Google announced Tuesday it will acquire cloud security firm Wiz for $32 billion.
The move pairs Google — among the world’s largest cloud service providers — with one of the most promising cloud security startups. The purchase comes less than a year after Wiz rejected a previous $23 billion bid from Google, with executives saying at the time that they hoped to take the company public.
In a blog, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the addition of Wiz would help address the “complex management challenges” that many organizations are seeing as they digitize their business and shift to multicloud or hybrid IT environments. Top-flight cloud security capabilities will also be needed as artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies introduce potentially new security considerations.
“Organizations with modern IT environments need a cybersecurity solution that spans multiple clouds,” the blog reads, “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.”
While Google has already made significant investments in security — most notably through its Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and acquisition of Mandiant in 2022 — Kurian said Wiz offers considerably different security benefits.
“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,” Kurian wrote. “It identifies potential attack paths, prioritizes the most critical risks based on their impact, and empowers enterprise developers to secure applications before deployment.”
Kurian said the company plans to integrate Wiz’s services into a number of Google services, including its threat intelligence, complimentary threat research with Mandiant and a unified security platform.
Both Kurian and Wiz co-founder Asaaf Rappaport emphasized that while Wiz will now be owned by Google, the company’s expertise across a broad range of cloud environments was a key part of its security value.
“We both also believe Wiz needs to remain a multicloud platform, so that across any cloud, we will continue to be a leading platform. We will still work closely with our great partners at AWS, Azure, Oracle, and across the entire industry,” Rappaport wrote.
Last year, Wiz raised a round of funding that valued the company at $12 billion.
The acquisition, when closed, will be the largest in Google’s history, surpassing the $12.5 billion the company paid to acquire Motorola Mobility in 2012.
