Alphabet Spins Off Security Company

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In a further bid to branch out of search Alphabet, the parent company of Google, spins off its security unit into Chronicle-- a standalone company with aim to deliver high-end security analytics services.

ChronicleBorn out of the Google X moonshot group, Chronicle is lead by former Symantec COO (and Starbucks CIO) Stephen Gillett. Google hardware powers its two first offerings. One is an enterprise security intelligence and analytics platform, while the other is VirusTotal, the online malware and virus scanner Google acquired back in 2012.

“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,” Gillett writes in a blog post announcing the creation of Chronicle. “We are building our intelligence and analytics platform to solve this problem.”

So far Chronicle does not detail the workings of its technology. Instead it simply promises to provide companies with the combination of machine learning, computing spower and storage required to identify threats hidden in "enormous volumes" of data.

Interestingly, Alphabet founded Chronicle back in February 2016 as part of the X group before "graduation"-- the process where it became an independent entity under the Alphabet umbrella. So far the Google parent has spun out 3 businesses out of the X group, namely healthcare unit Verily and self-driving vehicle developer Waymo.

Does Chronicle have a good chance at taking a stab at the security industry? The market might be worth nearly $100 billion according to Gartner, but the analyst tells Reuters “being the heavy hitter and even having small teams spun out of that doesn’t translate to instant success.” That said, it remains backed by the enormous Google war chest, and already counts a number of Fortune 500 companies as alpha testers.

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