Google announced on Tuesday, that it has plans to buy cybersecurity firm Mandiant, for around $5.4 billion as part of an effort to better protect its cloud customers. The Mountain View, California, search giant said it will pay $23 a share for the publicly traded firm, which was founded in 2004.
If the deal gets approved by regulators, it will be Google’s second-largest acquisition ever behind its $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility deal in 2012. Google sold the company to Lenovo for $2.9 billion two years later. Google’s third-largest acquisition is smart home product maker Nest, which it bought for $3.2 billion in 2014. Google is a unit of Alphabet.
Mandiant will join Google’s cloud computing division, which is yet to grow to the same size 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,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, in a statement.
