Google buys cybersecurity firm Mandiant for $5.4 billion to bolster its cloud security

As part of the effort to better protect its cloud customers, Alphabet’s Google announced Tuesday that it’s buying Mandiant in an all-cash transaction that values the cybersecurity firm at $5.4 billion. The deal is expected to close later this year. Google said the acquisition of Mandiant will complement its Cloud’s existing strengths in security.

As part of the acquisition agreement, Mandiant, which was founded in 2004, will join Google’s cloud computing division, which is trying to compete with rivals Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. If approved by regulators, the deal will be Google’s second-largest acquisition ever behind its $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility deal in 2012.

In a statement, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said, “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.”

He added: “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.”

In recent years, organizations 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; analyze and automate threat intelligence to scale threat detection across organizations; orchestrate and automate remediation; validate their protection against known threats, and visualize their IT environment in order to identify and simulate new threats.

“The cloud represents a new way to change the security paradigm by helping organizations address and protect themselves against entire classes of cyber threats, while also rapidly accelerating digital transformation,” Google said in a press release.