Google said Tuesday that it is buying cybersecurity firm Mandiant for about $5.4 billion as part of an initiative to safeguard its cloud consumers.
Google said it would pay $23 a share for the publicly listed firm, which was established in 2004.
If the acquisition goes through, it will be Google’s second-largest purchase to date, behind its $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility acquisition in 2012. Lenovo acquired Ring for $2.9 billion after two years, and subsequently sold it to Amazon for $1.29 billion. Google’s third-largest acquisition was smart home product maker Nest, which it bought for $3.2 billion in 2014 as a subsidiary of Alphabet.
Google’s second-largest purchase: Mandiant
Mandiant will join Google’s cloud computing division, which has yet to achieve the same scale as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services.
“Organizations around the world are facing unprecedented cybersecurity challenges as the sophistication and severity of attacks that were previously used to target major governments are now being used to target companies in every industry. We look forward to welcoming Mandiant to Google Cloud to further enhance our security operations suite and advisory services, and help customers address their most important security challenges.”
-Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, in a statement.
Later this year, the transaction is anticipated to be completed.
