Alphabet's enterprise cybersecurity division will become part of the Google security portfolio.

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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About the Author(s)

Curtis Franklin, Principal Analyst, Omdia

Curtis Franklin Jr. is Principal Analyst at Omdia, focusing on enterprise security management. Previously, he was senior editor of Dark Reading, editor of Light Reading's Security Now, and executive editor, technology, at InformationWeek, where he was also executive producer of InformationWeek's online radio and podcast episodes

Curtis has been writing about technologies and products in computing and networking since the early 1980s. He has been on staff and contributed to technology-industry publications including BYTE, ComputerWorld, CEO, Enterprise Efficiency, ChannelWeb, Network Computing, InfoWorld, PCWorld, Dark Reading, and ITWorld.com on subjects ranging from mobile enterprise computing to enterprise security and wireless networking.

Curtis is the author of thousands of articles, the co-author of five books, and has been a frequent speaker at computer and networking industry conferences across North America and Europe. His most recent books, Cloud Computing: Technologies and Strategies of the Ubiquitous Data Center, and Securing the Cloud: Security Strategies for the Ubiquitous Data Center, with co-author Brian Chee, are published by Taylor and Francis.

When he's not writing, Curtis is a painter, photographer, cook, and multi-instrumentalist musician. He is active in running, amateur radio (KG4GWA), the MakerFX maker space in Orlando, FL, and is a certified Florida Master Naturalist.

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