S for Security is Google owner Alphabet's new favorite letter
The plan is to throw the cloud at data collection and analysis, to produce alerts that matter
Google’s parent company Alphabet has launched a security company named Chronicle.
The business will be the new home of VirusTotal, which Google acquired in 2012. Chronicle’s other story will be “a new cybersecurity intelligence and analytics platform that we hope can help enterprises better manage and understand their own security-related data.”
Chronicle’s schtick is that security teams drown in multitudes of alerts, but can’t see the significant stuff and therefore can’t spot threats or attacks for ages. The company therefore plans to throw the cloud and machine at the problem, giving users more storage than they can run on-premises and algorithmic assistance to mine all that data to figure out what bad actors are up to.
Chronicle’s not said much about how it will deliver, other than to say it plans to use “Massive compute and storage” to and to deliver its promised insights as cloud services.
The company has also hopped on the “there are too many security vendors” bandwagon, arguing that “The proliferation of data from the dozens of security products that a typical large organization deploys is paradoxically making it harder, not easier, for teams to detect and investigate threats. Chronicle’s not alone with that stance: VMware’s voiced similar sentiments and security experts of The Register’s acquaintance have often said that security vendors selling solutions that address particular problems end up creating overlapping arrays of worthy tools that together make life more complicated.
Whether Chronicle will itself help or hinder remains obscure, as does the exact nature of its service remains . The company has revealed it’s running private Alpha tests, but precious little other detail is available at the time of writing.
One thing that is sure is that the security market is expected to grow, and grow, and grow, as increased interconnectivity gives bad actors more opportunities – and vendors who think they have something to offer reason to launch new products or services. ®