Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian announced that Google had completed the acquisition of the cybersecurity firm Mandiant for $5.4B on the 12th of September 2022

In March 2022, Google announced its plans to acquire publicly traded cybersecurity firm Mandiant after it was spun off from its previous owner FireEye, when private equity firm Symphony Technology Group acquired FireEye for $1.2B in June 2022.

In a blog post on the 12th of September 2022, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said, “We will retain the Mandiant brand and continue Mandiant’s mission to make every organization secure from cyber threats and confident in their readiness.”

Speaking about the acquisition, Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant, said that the company’s goal would remain the same even as part of Google Cloud: to make every organization secure from cyber threats and confident in their readiness.

Google is one of the “big three” public cloud providers, along with Microsoft and Amazon. As a cloud provider, Google promises its customers to keep all their data and infrastructure secure.

To achieve this, Google cloud services continually introduce new products to address the evolving threat landscape. In this process, Google sometimes also relies on cyber security incumbents to boost its own proposition.

Google’s acquisition of Mandiant is doing just that. By acquiring Mandiant, Google’s security data gathering capabilities will get a significant boost, and it will also have access to hundreds of security professionals.

Thomas Kurian said, “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 life cycle.”

The acquisition of Mandiant by Google Cloud will “reinvent how organizations protect themselves, as well as detect and respond to threats,” said Thomas Kurian.

Mandiant will retain the Mandiant brand but will now operate under Google Cloud to help organizations improve their threat, incident, and exposure management.

“We believe this acquisition creates incredible value for our customers and the security industry at large,” said Tomas Kurian.

He emphasized, “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.”

The addition of Mandiant’s attack surface management capabilities in Google Cloud’s portfolio will enable organizations to monitor assets for exposures continually, enabling intelligence and red teams to move security programs from reactive to proactive to understand what’s vulnerable, misconfigured, and exposed.

Kevin Mandia said, “Combining our 18 years of threat intelligence and incident response experience with Google Cloud’s security expertise presents an incredible opportunity to deliver with the speed and scale that the security industry needs.”

Since the acquisition of Google Cloud and Mandiant is complete, they will focus on delivering an end-to-end security operations suite with even greater capabilities to support customers across their cloud and on-premises environments.