What Did Google Do This Week?
GOOGLE MAKE WAVES IN CYBERSECURITY MARKET
Much of this week’s chatter has been dominated by Google’s apparently imminent takeover of the Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz, a story that broke just after we published last week. After Google’s long-mooted HubSpot acquisition fell apart last week, a Wiz deal — at around $23 billion — would be Alphabet’s biggest ever and a real statement of intent from the company looking to enter the cybersecurity market with a splash.
But after a massive Microsoft outage (triggered by an update in the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike’s software) briefly brought much of the world to a standstill on Friday, Google’s newly announced open-source AI platform Project Oscar could also have huge implications for the cybersecurity industry. Revealed at Google I/O Bengaluru, Project Oscar is designed to assist software product teams in tracking and addressing issues or bugs. Although it currently focuses on open-source projects, there is potential for it to be extended to support closed-source projects in the future.
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SO WHAT?
Google says it is already using Project Oscar to help monitor bug reports on its open-source programming language Go, with the AI helping to clarify and simplify issue reports on any bugs that surface. Cameron Balahan, Go’s group project manager, said in a recent Google video: “Our vision is that anyone can deploy Oscar to their project, open or closed source, and use the agents that come pre-packaged or bring their own.”
So in theory, Project Oscar could one day be used to stop global mishaps like Friday’s Microsoft outage. All in all, it’s a big week for cybersecurity and a double win for Google while Microsoft suffered an international embarrassment that affected flights, healthcare and banking. The outage was a reminder of how vital cybersecurity is for modern society to function, so it won’t hurt Google’s image that they’re launching Project Oscar and flirting with a massive Wiz acquisition while it all unfolds.
The acquisition news comes after Google made a bold move into the security market in 2022 with a $5.4 billion purchase of Mandiant, which was integrated into Google Cloud. This expansion instantly positioned Google Cloud as a significant rival to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services in the cloud security sector. By acquiring Wiz, Google gains cutting-edge technology that helps it narrow the competitive gap with its biggest rivals in the cloud and cybersecurity markets.
It’s clear that Google wants a piece of the cloud pie that Microsoft has hogged for years — underlined by recent reports that Sundar Pichai and co offered CISPE, a group of EU-based cloud firms, a package worth about €470 million in a failed attempt to derail their antitrust settlement with Microsoft, shortly before CISPE and Microsoft reached an agreement. That story doesn’t look great for Google, but it pales into insignificance considering their cybersecurity wins in the past week.
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