At Google Cloud Next this week, Google unveiled the Google Unified Security (GUS) platform. This move reflects their push to enhance their growing cybersecurity solutions. The company aims to create better results and integrate more closely with security teams at customer organizations.
Enterprise security leaders often struggle with their fragmented security environments. Many companies juggle numerous point solutions, leading to silos of data and a confusing picture of potential threats. This situation leaves them exposed to attackers who know how to exploit these weaknesses. Google understands this frustration. Heather Adkins, Google’s vice president of security engineering, highlighted that the development of GUS was driven by these challenges.
“I’m excited for customers because we now offer various integrated solutions,” Adkins noted. “I’ve had countless discussions over 20 years trying to piece these together.”
At its core, GUS merges security offerings like threat intelligence, cloud security, and secure enterprise browsing, integrating capabilities from Mandiant that Google acquired in 2022. This includes leveraging their Gemini AI to create a comprehensive solution aimed at improving security outcomes. Google claims this will establish a scalable and searchable security data architecture that spans users’ entire attack surfaces, improving visibility and speeding up response times across networks, endpoints, and applications.
Adkins explained, “The unified product creates a data layer that you can query anytime. If I’m a CISO curious about a threat like Salt Typhoon, I can simply ask. No need to sift through reports or go through the SOC first.” She emphasized that GUS can significantly transform workflows for security professionals.
Michelle Abraham, senior research director for IDC, says GUS moves organizations toward better security. By integrating browser behavior, managed threat hunting, and security validation, it aims to close coverage gaps and simplify threat detection and response.
With the rise of agentic AI being a hot topic at the event, Google sees this technology as a potential game-changer in cybersecurity. Brian Roddy, vice president of product management at Google, shared insights on how companies are already leveraging agentic AI in various roles, from customer support to deeper analysis tasks.
“What if we could take away the tedious tasks that security professionals deal with?” Roddy pondered. Preliminary feedback from major customers using GUS has been positive. “They really like the tools. The malware reverse engineering tool, for example, does something that usually takes years of experience. Now we can potentially increase output five to ten times.”
This new malware analysis agent assesses code safety, identifies malicious code, and executes scripts for deobfuscation. In a notable test, it neutralized a sample of the notorious WannaCry ransomware worm in just 34 seconds—a process that took the original threat analyst seven hours to achieve.
By the end of June, Google plans to preview this and a dynamic alert triage agent designed to analyze alerts and provide context to SOC analysts. This agent promises to significantly cut down the time analysts spend sorting through countless alerts each day.
“These first expert agents are just the beginning,” said Peter Bailey, Google Cloud security’s vice president. “We view this as a transformative way to enhance the threat detection and incident response pipeline for better outcomes.”