Chronicle Folds into Google

Chronicle, the enterprise cybersecurity division spun out of Alphabet's X — the search giant's "moonshot factory" incubator — is being swallowed by corporate sibling Google to become part of the Google Cloud. The move will make Chronicle part of the Google security portfolio, joining Google Cloud's detection, incident management, and remediation services.

In a blog post announcing the move, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote that Chronicle's VirusTotal and Backstory products are intended to add to the depth of the services Google can offer customers to secure their workflows and data in the cloud and on-premises.

Backstory, Chronicle's first analytics product, was announced at the RSA Conference in March. It joined VirusTotal, a virus detection and protection service that had been the company's first commercial offering starting in 2018.

The combination of Chronicle's analytics services and Google Cloud's big-data expertise seems likely to position the new Chronicle as a competitor to Splunk, LogRhythm, ArcSight, and companies with similar analytics offering.

The absorption of Chronicle follows Alphabet's integration of smart-home component manufacturer Nest into Google. According to Kurian, the reason for the integration is straightforward. "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," he wrote in the blog post.

Integration is expected to be completed by this fall.

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