Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has created Chronicle, an independent security company that helps large enterprises protect themselves from cyberattacks.
In a move by Alphabet to become a big player in corporate computing, Chronicle is betting on the premise that AI and machine learning software can help humans in analyzing massive data to detect cyber threats much more quickly and precisely than traditional methods.
According to CEO Stephen Gillett:
"As a result, it’s pretty common for hackers to go undetected for months, or for it to take a team months to fully understand what’s going on once they’ve detected an issue. All this adds up to more data breaches, more damage, and higher security costs."
In some cases, companies can also run into problems because there are too little data available.
This is a result of cost considerations, where some organizations do not store important security related data thereby causing critical information gaps. The result is that intruders are often able to stay undetected on networks they have broken into for long periods of time, Gillett said.
"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. We are building our intelligence and analytics platform to solve this problem."
The idea is that, with robust and large-scale infrastructure courtesy of its parent company, coupled with cloud-based storage and some machine learning technology, Chronicle wants to help organizations parse the numerous security alerts they receive daily, and tackle them in a timely manner.
Chronicle has been a project by Alphabet since February 2016, under its X moonshot division.
With Alphabet introducing Chronicle to the wild, it’s initially testing the security intelligence platform as "an early alpha program" with Fortune 500 companies. This reflects Alphabet’s goal to expand beyond its core online advertising business at Google, and become a major player in enterprise computing technology.