Four months after rejecting Google's $23 billion bid, leading cloud security company Wiz is bolstering the security remediation and risk management capabilities of its cloud-native platform with the acquisition of Israeli startup Dazz.
Wiz, a four-year-old company that saw its valuation this year soar to $12 billion, will add Dazz's AI-powered security remediation and risk management technology to its Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) for customers and MSSP partners, according to Wiz's co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport.
“With Dazz’s industry-leading processing engine, we can enable security teams to connect data from multiple sources and manage application risk in one unified platform,” Rappaport wrote in a blog post. “Their advanced mapping capabilities identify root issues, enabling engineers to address vulnerabilities directly in code while seamlessly integrating critical cloud context into security workflows.”
“Wiz is a single platform for the modern cloud security operating model, from cloud to code,” Bhatt wrote in a blog post, noting the rapid adoption of cloud and artificial intelligence and the acceleration of cyberattacks. “The Wiz team is fully committed to enabling a faster, more effective solution to cloud risk, right from the source.”
No financial details about the deal were revealed, although TechCrunch, citing unnamed sources, said Wiz would pay $450 million. This is its second acquisition this year after purchasing cloud threat detection company Gem Security for $350 million and its fourth since 2022. Dazz was founded in 2021. The acquisition will be a boon to the startup's customers and partners, according to the co-founder and CEO. Merav Bhatt.
Expanding the scope of the platform
The acquisition comes two months after Wiz unveiled Wiz Code, which expands its cloud platform into the world of developers so that its security capabilities can be built into software from the ground up. It was an important step for Wiz, making it a multi-product company with a larger presence.
With Wiz Code, every organization can “secure their cloud-native applications at every stage of development, protecting their code, CI/CD systems and infrastructure in one unified platform,” Yinon Kostica, Wiz co-founder and vice president of product, wrote. At the time, noting that “modern development practices such as DevOps, containers, and infrastructure as code (IaC) have blurred the lines between code and infrastructure.”
Given this, application and cloud security should not be treated as separate concerns, Kostica wrote. Doing so is ineffective and has led to security vulnerabilities. The addition of Dazz technologies will allow security and engineering teams to better mitigate threats and address risks.
The Wiz platform now includes Wiz Code to secure cloud development, Wiz Cloud to manage security postures, and Wiz Defend to respond to threats. Dazz's technology, which uses artificial intelligence and automation to detect, report and remediate vulnerabilities in cloud platforms, will be integrated into the Wiz platform.
Mergers and acquisitions in the security field
The Dazz deal will help Wiz – which partners with cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – expand its platform as it looks to better compete with larger players and is part of a larger group. The security M&A trend is where security is becoming more of a system play rather than a component play, according to Jack Gould, principal analyst at J.Gold Associates.
“Anything a company can do to expand its capabilities means that enterprises and SMEs can have one player to deal with in an integrated way rather than having a myriad of components that need to be put together,” Gould told MSSP Alert, adding that managers Wiz executives are then moving forward. google view. “Wiz believes it can become a successful company on its own, and as it expands its markets and sales, it believes Google's offering is too low. If Wiz can continue to expand, it will likely achieve a much higher market value than Google's offering.”
Wiz's aggressive strategy will also benefit the MSSPs who work with it. Last year, the company unveiled its Wiz Integration (WIN) platform, which provides security integrations so organizations can share security information with Wiz and its external partners. In August, Wiz announced a partnership with Expel to integrate MSSP cloud detection and response capabilities with Wiz's CNAPP platform.
“Being able to offer broader capability from Wiz means two things (for MSSPs) — the ability to better serve customer needs while also being able to increase revenue the more capabilities you offer,” Gould said.
