This week at RSA, the cybersecurity industry’s biggest annual conference, Google made a splash with a series of announcements, the biggest one being a new service called Backstory.
Backstory is a product by Google’s new cybersecurity arm, Chronicle. A cloud-based system similar to a SIEM (security information and event management), it collects all of a company’s security-related log data and protects it with the same security systems that protect the rest of its operations.
Backstory is licensed differently from other platforms that do the same, which charge based on how much information companies are collecting, Chronicle CEO Stephen Gillett said in a statement. According to the company, the platform will also be much faster than alternatives. For example, a search of 50 petabytes of logs by “current industry solutions” might take 12 hours, while Backstory would only take a second.
“We don’t believe there is anything similar to Backstory available today in terms of the scale of our data management and computation capabilities,” Chronicle said in its press kit.
