Google’s plan to win the cloud war hinges on its security aspirations>
The Register – Jessica Lyons Hardcastle
INTERVIEW Google’s quest to steal cloud customers from rivals Amazon and Microsoft will be won â or lost â based on its strength as a cybersecurity provider.
The web giant is pumping billions of dollars into its security offerings so that this big bet will pay off. This includes mergers and acquisitions as well as building out technologies to work across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments.
Becoming a security brand Google’s answer to this was Anthos â its multi-cloud platform that launched in 2019. It allows customers to run Kubernetes workloads in their datacenters and on Google Cloud Platform as well as on AWS and Azure.
And it gave security a starring role. The platform drew on its BeyondCorp approach to security that Google had started developing in 2010, after Chinese cyber-spies successfully infiltrated it and other Silicon Valley tech giants’ networks and stole intellectual property.
We’re told Google tries to take a different approach to that of its rivals.
“With Amazon, you have to be in Amazon to taste the rest of the security capabilities,” Potti claimed. “You can’t modernize your security operations center (SOC) if you’re not on Amazon completely. You can’t adopt a zero-trust posture for all your enterprise and your contractors” if you’re not all-in on Amazon.
Meanwhile Microsoft “wants to be an end-all, be-all” for security products and software in general, he argued. “The analogies that you hear about Microsoft having the fire in the forest and then also charging as a forest ranger,” he quipped.
Self-driving SOC The security operations center (SOC) is one of these segments. It’s an area where Google is using its internally developed tech combined with acquisitions to move customers to “self-driving” operations, Potti said.
In its second-biggest acquisition ever, Google inked a $5.4 billion deal to buy Mandiant, which would bring that firm’s threat detection and intelligence, as well as its advisory services and incident response, into Google Cloud. It’s worth noting Microsoft also reportedly explored a Mandiant buyout, and that fell through.
A couple of months before announcing the Mandiant deal, Google reportedly paid $500 million to acquire Siemplify to roll security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) into Chronicle â which already provided security information and event management (SIEM) and analytics capabilities.
Additionally, Google partners with endpoint and extended detection and response providers including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and Cybereason, which provide their own security services on top of Google’s Chronicle and BeyondCorp enterprise suite “for more of a complete offer,” Potti noted.
Link: https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/19/google_cloud_security_interview/