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Google has confirmed plans to acquire cybersecurity company Mandiant in an all-cash deal worth $5.4 billion, after rumors first emerged yesterday of an impending deal.
The move comes exactly a month after reports emerged that Microsoft was in early discussions to buy Mandiant, meaning that Google is essentially getting one over its big cloud rival.
Mandiant works with customers including InfoSys, OlyFed, and the Bank of Thailand, providing threat intelligence and consulting services, and automated tools for investigating security alerts. Mandiant is perhaps better known under its former name FireEye, a U.S. cybersecurity firm that shot to prominence for detecting major cyber attacks through the years. FireEye had acquired Mandiant for $1 billion in 2013, but last year it revealed plans to sell off the FireEye brand and products business and focus on its Mandiant cyber forensics business instead.
As part of the transaction, FireEye changed its corporate name to Mandiant.
‘Unprecedented cybersecurity challenges’
From Google’s perspective, buying Mandiant makes a great deal of sense, given its clear interest in bolstering its cloud platform and selling itself to large enterprises the world over. Indeed, as a result of the transaction, Mandiant will become part of Google Cloud, where it will offer advisory services to help companies reduce risk before, during, and after security incidents; power additional threat detection, intelligence, and automated incident response tools; and more.
“Organizations around the world are facing unprecedented cybersecurity challenges as the sophistication and severity of attacks that were previously used to target major governments are now being used to target companies in every industry,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a press release. “We look forward to welcoming Mandiant to Google Cloud to further enhance our security operations suite and advisory services, and help customers address their most important security challenges.”
Google said that it expects to close the Mandiant acquisition later this year, pending the usual regulatory and shareholder approvals.
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