Google closes $5.4B Mandiant acquisition

Google has announced that its proposed $5.4 billion bid to buy cybersecurity firm Mandiant is now complete.

The internet giant first revealed plans to acquire publicly-traded Mandiant back in March, less than a year after Mandiant was spun out of its previous owner FireEye as part of a $1.2 billion deal with private equity firm Symphony Technology Group.

Moving forward, Mandiant will operate under the auspices of Google Cloud, though the Mandiant brand will live on.

“We will retain the Mandiant brand and continue Mandiant’s mission to make every organization secure from cyber threats and confident in their readiness,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote in a blog post.

Mandiant dashboard Image Credit: Mandiant

As one of the so-called “big three” public cloud providers alongside Amazon and Microsoft, Google’s big promise to would-be customers is that it will keep all their data and infrastructure secure. This means continually introducing new products to address the ever-changing threat landscape, thought it sometimes means acquiring long-established incumbents with the expertise to bolster Google’s security proposition.

And that’s effectively what Google’s getting with Mandiant, giving it a major boost in terms of security data gathering capabilities, not to mention access to hundreds of security personnel.

“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,” Kurian 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, Google Cloud and Mandiant will help organizations reinvent security to meet the requirements of our rapidly changing world.”

Google closes $5.4B Mandiant acquisition by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch