Google Cloud today announced that Chronicle, the enterprise security company Google’s parent company Alphabet incubated under its X “moonshot factory,” is moving to Google Cloud and becoming part of Google’s security portfolio.
Chronicle officially launched out of X in January 2018, when it became an independent company under the Alphabet umbrella. Stephen Gillett, who was previously the COO of security company Symantec, became its CEO.
Spinning out Chronicle instead of bringing it to Google Cloud always seemed like an odd move. It was likely meant to see if its products, including malware and virus scanning service VirusTotal and its enterprise security intelligence and analytics platform, could stand on their own. It’s unclear how well Chronicle did in the market, but given Google’s focus on growing its cloud business, it seems like a logical move to now integrate Chronicle into Google Cloud.
“Chronicle’s products and engineering team complement what Google Cloud offers,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian writes today, “Chronicle’s VirusTotal malware intelligence services will be a powerful addition to the pool of threat data informing Google Cloud offerings, and will continue to support applications running on our platforms.”
He also notes that the team saw that both Chronicle and Google Cloud were already on a trajectory that saw them converge on the same kind of solutions.
He expects to see a full integration of Chronicle’s security tools into Google Cloud by this fall.