Alphabet’s ‘Chronicle’, launched last year, announced its first product, ‘Backstory’ at the ongoing RSA 2019. Backstory is a security data platform and stores huge amounts of business’ network data–including information from domain name servers to employee laptops and phones–into a Chronicle-installed collection of servers on a customer’s premises. This data is quickly indexed and organized.
According to Forbes, customers can then carry out searches on the data, like “Are any of my computers sending data to Russian government servers?” Cybersecurity investigators can start asking questions such as: What kinds of information are the Russians taking, when and how?. This method of working is very similar to Google Photos.
Backstory gives security analysts the ability to quickly understand the real vulnerabilities. According to the Backstory blog, “Backstory is a global security telemetry platform for investigation and threat hunting within your enterprise network. It is a specialized, cloud-native security analytics system, built on the core infrastructure that powers Google itself. Making security analytics instant, easy, and cost-effective.” The company states that this service requires zero customer hardware, maintenance, tuning, or ongoing management and can support security analytics against the largest customer networks with ease.
Features of Backstory
- Backstory provides a real-time and retroactive instant indicator matching across all logs. It checks failure points such as if a domain flips from good to bad, Backstory shows all devices that have ever communicated with that domain).
- Prebuilt search results and smart filters designed for security-specific use cases.
- Displays data in real time to support security investigations and hunts.
- Backstory provides Intelligent analytics to derive insights to support security investigations.
- Backstory can automatically work with huge petabytes of data.
Chronicle’s CEO Stephen Gillett told CNBC that the pricing model will not be based on volume. However, the licenses will be based on the size of the company and not on the size of the customer’s data. Backstory also intends to partner with other cybersecurity companies rather than competing with them.
Considering that Alphabet already has a history of obtaining sensitive customer information, it will be interesting to see how Backstory operates without this particular methodology.
To know more about this news in detail, read Backstory’s official blog.
Read Next
Google finally ends Forced arbitration for all its employees
Shareholders sue Alphabet’s board members for protecting senior execs accused of sexual harassment