The Internet giant wants to strengthen its cyber security business.
(Photo: Reuters)
san francisco The US technology group Google has announced the acquisition of the cyber security company Mandiant for 5.4 billion dollars. Both companies announced this on Tuesday.
“Cybersecurity wasn’t as important as it is today,” said Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia. With the strength of both companies, the topic of cyber security could be strongly promoted, especially against the background of the war in Ukraine. “Together we will provide expertise and intelligence at scale and transform the security industry,” said Mandia.
Google is number three in the global cloud provider market. The group recently generated around 19 billion dollars. However, unlike its rivals Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s cloud division has been losing money for years.
“Organizations around the world are facing unprecedented cybersecurity challenges as the sophistication and severity of attacks that once targeted major governments are now spreading to enterprises across all industries,” said Thomas Kurian, head of cloud division from Google,
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The war in Ukraine was not the trigger for the takeover, however, suspected analyst Neil MacDonald from market researcher Gartner. “The timing of the acquisition happened to coincide with the invasion of Ukraine, but it shows that security is becoming more important as the digital attack surface for businesses continues to expand.”
With the takeover, Google will significantly expand its capabilities in this area. “Google now has a comprehensive range of security detection and response options,” MacDonald told Handelsblatt.
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Mandiant owns with sales of 483 million dollars last year, but not among the largest cybersecurity vendors. The acquisition should increase sales in the cloud business for Google by around two percent. However, the loss is likely to increase further, since Mandiant also assumes a minus of eight to nine million dollars in its forecast for the current year.
Mandiant has a good reputation in the industry. The experts were called in several times for particularly difficult cases. Among other things, a Mandiant team worked on the largest hack by US government organizations when the US security company Solarwinds and many of their customers fell victim to a sophisticated attack last year.
With agency material
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