Elemenopee

Alphabet made its largest acquisition yet with a $32 billion deal to buy Wiz, formerly the world’s largest cybersecurity unicorn and now the upcoming face of Google’s cybersecurity ambitions.

Alternate blog titles: G-Wiz, or Alphabet, sup? No time to workshop that one I’m afraid as I’m all business to discuss what is likely the biggest news ever for cloud security, or so far at least. Last time we discussed Wiz on this blog, a little more than a year ago, I talked about a company hungry for acquisitions to pad out its Bonafides ahead of an IPO. Google made overtures in 2024 as well but got turned down at the time, maybe because Google was facing an antitrust breakup threat at the time.

Now the word is talks picked back up between the companies in the past two months. Gee, I wonder what changed?

But in all seriousness, this move is a huge blow struck by google in its competition with Microsoft and Amazon in cybersecurity and cloud computing offerings. It’s also a potential monetary windfall for Israel, who is poised to collect as much as $3.5 billion in taxes on the gargantuan tech deal. I joke often that cloud is a buzz word that gets trotted out at security conferences to sell the same old platforms to new customers, but with this deal now a foregone conclusion I suspect that cloud security is going to be on everyone’s lips as ISC West this year.

It's always these last few weeks before a big conference when all the truly earth-shattering news drops. Is there another big surprise waiting in the wings? I’ve got one more blog before I’m live at the show, so I guess we’ll find out together.