US cloud security company Wiz held a press conference in Tokyo and announced that it would begin full-scale business expansion in Japan. In March, Google announced that it would acquire the company for $32 billion, and its rapid growth has attracted attention. The company was founded in Israel in March 2020 and is based in New York, USA. In August 2022, it achieved $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), the fastest among software companies, and in May 2024 it was also evaluated as a “cybersecurity unicorn” with a market capitalization of $12 billion. In November 2024, it established a Japanese subsidiary, Wiz Cloud Japan, and appointed Nao Yamanaka, who served as president of VMware Japan, as its representative. Dali Rajic, President and COO, who appeared at the briefing, said, “We started by approaching Fortune 100 companies, and by addressing the cloud security challenges of large organizations with strict regulatory requirements, we can meet the needs of the entire cloud security market, and we are focusing on balancing the agility and safety of the cloud for our customers.” Wiz’s main product is the Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), which supports multi-cloud including hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft’s Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
The company’s biggest feature is its cloud-native security operation platform, which covers everything from application development to workload protection. According to Rajic, half of the Fortune 100 client companies have significantly reduced security risks by introducing the company’s solutions, and nearly 50% of the people in charge at client organizations are in the development department. He pointed out that as companies and organizations continue to use multi-cloud to grow their business, the IT environment is expanding and becoming more complex, and the “attack surface” (area of attack targets) that is easily targeted by cyber attacks is also expanding. In addition, various management entities are in a complex mix of development, operations, security, and various business departments, and it is extremely difficult to operate security in a cloud environment by leaving it to the security department as in the past.
These factors increase the security risk of companies and organizations, while also eroding the benefits of the cloud, such as agility that contributes to business growth. He also pointed out that in the future, when the use of AI becomes more widespread, the gap between value creation and increased risk will continue to widen. For this reason, the company is developing security solutions that are in line with the three things that the cloud brings: “visibility of the new environment,” “response to new risks,” and “new ownership models.” The company’s security platform consists of “Wiz Cloud,” which manages the security posture of cloud environments; “Wiz Code,” which manages vulnerability countermeasures, permissions, and settings through code and pipelines in line with the application development lifecycle; and “Wiz Defend,” which protects cloud workloads such as containers. Wiz Cloud is agentless and can be deployed quickly, while Wiz Defend can defend against threats targeting workloads in real time through agents. In addition, the company has a security graph database that aggregates and integrates various security-related information from Wiz Cloud, Wiz Code, and Wiz Defend, and shares various information by adding context.
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By combining this with the company’s own and various threat intelligence, the company says it is possible to identify actual risks that may be manifested in customer environments, prioritize responses, and reduce risks by the appropriate personnel (development team, IT team, security team, etc.), all in one go. Rajic said that although Japanese companies were slower to use the cloud than other countries, the use of AI is beginning to progress rapidly, and he expects that the use of multi-cloud will rapidly advance in the future. It is expected that the company will face the above-mentioned security challenges, and this will be an opportunity for the demand for its security solutions to increase, which is why the company has announced its full-scale business expansion. Wiz Cloud Japan President Yamanaka said that Wiz’s strength is its ability to balance cloud-native agility with enterprise-level security, and said, “We want to contribute to promoting the offensive and defensive digital strategies that will realize innovation for Japanese companies through DX (digital transformation) and AI.” According to Yamanaka, the company has already hired more than 30 people, aiming to have a domestic team of over 50 people by 2025.
The provision infrastructure for Wiz Cloud, Wiz Code, and Wiz Defend has also been established in data centers in Tokyo and Osaka, and the company is working on localizing these services, building a customer support system in Japanese, developing programs for domestic partners, training on certification and technology, and localizing documents in Japanese. The company is also implementing the security standards of the Financial Information System Center (FISC). The acquisition by Google is currently in the review process with the US authorities. Rajic commented, “At this stage, I cannot give detailed information about the future, but we expect to complete the project by 2026, and we are excited to be working with Google.” According to Google’s announcement, Wiz will become part of Google Cloud after the acquisition is complete, and will continue to support multiple clouds, including hyperscalers. In February, Google also announced a strategic and technical collaboration with Check Point Software Technologies, with Check Point moving forward with measures such as migrating its own CNAPP to Wiz. Rajic explained, “Our platform has an open approach, and we are openly connected to over 150 third parties. Our work with Check Point is the start of a new form of collaboration that will continue to expand in the future.”
