Alphabet’s moonshot security firm Chronicle joins Google Cloud

June 27, 2019 TH Author

Chronicle, a cybersecurity company hatched from Alphabet’s moonshot X unit, is formally joining Google Cloud in a move meant to build out Google Cloud’s security portfolio. Chronicle has lived as an independent subsidiary of Alphabet, where it developed a cybersecurity intelligence and analytics platform using Google-originated techniques.

In March, Chronicle released its first product called Backstory, described as a global cloud service that lets enterprises “privately upload, store, and analyze their internal security telemetry to detect and investigate potential cyber threats.”

Bundled with Google Cloud Platform, Chronicle will have easier distribution to enterprises while Google Cloud will get to lean into Chronicle’s analytics-based security tools to inform its own offerings. From Google’s blog post:

Threats posed by attackers to businesses, governments and organizations across the globe have only grown more sophisticated and urgent. At Google Cloud, our customers’ need to securely store data and defend against threats—either in the cloud or on premise—is a top priority. We approach security holistically, from the chip to the datacenter, with a continuously growing set of security capabilities that work in concert to deliver defense-in-depth at scale: from hardware infrastructure, service deployment and user identity, to storage, internet communication and security operations. With the trajectories of Chronicle and Google Cloud increasingly converging in response to customer needs, we want to bring these essential capabilities together for customers.

More broadly, the merger of Chronicle and Google Cloud lines up with other recent moves made by Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in his six months on the job. Earlier this month Google announced that it would acquire business intelligence platform Looker for $2.6 billion, with plans to add Looker’s toolset to the Google Cloud platform. The deal followed Google’s recent acquisition of Alooma and its earlier acquisition of Cask Data, which led to the Google Cloud Data Fusion data pipelining tool.

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