Mandiant, Inc. has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google LLC for $23.00 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $5.4 billion, a development which gives a significant leg up to Google’s cybersecurity efforts. Once the acquisition closes, Mandiant will join Google Cloud.
Cybersecurity challenges
Today, organisations are facing cybersecurity challenges that have accelerated in frequency, severity and diversity, creating a global security imperative. To address these risks, enterprises need to be able to detect and respond to adversaries quickly; analyse and automate threat intelligence to scale threat detection across organizations; orchestrate and automate remediation; validate their protection against known threats; and visualize their IT environment in order to identify and simulate new threats.
The cloud represents a new way to change the security paradigm by helping organizations address and protect themselves against entire classes of cyber threats, while also rapidly accelerating digital transformation. Google Cloud’s security operations suite will continue to provide a central point of intelligence, analysis and operations across on-premise environments, Google Cloud and other cloud providers.
In addition, Google Cloud is deeply committed to supporting the technology partners of both companies, including the endpoint ecosystem. This acquisition will enable system integrators, resellers and managed security service providers to offer broader solutions to customers.
“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, Google Cloud
The acquisition will complement Google Cloud’s existing strengths in security. Together with Mandiant, Google Cloud will deliver an end-to-end security operations suite with even greater capabilities as well as advisory services helping customers address critical security challenges and stay protected at every stage of the security lifecycle.
“Cyber security is a mission, and we believe it’s one of the most important of our generation. Google Cloud shares our mission-driven culture to bring security to every organization. Together, we will deliver our expertise and intelligence at scale via the Mandiant Advantage SaaS platform, as part of the Google Cloud security portfolio. These efforts will help organizations to effectively, efficiently and continuously manage and configure their complex mix of security products.” Kevin Mandia, CEO, Mandiant
The offer price represents a 57 per cent premium to the undisturbed 10-day trailing volume weighted average price as of February 7, 2022, the last full trading day prior to published market speculation regarding a potential sale of the company, it said in a statement. This deal is inclusive of Mandiant’s net cash.
The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of Mandiant stockholder and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close later this year. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC is acting as exclusive financial advisor, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati P.C. is acting as legal advisor to Mandiant.
