SAN FRANCISCO, July 16 (Reuters) - If Alphabet's

Google is successful in its effort to buy cloud

security company Wiz, it would bolster its cloud security

offerings for large organisations, a hotspot for hackers, and

help it take on cloud rivals Amazon.com ( AMZN ) and Microsoft ( MSFT )

, experts said.

Alphabet is in advanced talks to acquire Wiz, a person

familiar with the matter said on Sunday, in an up to $23 billion

deal that would be Google's most expensive acquisition and

provide it with cybersecurity products that defend against

ransomware gangs wreaking havoc on large enterprises.

"There is a hot market for cloud security," said Jerome

Seguera, a senior intelligence analyst at the cybersecurity firm

MalwareBytes, adding that Wiz gives customers "great visibility

into their assets in a straightforward way."

Wiz offers tools that allow organisations to scan their

entire infrastructure and specific software for threats.

Google has been steadily expanding its cybersecurity

offerings in recent years. Two years ago it bought the popular

cyber firm Mandiant for $5.4 billion.

"I think they are trying to compete with Microsoft ( MSFT ) and to a

smaller extent AWS (Amazon Web Services)," said Marc Bleicher,

chief technology officer of the security firm Surefire Cyber.

"Wiz is one of only a few who address a big chunk of the

cloud security market in one platform," Bleicher said.

Wiz was founded in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus

pandemic, primed to benefit from the move towards remote work

and the shift by organisations to cloud environments from

desktops. Most large organisations have also shifted to storing

their data on the cloud over the years, but that has come with

security risks - especially as companies expand and become more

complex.

Its founders, former Israeli army intelligence members,

earlier founded another cloud security firm named Adallom that

Microsoft ( MSFT ) bought for $320 million in 2015.

Headquartered in New York, the company has grown rapidly

since then. Only two months ago, at the RSA cybersecurity

conference in San Francsico, Wiz said it was valued at $12

billion. It now expects annual organic revenue of $1 billion in

2025 and has raised nearly $2 billion in venture capital

investment in total, said a person familiar with the Google deal

talks, declining to be named.

The Wiz buyout talks come as the pace of global dealmaking

in cybersecurity has significantly picked up in 2024. There were

120 global cybersecurity deals announced in the first half of

this year, accounting for $12.4 billion in deal value, compared

to 137 such deals last year, or $4.8 billion in deal value,

according to data from the financial information firm Dealogic.

Dave Dewalt, founder of the cyber-focused venture capital

firm NightDragon, said Wiz's growth is the result of strong

marketing and being "at the right place, at the right time, with

the right product."

DeWalt, former chief executive of cybersecurity firm

FireEye, said cloud security is the most important and

fastest-growing part of cybersecurity, driven by increasing

attacks on large organisations.

"The stakes are exponentially higher in the cloud. So

therefore, the security needs to be exponentially stronger, and

(there's) more revenue from it," he said, adding that Palo Alto

Networks ( PANW ) and Crowdstrike ( CRWD ) had also beefed up

their cloud security offerings in recent years.