Chronicle LLC, an Alphabet Inc. X spinoff company, today emerged from stealth mode with its first product: Backstory, a cloud security data and threat intelligence platform.

Described as “Google Photos for business’ network security” by Chronicle Chief Executive Officer Stephen Gillett, Backstory is claimed to be the “first global security telemetry platform designed for a world that thinks in petabytes.”

At its core, Backstory offers a cloud service 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.

“Backstory was designed for a world where companies generate massive amounts of security telemetry and struggle to hire enough trained analysts to make sense of it,” Chronicle explained in a post on Medium. “Customers can privately upload network activity such as DNS traffic to be scanned by Backstory’s analytics tools, which compares the data to threat signals from other sources.

Unsurprisingly given its parent company, Backstory utilizes the power of the Google Cloud to offer an “infinitely elastic container for storing… enterprise security telemetry.”

The service does not charge by volume, differentiating itself from many but not all competitors in the market. It has yet to release its pricing structure, however.

“Security professionals are in short supply and prefer to spend their time actually doing security work instead of managing the security data infrastructure,” analyst Jon Oltsik told CNBC. “This is creating a large opportunity for cloud vendors, who already own global cloud infrastructure that can handle the volumes of security information being generated today.”

Interestingly, Gillett is pitching Backstory as complementary to existing enterprise security services rather than a competitor but that is only good in theory.

“Some level of competition is inevitable,” CNBC noted. “Companies that provide security information and event management are the likeliest rivals for part of Chronicle’s business.”

Indeed, the prospect of competition in the market apparently hit rival Splunk Inc., whose shares fell more than 5 percent Monday.

Chronicle is demonstrating Backstory at the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week.

Image: Chronicle