Google reportedly in talks to buy infosec outfit Wiz for $23 billion

Ask any techie to name who leads the market for OSes, databases, networks or ERP and the answers are clear: Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP.

Security? That's a tougher question. But Google appears to be attempting a play for the crown, as it is reportedly poised to acquire infosec upstart Wiz.

Wiz was founded in just 2020 by folks who cut their teeth at Microsoft and then, deliciously, made a name finding several very nasty flaws in Azure – such as the ChaosDB flaw that allowed unauthorized read and write access to Azure Cosmos DB, and the "OMIGOD" flaws that permitted unauthorized code execution inside Microsoft's cloudy rental servers. The startup also created fine cloud security products and services.

According to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Google is deep in talks to buy Wiz for $23 billion – the largest-ever sum its parent company Alphabet has paid for prey.

If the deal comes off (both reports suggest it's not a sure thing yet) Google would emerge as owner of both Mandiant and Wiz – and that would give its cloudy division a claim to be at least near a position of security strength that its rivals couldn't obviously match.

Only a pair of pure-play security vendors – Palo Alto and Fortinet – boast annual revenue beyond $5 billion. Cisco was a billion short for its pre-Splunk security portfolio, but doesn't divulge the contribution security makes to its $29 billion "Secure, Agile Networks" business. IBM also doesn't reveal the true extent of its security business – nor do hyperscalers.

With Mandiant and Wiz aboard, Google could point to a strong portfolio of products and services drawn from the security market itself – rather than built as part of a portfolio of cloud services – and therefore a different approach to both cloud and security.

Claiming to be the world's top security vendor would be hard, because Google's portfolio would not match rivals' for breadth. But Microsoft can't claim to be the world's pre-eminent cloud for security, given its services have been sternly criticized by lawmakers after multiple failures. And while AWS is strong in security, its colossal portfolio means it stands more for generic cloudiness than security.

Whether buying Wiz would Google Cloud into revenue or technical leadership is another matter: the unit's closeness to Kubernetes didn't make it the natural first choice for containerized apps, or propel it to undisputed leadership of the cloud-native IaaS market.

Or maybe security leadership isn't something Google wants right now – given the antitrust attention its integration of search and ads has rightly earned.

But whether or not Google takes a Wiz, the throne of security leader remains vacant. And eventually someone will try to take it – perhaps more forcefully than current players. ®