• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 14, 2024

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reportedly may soon make its biggest acquisition ever, at a time when large cloud businesses are being hacked on a regular basis.

The deal reportedly means Alphabet could pay as much as $23 billion to acquire Wiz, which offers a different approach to cloud security.

The possible acquisition comes at an interesting time for the cloud industry, which heavily supports brands and agencies across advertising and marketing in storage and artificial intelligence.

The cloud industry helps companies scale innovations by simplifying and facilitating the process of testing new ideas and designing new applications without hardware limitations, and makes it easier to buy media and to check and balance strategies across channels.

Wiz ingests data from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other platforms, and then scans it for security risks. Alphabet’s deal with Wiz is not complete but The Wall Street Journal expects it to be finalized soon.

Wiz was founded in 2020 by the company CEO Assaf Rappaport and several colleagues. The founders sold their previous company to Microsoft in 2015 for $320 million. They worked at Microsoft for several years before leaving to launch Wiz, according to reports.

The cybersecurity software cloud computing company raised $1 billion earlier this year, and became one of the “few startups outside the artificial-intelligence industry to raise money at a higher valuation in 2024.”

Silicon Valley venture capitalists Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners backed the company.

Last week, AT&T said hackers accessed call logs on Snowflake, a third-party cloud computing platform. The hack contained several months of call logs for nearly all of its customers in what analysts are calling a massive cybersecurity breach.

According to the company’s annual report, it had more than 127 million connected devices at the end of 2023.

The stolen data runs the gamut from records of calls and texts between May 1 and October 31, 2022, and some information from January 2, 2023, AT&T stated in a press release.

The data did not contain content of calls or texts, personal information like Social Security numbers, dates of birth, or other personally identifiable information, AT&T said, and it did not include some typical information seen in use details, such as the time stamp of calls or texts.

Although the stolen data did not include that information, AT&T said there are ways to access publicly available online tools to find the name associated with a specific telephone number.