Security News > 2022 > April > US DOJ probes Google's $5.4b Mandiant acquisition

Federal regulators are taking a closer look at Google's planned $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant, a deal designed to boost the web giant's public cloud's cybersecurity capabilities.

In announcing its bid March 8, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a statement that "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."

The proposed acquisition comes at a time when larger mergers, including in the IT space, are getting more scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators in Washington DC. A deeper look by the DOJ is more about Google and the size of the bid than with any impact on a crowded cybersecurity field, according to Bob O'Donnell, principal analyst with Technalysis Research.

"That's why any kind of deal that Google does is probably going to get more regulatory checks, as well as Facebook and the other big players. That's just going to be the nature of the beast moving forward. It's going to be more challenging for them to make bigger acquisitions."

In an interview with The Register, Sunil Potti, vice president of security for Google Cloud, said its cybersecurity capabilities are a key part of the company's strategy for competing with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which are the first- and second-largest cloud providers in the world, with Google running behind in third, according to Synergy Research Group.

Before Google announced its bid for Mandiant, news reports surfaced that Microsoft was interested in buying the security vendor.

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