Google announced on Wednesday that it had finalised the acquisition of Wiz, a cloud security platform founded in 2020 in Israël and headquartered in New York, whose acquisition was unveiled a year ago. The company joins Google Cloud while retaining its brand and its ability to operate in multi-cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. The price of the deal - around 32 billion dollars - makes it the largest acquisition ever made by Google. By way of comparison, the group paid $12.5bn for Motorola Mobility in 2012 and $5.4bn for cybersecurity company Mandiant in 2022.
The valuation reflects Wiz's exceptional growth. In the space of just a few years, the company has become one of the fastest players in the history of cybersecurity to achieve high adoption in the large enterprise market. The platform is now used by around half of the Fortune 100 companies, including Shell, BMW, LVMH, Morgan Stanley and Salesforce.
This expansion can be explained by the rapid evolution of IT architectures. Companies are now deploying their applications and data in several clouds simultaneously, a strategy known as multicloud. While this approach offers greater technological flexibility, it also makes security much more complex to manage.
Convincing businesses to move to the cloud
Wiz has positioned itself precisely on this problem. Its platform can simultaneously analyse cloud environments, application code and production systems to identify vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. The aim is to provide a holistic view of risk across an organisation's entire digital infrastructure.
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence is further accentuating these issues. AI systems are based on complex infrastructures combining data, models, applications and cloud resources. Each of these layers can provide an entry point for cyber attacks.
Researchers at Wiz have shown in particular that AI-related vulnerabilities appear at several levels of the technology cycle, from the infrastructures used to train the models to the cloud platforms that host them. In some cases, flaws in widely used software components can simultaneously expose several cloud providers and their customers.
In competition with AWS and Microsoft
For Google, the acquisition of Wiz therefore serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, the group is looking to strengthen its cybersecurity capabilities at a time when businesses are migrating their critical systems to the cloud. On the other, it aims to support the rise of artificial intelligence, which is considerably increasing the attack surface of digital infrastructures.
The deal is also part of the competition between the major cloud providers. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure currently dominate the global market. Google Cloud is trying to differentiate itself by highlighting its capabilities in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.
By integrating Wiz's technology, Google hopes to offer a platform capable of detecting, preventing and responding more quickly to cyber threats, while using artificial intelligence to analyse suspicious behaviour and automate certain security tasks.
One notable element of the deal is that Wiz will continue to run on all of the major clouds on the market. This approach reflects a market reality: companies want to retain the freedom to spread their infrastructures across several providers. For Google, maintaining this compatibility allows Wiz to be positioned as a cross-functional security layer capable of monitoring hybrid and multi-cloud environments, even when some infrastructures are not based on Google Cloud.
Beyond the buyout itself, the deal illustrates a broader trend in the technology industry. As businesses deploy applications based on artificial intelligence and migrate their data to the cloud, cybersecurity is becoming a fundamental element of confidence in these infrastructures. In this context, Google's acquisition of Wiz is not just a strategic acquisition. It reflects the evolution of a market where security is gradually becoming one of the pillars of the digital economy.
