A year ago, Alphabet’s moonshot factory launched Chronicle to create cybersecurity products. At the time, cybersecurity seemed mundane relative to the ambitions of other moonshots. Now that Chronicle has unveiled its first product, called Backstory, the nature of its ambitions are a little clearer.
Backstory focuses on an area of enterprise cybersecurity called security information and event management, or SIEM, which is an ungainly term for a service offering real-time analysis of security alerts. Managing security alerts can be complex and costly because it draws on a vast amount of realtime data from what is often a patchwork of cybersecurity products.
Backstory relies on Google’s vast infrastructure, machine learning and data analytics tools to simplify the task at lower cost, helping companies to more easily filter out the signal of imminent security threats from the noise of false alarms that accompany them. The product drew heavily on Google’s own years of experience detecting threats to its sprawling infrastructure.
