Google Buys Mandiant

Alphabet (Google) announced that it has reached a deal to buy a cyber security company called Mandiant for around $5.4 billion. The deal will bolster their cloud business with increased cybersecurity offerings at a time when companies are experiencing waves of attacks on their systems. This deal is the second-largest in history for Alphabet after the Motorola Mobility deal which cost the company a cool $12.5 billion.

In the most recent quarter, the Google Cloud unit saw year-on-year revenue growth of 45% to $5.54 billion, which is about 7% of Alphabet's overall quarterly revenue. This deal makes sense as it will help with top-line growth and vertical integration, in addition to the insights derived from Mandiant's security solutions and threat analytics.

Mandiant is known for their insightful reports about malicious cyber campaigns and identifying the likely sponsor of the intrusions. US intelligence agencies rely on these skills and those of other companies like Palantir to shed light on the motives and tactics of hackers across the planet.

This deal will put Google in direct competition with Microsoft, which operates its own cybersecurity incident response business. If the deal clears antitrust hurdles, it might be a game changer for the Google Cloud business.