On March 18, 2025 Google Cloud announced an agreement to acquire Israeli security company Wiz for $32B. Pending regulatory approvals, the deal is expected to close in 2026 as an all cash transaction.
Why Wiz?
Wiz is an agentless security tool, designed to run in multi-cloud environments. They tout an end-to-end platform, but their market toehold stems from the convenience of their multi-cloud scanning.
Per the announcement webcast, here’s how Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport describes the company:
Wiz is about securing everything built and run in any cloud,
end-to-end, from code to cloud to runtime.
Per Rappaport, Wiz performs continuous scans of code and cloud environments. It then builds a graph of users’ code, cloud resources, services, and applications and connections between them. Wiz then maps potential attacks paths, prioritizes potential impacts, and blocks active threats.
Compared to the CSPs native tooling, Wiz offers a cleaner UI and faster environment view than what can be assembled from the cloud vendors themselves. Also, users can set security boundaries to extend beyond a single cloud and manage multiple environments in one place, consolidating their security view of all their cloud environments in a single tool.
In online forums, users allege Wiz’s pricing to be roughly 50% less than that of competitive tools like Orca, and they find the the agentless nature of Wiz’s tooling makes setup faster and more flexible than other legacy security scanners.
Why Google?
As opposed to AWS – where the phrase ‘multi-cloud’ was once verboten at its conference – Google Cloud’s path to market has long relied upon a multi- and hybrid-cloud push. After the 2020 announcement of BigQuery Omni, my colleague Steve O’Grady wrote:
Historically, a core approach of cloud vendors to the market has been attracting workloads to their platforms via proprietary offerings.
With Anthos, Google inverted that model, taking the proprietary software platform and decoupling it from the underlying cloud. This is notable because it represented a change of strategy, as noted, but also because it’s a heavy lift technically. It’s much easier to get a platform stack operating in one environment than it is in multiple.
Now with BigQuery, Google is doubling down on this approach, extending it beyond its GCP roots into other environments. This may weaken the argument for GCP compute at the margins, but it inarguably expands BigQuery’s addressable market dramatically.
In the intervening years Google has gone less aggressively down that path than they originally signaled with Anthos and BigQuery Omni, but of the major cloud service providers it remains the vendor most likely to make plays for winning workloads and revenue via a multi-cloud play.
The next question, then: why might Google be pursuing this growth via a security company?
The enterprise security landscape is undoubtedly changing with AI, and cloud vendors are not necessarily coming out ahead in this shift. Many enterprises remain wary of privacy and safety concerns. The addition of AI changes the threat posture of misconfigurations, data leaks, and other security mishaps; the table stakes of an incident grow. Security itself will undoubtedly have to shift and adapt with AI, but in the meantime it is becoming a mandate for enterprises to be better at doing currently available security postures well.
By offering a multi-cloud security solution like Wiz, Google is attempting to position itself as a more fully capable enterprise security provider than the other clouds, and potentially position itself for growth as the space evolves.
Deal Deets
Per the investment announcement Wiz will remain independent until the deal is closed. They will continue to partner with all cloud providers post-close and will continue to work with SaaS and software vendors to provide interoperability options. They will also continue to work with SIs and resellers.
Also, selfishly, I really hope they continue doing their own conference booths because I adore their marketing. Their playfulness, sense of humor, and attention to detail is just unmatched. Here are some pictures from past KubeCon and re:Invent showfloors. In a sea of fairly unremarkable booths, Wiz stands out. They’ve created a diner (serving everyone actual donuts); a homage to Blockbuster video (with phenomenal puns on the video boxes); a corner store (with actual products that sell their wordplay vision). It’s one of my favorite booths to visit just because I love to go see the fun details they’ll come up with.
To the Wiz marketing team out there who have been lobbying for budget and working hard on conference showfloor presence: hats off to you all. You’ve done well.
Disclosure: AWS and Google Cloud are RedMonk clients.
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