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Comment by PunchTornado | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand Google's play here. Does it want Wiz to be a unique offer for GCP customers? or they will keep it cloud agnostic?

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Wiz customer here, when fully implemented it provides an incredibly detailed and comprehensive view of your infrastructure.

I'm curious how much of that information is going to pass between Wiz and Google Cloud product/sales. It's effectively x-ray vision into some huge workloads running on their competitors.

Is this like Darktrace?

Apparently the cybersec bigwigs at our company love it, but for me I have to write a detailed explaination why another 'incident report' the clueless cybersecurity guys keep bothering me with is actually nonsense.

Nope. Darktrace is crap verging on fraud. Wiz actually solves tangible CSPM and runtime issues.

Can you give an example? Because I'm currently unable to understand the point of this product.

As a cybersecurity guy...

There are a lot of cybersecurity people that really know nothing about actual security and just rely on what their tools tell them. And products like Wiz love to "prove" their value by raising tons of red flags.

This is especially true for vulnerability management, which is basically Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf as a Service. The entire CVE ecosystem used to be great, but now it's turned into resume-driven-development where people exaggerate the severity of a vulnerability in order to have a CVSS 9.8 on their resume.

>>It's effectively x-ray vision into some huge workloads running on their competitors.

I wonder if there are antitrust lawyers watching this closely. Would be really interesting to get their perspective on this.

Wiz got "unconditional" approval from the EU. I think this was the last step holding up the acquisition.

https://www.reuters.com/world/google-secures-eu-antitrust-ap...

Probably a diversification play and a play to see out bigger contracts. If you've worked in the FEDRamp space, you may be aware that Wiz (last a checked, a year or so ago) is one of the few and possibly ownly player certified to operate in FedRAMP Medium/High deployments operating with the technology it does (eBPF instrumentation).

Google has really been expanding into DoD lately. I think they're realizing it's a large part of why AWS is so big and Azure is still alive.

If you think Google is capable of making a singular coherent decision on a topic like this, you're dreaming. There's likely multiple competing visions.

That said: the goal with Google M&A remains the same as always. Take competition off the board. I don't know this company or how they compete with Google, but 80% chance that's the play.

They are culturally incapable of merging other people's tech into their own stack and have both the tendency to rewrite everything from scratch on their own bespoke technologies and also internal engineering teams that will bristle at having a foreign body invade their cathedral.

You could say it would be talent acquisition but most everyone who comes from a startup walks as soon as their golden handcuffs loosen and they can find something else to do. Going from startup to Google is usually torturous.

Been through this 15 years ago. I don't think anything has changed.

> goal with Google M&A remains the same as always. Take competition off the board. I don't know this company or how they compete with Google, but 80% chance that's the play

I don't think that's true here (what is the competing google product exactly?) or generally in cloud acquisitions, that generally buy into their platform missing features

It's true that Cloud has behaved a bit different from Classic Google

The competing Google features are not a distinct product with its own name, but rather many separate features one can enable, like container image scanning. Collectively, it doesn't do all that Wiz offers, but it's still there.

Thats the entire purpose, the reality is that large corporations are increasingly “multi cloud” and Google wants to have an offering for them and for companies that are on AWS and Azure to be able to move some of their workloads to GCP.

AWS and GCP also made a joint announcement about multi cloud networking for a similar reason

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery...

>or they will keep it cloud agnostic?

They grossly overpaid if they aren't keeping it cloud agnostic. It's impressive software, but if it's only compatible with GCP it will not survive in this space.

I'm really hoping this means GCP Security Command Center quickly gets subsumed by Wiz

you mean there will now be three products instead of two

Google Security Center Wiz Google Agentic Wiz Security

Make it easy to use google cloud and plug into google ai

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