Wiz Acquisition Highlights Cybersecurity’s 2020s Dominance

That Google would spend $32 billion on the cybersecurity firm Wiz underscores just how important cybersecurity has become - not just for the cloud ecosystem, but for technology as a whole.

The sum is even more remarkable considering that Wiz operates primarily in relatively new cybersecurity niches: Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Workload Protection (CWP). The current market sizes of these segments alone would hardly justify such a large acquisition. However, acquisitions are always about anticipated market trends, and this deal signals just how high expectations are for the future of cybersecurity.

In fact, security has been a recurrent theme in recent acquisitions by Google: in 2022 it acquired threat intel and incident response firm Mandiant for $5.4 billion. It also recently acquired software virtualization company Cameyo, which enables secure delivery of Windows and internal web applications to any device.

To put in perspective, Google's acquisition track records includes Motorola Mobility, 2012, US$12.5 billion (protecting Android ecosystem), Nest Labs $3.2B in 2014 (IoT devices), DoubleClick $3.1B in 2007 (digital advertising), but nothing compares to the latest cybersecurity venture.

CSPM and CWP are market segments we've been covering recently (for ex. see Trend Micro Vision One here).

In essence, it's about protecting cloud assets and artifacts together with identities, the importance of which we've been stressing when discussing recent attacks (see here).

Wiz combines these functionalities with intelligent attack path analysis (see example below) and therefore strengthens Google's positioning in key areas:

✔ Multi-cloud security (AWS, Azure, GCP) → Expands Google’s influence beyond its cloud.

 ✔ Agentless scanning → Faster, easier deployment compared to agent-based tools on endpoints.

 ✔ Unified security graph → Helps security teams visualize attack paths across cloud environments.

An example of attack path analysis in the cloud. Source: Wiz