Google Capital invested $25M in Zscaler, a leading cloud security company that secures more than 15M users around the world. Gene Frantz, Partner at Google Capital stated “we’re are big believers in two unstoppable technology trends that Zscaler is riding – the rise of mobile computing and the evolution from point solutions hosted onsite to integrated cloud platforms”. This is great news for Zscaler, but lets pull back curtain and try to figure out whats going on. Lets start with some bullet points.
- Google has invested in four cyber security companies: CloudFlare, Zscaler, CrowdStrike and Shape Security
- AWS is a $7.3B business, which includes $1B in database services
- AWS has 1M customers and is growing 81% year-on-year
- EC2 business growing at 95%, S3 at 120% and database at 127%
What does this mean? Amazon is growing like gangbusters and giving Google a major heartburn. However, even though EC2, S3 and the database business are growing extraordinarily well, there is one big gaping hole in the Amazon product line – “Cloud Security”. Google is tremendously ahead of Amazon in Edge Security, and if they play their cards right, Google will supplant the traditional security players like Palo Alto Networks and FireEye, and capture billions of the security spend across the world. Google is in a position to kill it, while Amazon tries to figure out “which way did he go” in the cloud security space.
