Chronicle Inc., the cybersecurity subsidiary that Alphabet Inc. formed last year, will be folded into Google Cloud.

Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian announced the move in a blog post this morning. Kurian, who came aboard last November after a 22-year career at Oracle Corp., wrote that the Chronicle team will be absorbed into his group over the coming weeks.

Chronicle spun out of Alphabet’s X skunkworks lab last year with the mission of developing software for protecting enterprise networks. The unit hit the ground running. Less than two months after becoming an independent subsidiary, it launched Backstory, a service designed to help companies find malicious activity in their infrastructure.

Backstory runs on Google Cloud and works by hoovering up large amounts of security-related data from an organization’s systems. After the logs are ingested, they’re checked against a massive corpus of information on online threats. Security teams can use Backstory to look for malware infections and see if any internal systems have been accessed from a malicious domain.

Chronicle followed up the introduction of the service by launching a second offering called VirusTotal Enterprise. It’s based on the free Google service of the same name, which lets users run suspect files through over 100 antivirus engines. Chronicle augmented the core feature set with advanced capabilities such as the ability to look up data about specific malware strands. 

The unit’s products will be integrated with the security services in Google Cloud. VirusTotal will help provide improved threat detection in cloud deployments, while Backstory is set to complement the platform’s existing breach management features.

“Chronicle’s Backstory investigation flows, added to Google Cloud’s detection, incident management and remediation capabilities, will create a comprehensive end-to-end solution that will enable customers to detect and mitigate threats faster, both within their cloud deployments and across their entire enterprise,” Kurian wrote. That indicates that Google may bring Backstory to customers’ on-premises infrastructure and potentially even rival platforms.

Google Cloud has been pursuing a cross-platform product strategy since Kurian took over the reins. In April, the group launched Anthos, a platform that enables enterprises to deploy applications unchanged on any cloud and in on-premises data centers.

More recently, Google entered a landmark deal to Looker Data Sciences Inc for $2.6 billion. Kurian said at the time that the acquisition will enable the search giant to provide an “end-to-end” solution for performing analytics in the cloud. 

Image: Google