In the bigger picture, Google’s pickup of Mandiant could spark more M&A activity across the cybersecurity industry, as S&P Global reports. “In a nutshell, this deal was a shot across the bow from Google to Microsoft and Amazon with this flagship cyber security acquisition," Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said in a research note.

Amazon and Microsoft could end up buying other cloud security outfits as a result of the deal, said Ives, who described the Mandiant buy as “the tip of the iceberg to a massive phase of consolidation potentially ahead for the cloud space.” Ives said possible targets would include Varonis, Tenable, CyberArk, Qualys, Rapid7, SailPoint and Ping.

Within the cloud computing realm, the Mandiant transaction may reflect Google’s status as a distant third behind Amazon and Microsoft, as Inc. notes. To catch up, Google arguably needs to act like it’s already one of the industry leaders, rather than a relative newcomer.

“The way we look at it is we're obviously not competing with our peers at the scale they were then, we are competing at the scale they are now in a market that is accelerating," Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Google parent company Alphabet, said at an industry event. Porat added that the deal would better enable Google to meet the “idiosyncratic needs” of its various customers, who demand artificial intelligence and automation.

Regarding the deal, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a blog post that clients also ask for threats to be detected faster and with greater sophistication.

At a more basic level, Analytics Insight notes that buying Mandiant is expected to bolster Google Cloud’s current cloud security offerings, improving them to “deliver an end-to-end security operations suite with even greater capabilities to support customers across their cloud and on-premise environments.”