Alphabet’s cybersecurity company Chronicle announced today that it’s joining Google and will become part of Google Cloud. Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian announced the news today, describing the union as a way to “create a powerful and comprehensive security portfolio that will benefit all of our customers.” He noted increasing overlap, with both companies building the same tools in response to customer demand.
Chronicle will have easier distribution to enterprises while Google Cloud will get to lean into Chronicle’s analytics-based security tools to inform its own offerings. From Google’s blog post:
Threats posed by attackers to businesses, governments and organizations across the globe have only grown more sophisticated and urgent. At Google Cloud, our customers’ need to securely store data and defend against threats—either in the cloud or on premise—is a top priority. We approach security holistically, from the chip to the datacenter, with a continuously growing set of security capabilities that work in concert to deliver defense-in-depth at scale: from hardware infrastructure, service deployment and user identity, to storage, internet communication and security operations. 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.
This change comes after Google Cloud purchased Looker, a data analytics provider, for $2.6 billion with an eye on accelerating that company’s growth. Google said at the time that customers could use Lookout to help clients better understand the Big Data surrounding them. Bringing Chronicle under the same umbrella is another indication that Google Cloud is banking that visibility tools will help it compete with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
