Chronicle graduates from the Google School of Moonshot

Google’s R&D efforts are some of the best kept secrets in the technology world, so a graduate from the Moonshot division is likely to be something of interest.

The latest company to be unveiled to the world is Chronicle, a new independent business within Alphabet dedicated to cyber security. The venture will be run by Stephen Gillett, a former COO at security firm Symantec, with the ambition of aiding security teams with the power of artificial intelligence and data analytics.

“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 analyse security signals that have previously been too difficult and expensive to find,” said Gillett. “We are building our intelligence and analytics platform to solve this problem.”

The business is built on the principle that hackers are better at navigating around security perimeters than in-house professionals are at building them. This is not to say the security teams are under qualified, more that the threats are growing quicker than the size of said team or the budgets which they have to operate on.

Hackers and threats can go undetected for long periods of time due to the number of threats a company faces daily, the amount of information which needs to be processed or blank spots in intelligence reports after seemingly unimportant information has been discarded. This information might prove to be important at a later date, but storage costs and the mountain of data already available means prioritization.

Operating in the cloud, Google’s solution is to incorporate machine learning and data processing technologies to the data to cut down the time understanding and, ultimately, reacting to a threat. It is the power of artificial intelligence which has been promised for some time; remove the heavy lifting off the shoulders of the professionals so they can concentrate on more value add and proactive activities.

While this does capitalise on the security trends of no-one having a clue throughout the world, it should be noted that Google is a bit late to the game when it comes to AI in security. IBM, owner of the Watson platform, has been working in this area for some time.

Throughout 2017, IBM has been releasing various statements declaring the importance of Watson in the world of security, while also casually dropping self-indulgent case studies about how fantastic the AI is at finding and assessing threats. QRadar Advisor is one solution which using the cognitive platform to identify and automate responses to threats. Its X-Force Command Center also has Watson security features.

Security is a topic which is often avoided by the industry in the build-up to big events because while it is usually a good PR quote, few effective products are brought to the market to back up all the claims of security-first. With MWC just around the corner there might be a few people who are interested in seeing Chronicle in action.