Google deal for 'hot market' cyber firm Wiz would bolster cloud security
By Zeba Siddiqui
SAN FRANCISCO, July 16 (Reuters) -If Alphabet's GOOGL.O Google is successful in its effort to buy cloud security company Wiz, it would bolster its cloud security offerings for large organisations, a hotspot for hackers, and help it take on cloud rivals Amazon.com AMZN.O and Microsoft MSFT.O, experts said.
Alphabet is in advanced talks to acquire Wiz, a person familiar with the matter said on Sunday, in an up to $23 billion deal that would be Google's most expensive acquisition and provide it with cybersecurity products that defend against ransomware gangs wreaking havoc on large enterprises.
"There is a hot market for cloud security," said Jerome Seguera, a senior intelligence analyst at the cybersecurity firm MalwareBytes, adding that Wiz gives customers "great visibility into their assets in a straightforward way."
Wiz offers tools that allow organisations to scan their entire infrastructure and specific software for threats.
Google has been steadily expanding its cybersecurity offerings in recent years. Two years ago it bought the popular cyber firm Mandiant for $5.4 billion.
"I think they are trying to compete with Microsoft and to a smaller extent AWS (Amazon Web Services)," said Marc Bleicher, chief technology officer of the security firm Surefire Cyber.
"Wiz is one of only a few who address a big chunk of the cloud security market in one platform," Bleicher said.
Wiz was founded in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, primed to benefit from the move towards remote work and the shift by organisations to cloud environments from desktops. Most large organisations have also shifted to storing their data on the cloud over the years, but that has come with security risks - especially as companies expand and become more complex.
Its founders, former Israeli army intelligence members, earlier founded another cloud security firm named Adallom that Microsoft bought for $320 million in 2015.
Headquartered in New York, the company has grown rapidly since then. Only two months ago, at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francsico, Wiz said it was valued at $12 billion. It now expects annual organic revenue of $1 billion in 2025 and has raised nearly $2 billion in venture capital investment in total, said a person familiar with the Google deal talks, declining to be named.
The Wiz buyout talks come as the pace of global dealmaking in cybersecurity has significantly picked up in 2024. There were 120 global cybersecurity deals announced in the first half of this year, accounting for $12.4 billion in deal value, compared to 137 such deals last year, or $4.8 billion in deal value, according to data from the financial information firm Dealogic.
Dave Dewalt, founder of the cyber-focused venture capital firm NightDragon, said Wiz's growth is the result of strong marketing and being "at the right place, at the right time, with the right product."
DeWalt, former chief executive of cybersecurity firm FireEye, said cloud security is the most important and fastest-growing part of cybersecurity, driven by increasing attacks on large organisations.
"The stakes are exponentially higher in the cloud. So therefore, the security needs to be exponentially stronger, and (there's) more revenue from it," he said, adding that Palo Alto Networks PANW.O and Crowdstrike CRWD.O had also beefed up their cloud security offerings in recent years.
Reporting by Zeba Siddiqui in San Francisco, James Pearson in London, Milana Vinn in NEW YORK, and Krystal Hu in San Francisco; Editing by Chris Sanders and Stephen Coates
免責聲明: XM Group提供線上交易平台的登入和執行服務，允許個人查看和/或使用網站所提供的內容，但不進行任何更改或擴展其服務和訪問權限，並受以下條款與條例約束：（i）條款與條例；（ii）風險提示；（iii）完全免責聲明。網站內部所提供的所有資訊，僅限於一般資訊用途。請注意，我們所有的線上交易平台內容並不構成，也不被視為進入金融市場交易的邀約或邀請 。金融市場交易會對您的投資帶來重大風險。
所有缐上交易平台所發佈的資料，僅適用於教育/資訊類用途，不包含也不應被視爲適用於金融、投資稅或交易相關諮詢和建議，或是交易價格紀錄，或是任何金融商品或非應邀途徑的金融相關優惠的交易邀約或邀請。
本網站的所有XM和第三方所提供的内容，包括意見、新聞、研究、分析、價格其他資訊和第三方網站鏈接，皆爲‘按原狀’，並作爲一般市場評論所提供，而非投資建議。請理解和接受，所有被歸類為投資研究範圍的相關内容，並非爲了促進投資研究獨立性，而根據法律要求所編寫，而是被視爲符合營銷傳播相關法律與法規所編寫的内容。請確保您已詳讀並完全理解我們的非獨立投資研究提示和風險提示資訊，相關詳情請點擊 這裡查看。
