Google Chronicle – An Introduction to Cloud-Native Security Operations Suite

With the rising security threats and ever-evolving cyber attacks, staying ahead of cybercriminals is a matter of concern for most organizations. In fact, it has been critical for security teams to effectively secure the IT infrastructure with the recent mass shift to remote and hybrid work. 

Nearly two-thirds of organizations believe that security operations are more difficult to manage today than it was 2 years ago since sophisticated threat actors these days make threat detection more intense and challenging. 

That’s why Google came up with a modern cloud-native security operations suite named Google Chronicle. This platform makes it easier for cybersecurity teams to detect, investigate, and respond to a cyber threat with greater speed, scale, and intelligence. This is the next step by Google that aims to balance security operations and provide better security outcomes for organizations of all sizes.

What Google Chronicle Does?

A cloud service called Chronicle was developed enabling businesses to store, process, and search the enormous volumes of security and network telemetry they produce. Also, it was constructed as a specialized layer on top of the core Google infrastructure. Furthermore, the Chronicle normalizes, indexes, correlates, and analyses the data to offer immediate insight and context on harmful conduct.

Many security teams rely on the tools that Chronicle Security Operations brings together to more swiftly identify risks and fast respond to them. It integrates Google Cloud threat intelligence, security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) capabilities from our Siemplify acquisition, and security information and event management (SIEM) technology from Chronicle. All security operations software comes under the Chronicle brand.

The Chronicle’s security operations can provide a more streamlined and integrated experience for a security team. Such as;

• The unified user experience by utilizing a consistent appearance and feel throughout Chronicle’s SIEM and SOAR capabilities.
• A single display that compiles and provides facts about an entity from several pertinent data sources, such as VirusTotal and Google Cloud. Also, threat intelligence aids in context-giving and promotes quicker decision-making.
• Investigation pivots that allow analysts to flip between alerts and entities across Chronicle SOAR and SIEM detections help speed up investigations.
• For a more efficient investigative process, alert management between Chronicle SOAR threat-centered case management and Chronicle SIEM detections has been integrated.
• Security Command Center may quickly resolve issues and require less manual work by surfacing pre-packaged reaction playbooks to Google Cloud-based notifications.

Google Chronicle Features 

This cloud-native security operation suite can be used to fulfill various purposes. For instance: 

Search

• You can Search your raw unparsed logs via Raw Log Scan
• It’s possible to Search your raw unparsed logs using Regular Expressions.

Investigative Views

• Provides Enterprise Insights by Displaying the domains and assets most in need of investigation.
• You can easily Investigate assets within your enterprise and whether or not they have interacted with suspicious domains.
• It’s possible to view and Investigate specific IP addresses within your enterprise and what impact they have on your assets.
• You can conveniently Search for and investigate files based on their hash value.
• Investigate specific domains within your enterprise and what impact they have on your assets.
• You can accurately examine users within your enterprise who may have been impacted by security events.
• Through Procedural filtering, you can Fine-tune information about an asset, including by event type, log source, network connection status, and Top Level Domain (TLD).

Curated information

• It provides the Asset insight blocks which highlight the domains and alerts that you might want to investigate further.
• Also, it gives the Prevalence graph that shows the number of domains an asset has connected to over a specified time period.
• This Alerts from popular security products.

Detection Engine

The Chronicle Detection Engine can be used to automatically look through your data for security flaws. So, you can define rules to search all of your incoming data and alert you when known or prospective hazards materialize in your organization.

Additional tools

Google Chronicle also offers some additional tools. Such as;

• VirusTotal: You can further investigate an asset, domain, or IP address by launching VirusTotal and clicking VT Context. 
• Chronicle extension for Chrome: You can Launch Chronicle from anywhere within the Chrome browser using the extension.

Economic Benefit of Google Chronicle

As per ESG’s (Enterprise Strategy Group’s) economic analysis report, Google Chronicle provides customers with significant savings by leveraging the resources and economies of scale of the Google Cloud Platform and offers them a new pricing model.

On the other hand, traditional security analytics platforms use a data volume-based pricing model, and costs increase in direct relation to the evergrowing volume of security telemetry.

In addition, employee-based pricing is used by Google Chronicle, which means the price of the service is mostly influenced by how many people work there.

A greater chance of spotting long-lived threats from temporally distant indicators of attack (IOA) and indications of compromise is ensured by decoupling costs from data volumes and encouraging the gathering and analysis of all telemetry over longer durations (IOC).

Google Chronicle Capabilities

Today’s threat landscape demands security operations that can deliver intelligence, speed, & scale and Google Chronicle fulfills the same. It possesses various capabilities such as:

1. Hyper-scalable Infrastructure: It becomes possible for the Security teams to analyze security telemetry and retain that data much longer than the industry standard at a price point that’s fixed and predictable.
2. Readily Accessible: Searching through petabytes of data in under a second can be as simple as using Google.
3. Frontline Intelligence: With Google Cloud’s insights and threat intelligence, easily balance security operations and concentrate the organization’s limited expert resources on the particular security concerns they face.
4. Online Response: Automate responses to common security threats such as phishing and malware.

FAQs

Q- What is Google Chronicle?

It is an analytics and incident response platform for cybersecurity that provides tools for threat identification and analysis.

Q- What is the process of Google Chronicle?

Security telemetry is analyzed by the Chronicle using machine learning, advanced analytics, and large-scale data processing to find any risks.

Q- What categories of security data does the Chronicle examine?

Chronicle looks through a wide range of security data, including network traffic, endpoint logs, and other media sources, in order to detect and reduce security threats.

Q- What makes Google Chronicle unique among other platforms for cybersecurity?

Scalability and capacity to manage substantial amounts of security data are two distinguishing features of Chronicle. In order to detect threats more intelligently, it also highlights the application of machine learning.

Q- Is Google Chronicle appropriate for small businesses?

Since Chronicle is scalable in nature, it may be utilized by both big and small businesses as per their requirement.

Q- Does Google Chronicle operate in the cloud?

Yes, it is a cloud-based cybersecurity platform and it makes use of Google Cloud infrastructure.