Google has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Mandiant, a specialist in dynamic cyber defence and response for $23.00 per share.

The all-cash transaction is valued at approximately $5.4 billion, inclusive of Mandiant’s net cash, and will see Mandiant join Google Cloud.

Organisations are facing cybersecurity challenges that have accelerated in frequency, severity and diversity, creating a global security imperative. To address these risks, enterprises need to be able to detect and respond to adversaries quickly; analyse and automate threat intelligence to scale threat detection across organisations; orchestrate and automate remediation; validate their protection against known threats; and visualise their IT environment in order to identify and simulate new threats. The cloud represents a new way to change the security paradigm by helping organisations address and protect themselves against entire classes of cyber threats, while also rapidly accelerating digital transformation.

The acquisition of Mandiant will complement Google Cloud’s existing strengths in security. Google Cloud offers customers a robust set of services including pioneering capabilities such as BeyondCorp Enterprise for Zero Trust and VirusTotal for malicious content and software vulnerabilities; Chronicle’s planet-scale security analytics and automation coupled with services such as Security Command Center to help organisations detect and protect themselves from cyber threats; as well as expertise from Google Cloud’s Cybersecurity Action Team. With the addition of Mandiant, Google Cloud will enhance these offerings to deliver an end-to-end security operations suite with even greater capabilities to support customers across their cloud and on-premise environments.

Mandiant is said to bring real-time and in-depth threat intelligence gained on the frontlines of cybersecurity with the largest organisations in the world. Combined with Google Cloud’s cloud-native security offerings, the acquisition will help enterprises globally stay protected at every stage of the security lifecycle:

• Advisory Services: Mandiant’s proven global expertise in providing comprehensive incident response, strategic readiness and technical assurance helps customers mitigate threats and reduce business risk before, during and after an incident.
• Threat Detection and Intelligence: Mandiant’s experience detecting and responding to advanced adversaries offers customers actionable insights into the threats that matter right now.
• Automation and Response Tools: Security operations tools within Google Cloud’s Chronicle, Siemplify solutions and Mandiant’s Automated Defence help customers analyse, prioritise and streamline threat response and leverage Mandiant’s expertise as a virtual extension of their teams.
• Testing and Validation: Mandiant Security Validation helps customers continuously validate and measure the effectiveness of cybersecurity controls across cloud and on-premise environments, and complements Google Cloud’s Security Command Centre to help ensure strong risk management.
• Managed Defence: Mandiant’s managed detection and response service acts as a seamless extension of customers’ security teams, delivering continuous monitoring, event triage and threat hunting that’s agnostic to customers’ endpoint and network tooling.

Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud (pictured), said: “Organisations 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.

“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.”

Kevin Mandia, CEO, Mandiant, said: “There has never been a more critical time in cybersecurity. Since our founding in 2004, Mandiant’s mission has been to combat cyber attacks and protect our customers from the latest threats.

“To that end, we are thrilled to be joining forces with Google Cloud. Together, we will deliver expertise and intelligence at scale, changing the security industry.”

As a pioneer in offering multicloud technology, Google Cloud’s security operations suite will continue to provide a central point of intelligence, analysis and operations across on-premise environments, Google Cloud and other cloud providers. In addition, Google Cloud is deeply committed to supporting the technology partners of both companies, including the endpoint ecosystem. This acquisition will enable system integrators, resellers and managed security service providers to offer broader solutions to customers.

The acquisition of Mandiant is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of Mandiant stockholder and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close later this year.

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Tags: cybersecurity, google cloud, Mandiant