All Eyes on Microsoft with Mandiant

In other cybersecurity news …

All eyes are on Microsoft as the hottest cybersecurity headline this week has been the software giant’s reported interest in acquiring Mandiant, which rebranded from FireEye last fall.

Microsoft might look to acquire the cybersecurity research company to bolster its products, and help protect customers from hacks and breaches.

In the meantime, Eric Parizo, principal analyst of Omdia’s cybersecurity operations intelligence service, said while such a deal would be a highly expensive proposition for Microsoft, likely in excess of $4 billion, it would be a strong move that ultimately benefits both organizations.

“The Mandiant strategy post-FireEye is to scale its business primarily through the Mandiant Advantage SaaS platform to deliver unmanaged services like threat intelligence, security validation and automated defense, coupled with its widely known managed services offerings,” he said. “It is a sensible strategy, but Mandiant’s challenge is that for Advantage to meet its expectations, the company must court a critical mass of new SMB customers, an area it has not focused on in the past. Selling unmanaged services to SMBs is a much different proposition than selling managed services to large enterprises.”

Meanwhile, few companies have had more success selling to companies of all sizes, including SMBs, than Microsoft, Parizo said.

“The software giant could immediately plug the Mandiant offerings directly into its sales organization and quickly upsell many Windows and Microsoft 365 customers on Mandiant security offerings,” he said. “Such an acquisition would also immediately give Microsoft one of the industry’s most prestigious managed services organizations, an area today where it must largely rely on partners. Mandiant’s technology could also potentially enhance Microsoft’s own security solutions, such as Defender and Sentinel. Finally, after decades of being lukewarm on cybersecurity, such a move would leave no doubt about Microsoft’s commitment to being an industry leader in cybersecurity solutions and services, a perception it has been increasingly eager to foster.”

Also this week, Mandiant and SentinelOne announced a new strategic alliance to help organizations reduce the risk of data breaches and strengthen their ability to mitigate cyber threats. The alliance enables Mandiant’s incident responders’ use of SentinelOne’s Singularity extended detection and response (XDR) platform to investigate and remediate breaches.