Our sources confirm that Wiz will remain an independent platform that will work across all cloud providers, not just Google Cloud Platform.

Google Cloud’s ad on the Las Vegas Sphere, overlooking Amazon’s re:Invent conference in November 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)Editor’s note: This analysis is written by Christopher Budd, a tech industry veteran who previously worked at the Microsoft Security Response Center.Earlier this month, Google announced plans to acquire Israel-based Wiz for the nearly jaw-dropping price of $32 billion (yes, with a “b”). Not only is this the biggest cybersecurity deal (yet) in terms of money — it’s also another instance of Google swooping in with a very big, open checkbook to snap up a cybersecurity industry leader to fold into the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This makes it clearer that Google sees security as a competitive differentiator in the cloud and is another step toward Microsoft’s model of integrating cloud and security in-house — and away from Amazon Web Services’ more hands-off strategy of relying primarily on a security partner ecosystem. Google’s move on Wiz is very similar to its acquisition of Mandiant in 2022 when it paid $5.4 billion for arguably the single best known incident response (IR) company in the world. Since then we’ve seen that Google bought Mandiant not because Google wanted to become a player in the IR space but because Google wanted to have some of the best IR capabilities in the world protecting GCP and its customers. Wiz is a leading company in the Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) space. CNAPPs provide a critical security layer to today’s cloud computing. If we look at the Mandiant acquisition as a blueprint, we can surmise that Google plans to take another industry-leading company and focus it on securing GCP.Meanwhile in Redmond, IR and CNAPP are capabilities that Microsoft’s cloud offering has had for years through internal development