Google makes second-largest acquisition ever: $5.4 billion for Mandiant

Enlarge (credit: Mandiant)

Google has announced a massive $5.4 billion deal to acquire the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, Inc. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval, but Google says it expects the deal to close later this year. If it goes through, it would be Google's second-largest acquisition ever, slotting in between the $12.5 billion deal for Motorola Mobility and the $3.2 billion purchase of Nest. Mandiant will join the Google Cloud division.

Mandiant was founded in 2004 and does security consultancy and threat research. It makes an automated threat-monitoring system called the "Mandiant Advantage Platform." Mandiant was a key researcher investigating many of the world's biggest security incidents, like the SolarWinds supply-chain attack, the Log4j vulnerability, and the Pulse Secure VPN vulnerabilities.

Google has a ton of experience securing its own cloud. Besides bulking up Google's security staff on its home turf, the goal of this deal is to bring more of that security know-how onsite with security consultancy services. The blog post lays out what the full Google Cloud security offering will look like:

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