Google has a new sister: parent company Alphabet has announced the formation of a new subsidiary company, called Chronicle, focused on cybersecurity.
Chronicle was formed in 2016 inside X, Alphabet’s experimental lab that has produced its driverless car effort, Waymo, and projects on drones, Internet connectivity and the Google Glass headset.
In the announcement on Wednesday, the new company stressed the speed and data storage capacity it would offer companies looking to fix security issues, which Chronicle said gives it an edge over other companies in the cybersecurity market. Chronicle provided no further details on its business model or technical products.
Stephen Gillett, the unit’s CEO, wrote in a blog post that Chronicle’s advantage would come from Alphabet’s gigantic computer infrastructure and machine learning, a popular type of artificial intelligence.
“We’ll be able to help organisations see their full security picture in much higher fidelity than they currently can,” he wrote.
On a call with reporters, Gillett said the company is testing an early version of its services with some Fortune 500 firms, but he declined to name them. “We are absolutely committed to staying ahead of cybercriminals and we have the resources to see it through,” he said.
Gillett formerly served as chief operating officer of security software company Symantec. He said he joined X in early 2016 and began working on the project that would become Chronicle.
Unlike most other X efforts, the latest unit will sell services to other companies — another indication of the shift toward enterprise markets for the tech giant, famed for outrageous “moonshots”. In the past year, Alphabet has trimmed several auxiliary projects unrelated to core Internet services and ploughed money into its cloud computing business.
Gillett noted that Chronicle’s unique data storage assets would win over customers. But he didn’t say if his firm would be selling offerings in tandem with Google’s cloud storage service. “We’re not discussing the relationships,” he said. — Reported by Mark Bergen, (c) 2018 Bloomberg LP
