Alphabet's cybersecurity company Chronicle will join Google Cloud
Chronicle just released its first commercial product in March.
Alphabet's cybersecurity company Chronicle announced today that it's joining Google and will become part of Google Cloud. The cybersecurity company launched in January 2018, and it released its first commercial product, Backstory, in March. In a blog post, Chronicle CEO and co-founder Stephen Gillett said Google Cloud's cybersecurity tools and Chronicle's Backstory and VirusTotal are complementary and will be leveraged together.
Chronicle got its start as a project inside X, Alphabet's "moonshot factory," and it quickly spun into a standalone company. When Chronicle introduced Backstory this spring, the company compared it to Google Photos for cybersecurity. Users dump in data from various security products, and Backstory organizes the alerts and scans for legitimate threats.
It's not unusual for Alphabet to fold its "Other Bets" into Google, as we saw when it integrated Nest's hardware team last year. But Alphabet usually does so when companies are more mature and have proven their ability to make money. Alphabet's decision to move Chronicle to Google Cloud could be taken as a vote of confidence in the platform. It could also speak to Google Cloud's need for additional cybersecurity tools. Chronicle expects the integration to be completed sometime this fall, and it's getting started on "accelerated product integrations" immediately.
