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While there are plenty of drivers behind Google’s acquisition of cybersecurity powerhouse Mandiant, the fact that the security capability with Google is “more interesting” for a company like Mandiant — than it would have been for Microsoft — is critical, a Gartner said. analyst at VentureBeat.
Google announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire Mandiant in a $5.4 billion cash deal, expected to close “later this year,” the companies said.
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft — which was reportedly previously in talks to acquire Mandiant — was no longer in the running to make the acquisition. The Information had reported earlier in the day that Google wanted to acquire Mandiant instead.
For Mandiant, there would be a big difference between joining Google and being acquired by Microsoft, according to Peter Firstbrook, a research vice president and analyst at Gartner.
Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia most likely saw a “much more exciting” future with Google than with Microsoft, Firstbrook said. “If I were Kevin Mandia, I’d think, ‘Microsoft would turn us into a body shop to do repetitive tasks,'” Firstbrook said in an interview.
Microsoft and Mandiant declined to comment when reached by VentureBeat today.
Different approaches
Microsoft is very focused on improving its own broad ecosystem of products and services, which is a driving force behind its security strategy, Firstbrook said.
“Microsoft Would Like” [Mandiant] to manage its own products — Active Directory, Defender, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint,” he said. “Microsoft is very focused on integrating its own products together.”
Google, on the other hand, “don’t really have skin in the game” in most security product areas, except in securing cloud workloads, Firstbrook said.
Aside from the cloud: “If you think about all the other security measures, they don’t really have a product. They have no endpoint security. They have no email security. They don’t have CASB [cloud access security broker], or firewalls,” he said. “So they’re pretty agnostic about all that. While Microsoft is not agnostic for most of them.”
And in some ways, a strong focus on a single security vendor is exactly what Mandiant has been working on to get away with. The company split from FireEye in October, but even before that, the Mandiant company had begun to diversify its focus on a single vendor (FireEye) by adding support for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint in May.
A month ago, Mandiant added support for a third-party endpoint detection and response (EDR) vendor, SentinelOne, and said it plans to add even broader vendor support in the future.
‘More interesting challenge’
So joining Microsoft could have been seen as the exact opposite of what Mandiant’s strategy has been lately. The largely agnostic Google Cloud is much more strategic in that regard.
“Mandiant probably wanted to do more business with Google because it’s a more interesting challenge. It’s for all products rather than just Microsoft,” Firstbrook said. “I think Microsoft wanted a body shop and some templates. So it wouldn’t have been that interesting.”
At a news conference with reporters and analysts today, Mandia emphasized the fact that his company will have the freedom to support “heterogeneous” environments that “use many different security technologies to protect themselves”.
“I feel like this merger between Mandiant and Google Cloud will allow us to be the brains behind so many of those controls that people depend on,” Mandia said at the press conference. “It’s Mandiant, not tied to just FireEye endpoint, FireEye email, and FireEye network-based security. It’s now Mandiant with Google Cloud, along with… all the different products people rely on.”
‘Datacentric problem’
Importantly, the timing at this point is still close to the start of Google Cloud’s push into enterprise security, rather than far into the effort, as it would have been at Microsoft.
Google Cloud is “just getting started with enterprise security,” Firstbrook said. “So they are not yet a big player.”
Another critical factor is that “a transformation is underway here” in cybersecurity, he said. “Security is becoming a data-centric problem.”
Currently, much of the critical security data is still in on-premises systems like Splunk, but “in the next few years it will move to the cloud,” Firstbrook said. “And Google clearly has a big advantage in cloud infrastructure and cloud costs. And they’re a pretty big data and analytics store.”
Ultimately, he said, “If security becomes a data-centric issue in the future, the vendors with a low-cost, scalable, and analytics-based backend will be winners.”
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This post Mandiant has a ‘more exciting’ future with Google than Microsoft, analyst says
was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/08/mandiant-has-more-exciting-future-with-google-than-microsoft-analyst-says/”