian said.
Google is a competitor in the cloud computing market where other players such as Amazon and Microsoft have gained ground. To keep its customers, Google need to keep their entire data and cloud infrastructure secure. This means updating its cybersecurity system continually with new products that will strengthen it. These new products are better found with well-established cybersecurity firms – the reason why Google had to acquire Mandiant.
“Ultimately, we hope to shift the industry to a more proactive approach focused on modernizing 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.
“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 lifecycle. 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, Google Cloud and Mandiant will help organizations reinvent security to meet the requirements of our rapidly changing world,” Kurian said.