By: Nick Gambino
Google has just set a new record for how much they’re willing to pay to bring a company into the Alphabet family. The tech giant just announced they acquired Wiz, a cybersecurity startup company, for a whopping $32 billion. This is Google’s biggest acquisition payout ever.
Just last year, Wiz backed out of a deal with Google with an impressive, but considerably smaller, $23 billion price tag. What I assume was a negotiating tactic by Wiz worked, earning them an additional $9 billion to seal the deal.
But why is Google willing to pay so much for a cybersecurity startup that many of us haven’t even heard of ? The answer is Google Cloud. The company’s cloud services aren’t bringing in revenue like it should. Sure, they earned $43 billion last year, but that’s less than half what rivals Amazon and Microsoft are making from their cloud offerings.
By bringing Wiz under the Google Cloud umbrella, they hope to bolster their services and offer something their rivals aren’t really offering – cloud security.
“Security is a fundamental priority for CEOs and government leaders around the world, but the landscape is changing,” Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, said in a recent call with investors discussing the Wiz acquisition. “The pace and impact of breaches are accelerating. AI brings new risks but also new opportunities. Together we believe this and Google Cloud can accelerate the ability of organizations to improve their security.”
To be clear, it’s not that Amazon and Microsoft don’t have security measures in place when using their cloud, but as Google has made clear, we live in a fast-changing world where AI is altering the literal playing field at a rate we can’t fully comprehend. Wiz might have the answers to these new security problems.
Wiz gives companies the tools they need to execute agentless security measures to secure any device. This dramatically cuts down on time and money. What’s more is their software tools boast a super user-friendly UI, setting it apart from other similar agentless security tools in the marketplace.
With how much was paid to acquire it, there are going to be a lot of eyes on Google and how they utilize Wiz going forward. We’ll have to wait and see if that price tag was worth it.
