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Google to buy Wiz for $32B

reuters.com

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Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#281

Post by happyopossum »

leftcenterright wrote: post #237

I still find it amazing that: - Businesses pay the cloud providers to allow them to use compute/disk/network - Businesses pay to hire the engineers who can work on cloud - Businesses pay to hire security engineers who can secure the applications in cloud - Businesses pay to hire FinOps to optimize their cloud usage - Businesses hire security companies to secure their cloud usage (e.g. Wiz was one such company) - Now…

> - Now cloud provider has to acquire the security company to secure their own cloud?

No - this acquisition is about selling Wiz to cloud customers. Deploying on cloud securely is a solved problem if you set and follow good policies. Virtually nobody is doing this, ergo companies like Wiz that will tell you when you're doing something stupid.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#282

Post by happyopossum »

1024core wrote: post #228

Didn't Google acquire another cloud security outfit called Mandiant sometime back? How is this different from that?

> another cloud security outfit called Mandiant sometime back

Mandiant wasn't/isn't "cloud security" - they're primarily security research, threat intel, and incident response. Completely different space, customer base, and product set.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#283

Post by culanuchachamim »

coliveira wrote: post #266
czk wrote: post #256

> Wiz has raised a total of $1.9 billion from a combination of venture capital funds and private investors > Wiz agreed to acquire Tel Aviv-based Raftt, a cloud-based developer collaboration platform, for $50 million in December 2023. In April 2024, the company acquired cloud detection and response startup, Gem Security, for around $350 million > Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy…

These companies are the closest you can get to a legal mafia, they are effectively charging companies around the world to keep them "safe". In other words, a job that is traditionally considered to be a basic service of the government is now being privatized by people that nobody knows if we can really trust.

Big difference

The mafia charges protection from itself, here the bad actors are out there and wiz help you protect from them.

Wiz selling doors with appropriate locks for your bussines.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#284

Post by codingmoney »

The acquisition of Wiz by Google raises some interesting questions about the future of cloud security. On one hand, it could lead to better integration and innovation in Google Cloud's security offerings. On the other hand, it might concentrate too much power in the hands of a single vendor. It will be interesting to see how this deal affects the competitive landscape and whether other cloud providers will respond with similar acquisitions or partnerships.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#285

Post by otterley »

ABS wrote: post #57
scarface_74 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an underrated weakness of Google. When I was working at AWS ProServe, we never even took GCP as a serious competitor. Their customer service, acount management and enterprise sales team was so horrendous it was laughable. I don’t think we even had talking points about why AWS was better than GCP like we did Azure.

what drives me mad is that it's not even underrated! everyone knows, everyone has been talking (and complaning) about this for something like 15 years! I personally know of 2 big GCP customers who, over the years, left GCP because of this and the impact it had in critical situations. This very feedback was given in both cases to people considerably high up on GCP's ladder and... nothing's ever changed. I'm sure plent…

Google is, at its core, an advertising company that tries to disguise itself as a technology company. When necessity calls, they will undoubtedly elect to divert resources towards their core business and away from their hobby projects (which GCP is).

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#286

Post by bschmidt69 »

czk wrote: post #256

> Wiz has raised a total of $1.9 billion from a combination of venture capital funds and private investors > Wiz agreed to acquire Tel Aviv-based Raftt, a cloud-based developer collaboration platform, for $50 million in December 2023. In April 2024, the company acquired cloud detection and response startup, Gem Security, for around $350 million > Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy…

[flagged]

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#287

Post by dhx »

mmaunder wrote: post #4

Anyone got a sense for where the value is in Wiz? Revenue? IP? Any customers here?

Data for nation state espionage and industrial espionage?

Whoever owns Wiz obtains read only access to large company and government cloud networks. Even in the Wiz outpost model where the scanning engine is deployed into the user's own cloud network, results from scans are sent back to Wiz Cloud, and this includes sensitive information such as "Installed packages, Exposed secrets, Malware detection".[1] For an example real world deployment, GitLab SaaS public documentation expects the "Wiz Runtime Sensor" to be installed in every container.[2] This Wiz software requires highly elevated privileges to a level that the GitLab security risk assessment only briefly describes.[3]

The data Wiz collects on customers appears to allow answering of queries such as:

1. Which containers of government agencies in country X have the xz-utils library installed? Of these containers, what other software is installed alongside? How many of these containers are exposed to the Internet, directly or indirectly?

2. Which government agencies in country X have a publicly exposed service vulnerable to CVE-20xx-xxxx?

3. For top 200 companies, plot the popularity of AWS or Azure service ACME123 over the past 12 months compared to competing Google service ACME456.

Aside from security risks of having sensitive information of entire governments or large organisations hoovered up by Wiz, use of the "Wiz Runtime Sensor" also includes the risk of an incident similar to the failed CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor update of 2024.

The criticisms above are not specific to Wiz. There are many other competing products/services with similarly poor architectures and lack of protection of sensitive IT system information of governments and large organisations.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/architecture/partners/id-prioritize...

[2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/readiness/-/tree/mast...

[3] https://github.com/wiz-sec/charts/blob/master/wiz-sensor/tem...

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#288

Post by happyopossum »

xnx wrote: post #66

Is enterprise security software like consumer antivirus software (i.e. unnecessary (or even harmful) if you know what you're doing)?

"Enterprise" and "you know what you're doing" don't go hand-in-hand. You might know what you're doing, but does everyone else at your enterprise?

Every single devops person who can push a CL to staging (that may not get properly reviewed)? Every marketing whiz who is using a dataviz tool against a cloud storage bucket you didn't even know existed? Every support engineer who is on-call at 2:#0am and can fix a customer's problem with one tiny IAM change?

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#289

Post by bigyabai »

scarface_74 wrote: post #264
apercu wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know man, iPhones and Macs are really buggy, bloated/full of unnecessary features, and user hostile. Microsoft products are also hot garbage. The cars we get to pay tens of thousands (or even hundreds) are pretty much garbage now. It's not just Google.

I am not talking about opinions on quality. I’m talking about objective measures in introducing a new product that moves the needle as far as revenue/profit and market share that is not cancelled quickly

Again, the parent's point stands. Apple is not changing the game with Apple Vision Pro or Apple Intelligence. Microsoft isn't getting accolades for Windows 11 and Copilot. It's not always smart to bet the farm on a product that nobody wants to pay for.

Objectively speaking Google is one of the few companies that saw where the puck was headed and skated there. They built TensorFlow, they sponsored serious local AI research. Now they build their own in-house training and inference hardware. Relative to the struggling we see from the rest of FAANG, I would argue Google is perhaps the only successful competitor left. I despise their monopoly abuse of AdSense, but they're not going to be effectively prosecuted with protectionist American policy defending them. Google "won" the services sector and now everyone and their mother is butthurt.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#290

Post by birdman3131 »

Kipters wrote: post #178
JKCalhoun wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought they made smart lightbulbs (I have some "WiZ" ones installed in fact).

I was worried it was that WiZ, luckily it's not Their bulbs are one of the few WiFi bulbs that don't require an app to operate (only for the initial configuration)

Shelly does not require an app at all. Initial setup can be done via the WIFI AP it generates by default. Cloud is a checkbox in the app/web interface.

https://shelly.guide/add-a-shelly-to-your-wi-fi-through-web-...

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