Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia told reporters the deal with Google will allow his company to better help customers no matter whose security tools they use since Google's team investigates threats across product types.Mandiant will live on as a separate brand inside of its new parent company, Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables told Axios ahead of today's announcements. Mandia will continue as CEO, reporting to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Mandiant customers will not be required to become Google customers, Venables said, although he hopes they will willingly become Google Cloud customers over time. Mandiant will not share with Google any proprietary information that it comes across while helping a company recover from ransomware, nation-state cyberattacks or other cybersecurity incidents, Venables said.Google has a dual-pronged strategy with Mandiant. On one side, Mandiant is continuing to offer its own standalone incident response products. On the other, more Google Cloud security products will embed Mandiant's incident response tools.
"There's a little bit of a sigh of relief that there is going to be some competition to the other company that typically serves government," Venables said of Washington's reaction to the deal. Employees on Google's existing security teams and Mandiant have already started collaborating on threat intelligence research, which Venables hopes translates into stronger Google products down the line.
"It's not this kind of little acquisition," Venables said. "It's this big part of our ongoing security transformation in terms of building a much bigger security business."