Siemens AG is teaming up with Alphabet Inc.’s Chronicle LLC subsidiary to secure systems in the energy infrastructure industry.

The plan announced today is for Siemens to use Chronicle’s Backstory network security platform to provide more visibility into energy company’s information technology systems, the companies said. Siemens will combine Backstory with its own cybersecurity tools.

Chronicle’s Backstory platform, which was only launched in March, is a cloud service running on Google LLC’s infrastructure that allows companies to upload, store and analyze security telemetry to detect and investigate potential threats, all from a unified dashboard. Security telemetry, in this case, includes high-volume data such as domain name system traffic, netflow, endpoint logs, proxy logs and other measurable data.

At the time of Backstory’s launch, Chronicle Chief Executive Officer Stephen Billet described the platform as “Google Photos for business network security,” adding that it’s the “first global security telemetry platform designed for a world that thinks in petabytes.”

Petabyte scale is exactly what the energy industry needs if it’s to ward off threats to its increasingly connected infrastructure. With the industrial “internet of things” taking off, more utilities are getting connected to the web, generating massive amounts of data that could be of interest to state-sponsored hackers and cybercriminals. Energy infrastructure would be a tempting target for any country interested in causing damage to one of its rivals, and energy firms are equally wary of criminal threats such as ransomware.

So it’s no surprise that securing critical infrastructure is seen as a highly lucrative market by security firms, which have taken different approaches to solving the problem. General Electric Co. for example, recently said it’s going to expand its “digital ghost” security technology to the oil and gas and renewable energy industries later this year. Digital ghost is a reference to digital twin technology that replicates physical equipment in software, this time applied to control systems.

Chronicle is a much more recent entrant to the cybersecurity market, but the partnership with Siemens gives it an immediate presence in the energy sector. Chronicle’s platform, combined with Siemens’ own technology and know-how, should enable the companies to adapt to constantly evolving attacks, officials said.

“We will be able to give customers confidence to take action,” said Leo Simonovich, global head of Siemens Industrial Cyber and Digital Security business. “We’ve seen an exponential increase in cyberattacks. This can lead to shutdowns. The energy industry is challenged by visibility and increased connectivity.”

Siemens said it will integrate Chronicle’s Backstory into its managed services offering for industrial cybermonitoring, which covers both hybrid and public cloud environments.

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