Google’s Parent Company, Alphabet, Launches Cyber Arm ‘Chronicle’

Meet the newest addition to the Google family: Chronicle. The independent cyber security company falls under the banner of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and will feature an intelligence and analytics platform, along with VirusTotal, a malware detection program acquired by Google in 2012.

According to the Chronicle Blog, this cyber security arm will “help enterprises better manage and understand their own security-related data.” Meanwhile, VirusTotal will continue to operate as it has in recent years.

In outlining the need for a new cyber security presence, Chronicle’s CEO, Stephen Gillett, pointed to the proliferation of data sets, a massive talent shortage, costs of data storage and the oversaturation of threats that security teams must acknowledge on a daily basis.

These adverse effects, Gillett writes, may result in a hacker going unnoticed for a period of months. Once detected, the IT teams may have to navigate multiple security tiers to address the issue. Over time, costs skyrocket – as security budgets, perhaps, stay flat.

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“We want to 10x the speed and impact of security teams’ work by making it much easier, faster and more cost-effective for them to capture and analyze security signals that have previously been too difficult and expensive to find,” the post reads. “We are building our intelligence and analytics platform to solve this problem.”

Chronicle will operate on the “same fast, powerful, highly scalable infrastructure that powers a range of other Alphabet initiatives that require enormous processing power and storage.” The goal: to reduce a security team’s incident response time from hours to minutes, and provide more readily available storage.

“Add in some machine learning and better search capabilities, and we think we’ll be able to help organizations see their full security picture in much higher fidelity than they currently can,” Gillett states.

Chronicle came into existence as an X project in February 2016. On the team’s expansion, Gillett writes, “We knew we had complementary skills that could help businesses — especially those without Google’s deep computing expertise — with their cybersecurity challenges.”

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Chronicle has since been counseled by Fortune 500 companies on its direction. Some are currently in an “alpha program,” testing the cyber security intelligence platform.

Gillett writes that Chronicle will have its own contracts and data policies, but will have the added bonus of consulting with Alphabet.

This emergence comes at a time where both breach anxiety and the actual breach count are rising – causing uneasiness within security teams and perhaps C-level management. Yet, Chronicle’s platform appears unique in boasting the expansive Alphabet infrastructure, while still remaining independent and enterprise-driven.

The world of “reactive” cyber security practices could be slowly disappearing with platforms like Chronicle, and other vendors endeavoring to reduce incident response time and head threats off at the pass.