Wiz is a multicloud security rocket ship. Now it works for a cloud provider

Google Cloud has long made multicloud services a key part of its product development strategy, which makes sense when you're the third-place player in a category known as the Big Three. Tuesday's $32 billion acquisition of Wiz — a cloud security platform designed to work across all major cloud providers — will be a test of its commitment to work with its competitors and a signal of whether security trumps other considerations when it comes to buying cloud services.

Wiz turned down a $23 billion offer from Google last July, but several reports Tuesday suggested that expectations that the Trump administration will take a more hands-off approach to tech mergers — plus, you know, that additional $9 billion — sealed the deal. Wiz had raised $2 billion in funding according to Crunchbase, and saw extraordinary growth over the last five years.

The company built a security platform that "rapidly scans the customer’s environment, constructing a comprehensive graph of code, cloud resources, services, and applications – along with the connections between them," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a blog post.

The software can identify potential threats to applications even before they are deployed, and identify the flaws most likely to cause big problems. It can also suggest ways that developers can fix their code in partnership with the policies set by their security organizations when incoming attacks are detected on deployed applications.

"Wiz is an innovative leader, creating new categories of cybersecurity solutions in the last 12 months, including code-to-cloud security and cloud-native runtime defense, further strengthening its impact," Kurian wrote.

Both Google and Wiz said they will continue to support Wiz customers running applications on AWS and Microsoft Azure, but no company spends $32 billion without plans to capture new business. Security services are both a vital part of any cloud infrastructure customer's operating environment as well as a profitable business for infrastructure vendors.

Microsoft-aligned partners interviewed by CRN saw the Wiz deal as a clear shot at Microsoft's enormous-but-shaky enterprise security business. "I’m not surprised Google would pay such a high price for Wiz. Microsoft has so much security and AI momentum that Google needed to do something to be more competitive," Michael Hadley, president and CEO of iCorps Technology, told CRN.

"Google’s experience with multi-cloud offerings through previous acquisitions, such as Looker, will be beneficial. Nevertheless, delivering cloud-native security solutions on cloud platforms outside its direct control introduces an entirely new set of complexities," said Constellation Research's Chirag Mehta.

But even as Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission staffers spend most of their time doing Control-F searches for what they consider "woke" words, there's still a chance that such a massive deal — which will give Google deep insight into what its competitors' customers are running on those platforms — will face scrutiny. After all, the new DOJ is still trying to break up Google in some fashion.

Perhaps that's why Google declared that AI and cloud computing has "dramatically changed the security landscape for customers, making cybersecurity increasingly important in defending against emergent risks and protecting national security," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a separate blog post. Semafor noted that HPE and Juniper are citing similar national-security reasons as to why the government should approve their proposed merger, which Trump's DOJ is trying to block.

"Given the regulatory uncertainty around this acquisition, customers running workloads primarily on Azure or AWS should ensure they have clear contingency strategies to safeguard their cybersecurity investments," Constellation Research's Mehta said. And expect every other company in cloud security — including Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Crowdstrike, among others — to make a bid for Wiz customers running on AWS or Azure.

(This post originally appeared in the Runtime newsletter on Mar. 18th, sign up here to get more enterprise tech news three times a week.)