After splitting with FireEye, Mandiant set out to collaborate with its former competitors, fellow security vendors, and cloud service providers. Google's $5.4 billion takeover bid is unlikely to change that strategy, according to executives at the company.

“Mandiant is on a journey to become technology independent,” Mandiant Global CTO Marshall Heilman told SDxCentral. “We are trying to build technology that would power the entire industry.”

As part of this, the company committed to integrating with all the security platforms its customers already have deployed in their environments, he explained. “We are finding ways to partner with and power them all.”

According to Heilman, these collaborations address many of the security and operational concerns faced by CISOs. “There are very few vendors that you can go in and buy every security capability you need from that one vendor,” he said.

For the technologies Mandiant doesn’t offer, the company can recommend one from its partners, Heilman said. “From the customer's perspective, it's like working with one vendor."

He argues that this also helps to address the cybersecurity skills shortage. "Leveraging a company like Mandiant for consulting services, or MDR services, or so forth, makes more sense in a lot of cases than hiring your own people," he added.

However, building partnerships with competitors naturally comes with some challenges, and Mandiant is trying to figure out the rules of the road from a partnership perspective. 

“We're still figuring it out as we go,” Heilman explained. “One of the things that we find helps us out a lot is we're very transparent with all of our partners. We're upfront about what we are, what we are not, and where we expect to have conflict.” 

Mandiant supports Trellix, SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, and Microsoft’s security platforms, and expects to add more in the near future. “We are talking with most of the major security vendors, there's a lot of exciting announcements that we know we're going to have come out between now and the end of the year,” Heilman said.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon Platform is the latest addition to Mandiant’s support list and embraces this collaborative approach to address an increasingly complex threat environment.

The partnership allows Mandiant to take advantage of CrowdStrike's Falcon, while the service provider plans to extend managed detection and response (MDR) services later to Falcon customers later this year.

This kind of partnership is “one plus one equals three,” Heilman claims. “Customers can leverage the technology they want, and they can gain Mandiant’s expertise and intelligence which they couldn't get through these other vendors.”

Similarly, Mandiant also teamed up with Trellix for incident response. The two companies have a long history. FireEye bought Mandiant for about $1 billion in early 2014. Last year, it announced plans to reposition its Mandiant threat intelligence and incident response arm as an independent company. Then, FireEye and McAfee Enterprise officially merged in October 2021 and rebranded as Trellix this January.

Trellix CPO Aparna Rayasam told SDxCentral in an earlier interview that the partnership will continue, at least for the short term. 

Heilman added that the two vendors have deeper integration compared to Mandiant’s other partnerships since FireEye and Mandiant were one company for eight years. 

However, Mandiant is making efforts to extend a similar level of integration to all of its technology partners over the next four years, he said. “Our goal is to power the entire industry regardless of who the technology vendor is.”

In an effort to expand Google Cloud's security offerings, Google announced plans to acquire Mandiant last month in an all-cash deal valued at around $5.4 billion. Microsoft was reportedly also in talks with Mandiant before the announcement. Both tech giants aimed to bring Mandiant’s MDR platform in house, according to multiple analysts. 

Heilman refused to comment on the deal, but he noted that Mandiant plans to extend the same collaborative strategy it has taken with security vendors to the public cloud. “We're figuring out where it makes the most sense to partner,” he said.

Mandiant has a great relationship with Microsoft, he said. The security vendor announced last April that its MDR services started to support Microsoft Defender for Endpoint products.

The partnership with Microsoft “is going strong … That's not something that's changed and that's not going to change,” Heilman said. “We like what we're bringing to our customers with that kind of relationship and we expect that to continue.”