Google’s parent company Alphabet recently shook up the tech world with the largest cybersecurity deal in history, spending US$32 billion ($50.7 billion) to acquire cloud security company Wiz.
The all-cash premium paid for the Israeli-American company founded in 2020 represented not only a noticeable uptick from the reported valuation of $23 billion that Alphabet attempted to buy it for last year, but also solidified the deal as the tech giant’s biggest acquisition to date in terms of monetary value, surpassing the likes of Motorola Mobility, DoubleClick and YouTube.
If the deal is successful, Wiz is set to be integrated into Google Cloud next year and will bolster the company’s security offering, which already includes the likes of Google Threat Intelligence, Google Security Operations and Mandiant, acquired in 2022.
Australian partners responded positively to the news, seeing synergy between the two companies and flow-on effects for customers, such as better security, easier adoption of multicloud environments and the ability to tap into multiple providers while remaining compliant.
Cybersecurity firm StickmanCyber's founder and CEO Ajay Unni said he had been waiting to see this happen since the original offer made by Google last year - for $23 million - did not go through.
"As a Google Cloud Security partner this is a significant step forward in building Google’s overall security offering," he told us.
"We have been working closely with Google Cloud Security for our mid-market customer base who are looking for outcomes with better security and compliance bundled together under one umbrella and done for them with a trusted partner.
"We see the roadmap for Google to be a significant player not only at the enterprise level but more so at the mid-market level where customers are looking for comprehensive and cost-effective solutions."
A spokesperson for Google-focused MSP Geeks on Tap and its related consulting arm ThinkCloud said that the strategic move promised to significantly enhance the cybersecurity landscape for Australian businesses, particularly those embracing multicloud environments, and would empower Geeks on Tap and ThinkCloud to deliver even more comprehensive and proactive security solutions.
"As cybersecurity risks accelerate and organisations adopt multicloud or hybrid deployments, traditional security approaches struggle to keep pace - the integration of Wiz’s capabilities with Google Cloud’s existing security offerings is poised to address these challenges head-on," the spokesperson stated.
"The synergy between Google Cloud and Wiz aims to create a next-generation unified security platform by combining Wiz’s Cloud Security Platform with Google Security Operations. This integration will secure cloud-native applications at every stage of development, protecting code, CI/CD systems, and infrastructure.
"The combined power will also enhance threat intelligence, providing customers with a clearer view of their systems from an adversary's perspective, and bolster new threat protection, including threats associated with AI adoption."
As a Google Premier Partner servicing customers across Google Workspace and Google Cloud, Geeks on Tap would be able to use an integrated Wiz platform to offer enhanced security assessments and proactive threat prevention across clients' multicloud environments, as well as improve efficient of threat detection, investigation, and response for managed services clients.
For ThinkCloud, specialising in cloud-first business transformations, the integration will mean being able to incorporate Wiz’s code-to-cloud security capabilities to help clients build secure cloud environments from the outset, as well as leveraging the insights provided by the combined Google and Wiz platform to offer more strategic security guidance and help businesses improve their overall security posture.
Founder of data, cloud and analytics consultancy firm Practiv, Jordan Greig, said that the acquisition plays in to Google Cloud’s core strategy, which is building an open Cloud that embraces multi-cloud architectures.
“Customers are using a principal hyper-scaler such as GCP or AWS but additionally using specialist platforms for things like data and AI - think Snowflake as a data-cloud platform sitting alongside GCP or AWS,” he said.
“We build systems that are secure by default and believe that the Wiz acquisition allows for our customers who are leveraging this architecture to have a consistent, secure and compliant environment across whichever cloud providers they choose for infrastructure, data and AI etc.
This is huge as it means customers don’t need to go all in to a single provider for workloads across infrastructure, data, AI and cyber security - Jordan Greig, Practiv
CNAPP competition
Technology research, media and advisory firm Futurum Group stated that the deal is centred on the notion of supporting multi-cloud environments, with Wiz having had success with an offering that combines ease of use and a broad set of capabilities, covering code-to-cloud, cloud security posture management (CSPM) and runtime security use cases.
“While not the dominant Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) vendor, Wiz CNAPP is a strong competitor to others in the category, specifically Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, among many others,” Futurum Group stated.
“Wiz CNAPP and its Software Composition Analysis and Software Bill of Materials capabilities fit well into Google Cloud’s developer-focused offerings, extending security to earlier in the software development lifecycle.”
Futurum Group sees Wiz’s agentless and API-centric architectures helping to ease integration and deployment challenges, while the company’s AI Security Posture Management is likely to bolster Google Cloud’s positioning in this area, putting it in competition with Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft and Orca Security for AI security spending.
“Now, Google Cloud is essentially taking the position—defensibly, in our opinion—that it can be a key option for an enterprise’s core security operations platform. This directly challenges Microsoft Sentinel, Palo Alto Networks Cortex, Cisco Splunk, and many others,” the advisory firm stated.
“Indeed, both AWS and Azure highlight Wiz as a key partner for cloud security, which is usually one of the top categories in their marketplaces. Wiz was certainly a poster child for the AWS marketplace, and it is very likely that AWS is one of Wiz’s largest GTM partners if not its largest. We expect this deal to impact relationships with the other hyperscalers.”
Gartner’s VP analyst, Charlie Winckless, said that it’s very unlikely that Google will no longer support AWS and Azure with the Wiz product, with the benefit for customers being that if the acquisition goes through, Google will offer coverage across all the major providers, as well as extending to OCI and large Chinese clouds.
“For now, existing customers are extremely unlikely to see changes, but over time integration with Google SecOps and threat intelligence from Mandiant are likely extensions in value for new and existing customers,” he said.
Winckless said that the deal gives Google better coverage and a “much more significant market presence” in the rapidly growing market of CNAPP/CSPM - among the fastest growing markets that Gartner tracks – and also grants them an advantage in the cloud security space over Microsoft and extends Google’s reach.
“Wiz is the estimated market share leader in the CNAPP market. This is also where Google Security Command Center Enterprise focuses, but Wiz provides both more extensive and complete capabilities (filling more needs for enterprises) and much more complete coverage of Azure,” he said.
Forrester analysts said the acquisition proves that multicloud CNAPP is now indispensable for cloud infrastructure security offerings.
“While Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has successfully developed CNAPP capabilities (cloud security posture management and cloud workload protection) for its own platform’s native security, these tools have predominantly focused only on protecting GCP endpoints/assets,” Forrester analysts stated.
“After Microsoft’s 2021 early acquisition of CloudKnox and development of Defender for Cloud (a multicloud CNAPP tool competing with Palo Alto Networks and others), Google is now feeling the pressure to offer a true, multicloud-capable CNAPP tool, given that so many organisations are multicloud today.
“Forrester expects that, post-acquisition, most current CNAPP capabilities in GCP (such as CSPM, cloud infrastructure entitlement management and agentless cloud workload protection) will be replaced by Wiz’s offering and remain with multicloud support. Multicloud security capabilities will accelerate Google Cloud’s entry into many enterprises.”
Forrester also predicted that not only will Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Sysdig, Rapid7, Trend Micro and others now face “fierce competition” from cloud infrastructure providers like Google and Microsoft, but that the acquisition will drive independent CNAPP providers to innovate and seek differentiation in comparison to the cloud infrastructure providers and could lead to further consolidation within the CNAPP space.
“Cloud customers must consider whether these independent CNAPP vendors have sufficient capabilities to maintain themselves as a trusted third-party platform that mitigates reliance on a single cloud provider — a pattern that has benefited vendors in the observability and AIOps space, for example,” the analysts said.
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