Chronicle, which like Google is part of Alphabet, announced its first major offering, Backstory, on March 4. According to Chronicle, Backstory is “a global cloud service where companies can privately upload, store, and analyze their internal security telemetry to detect and investigate potential cyber threats.”

Just days earlier, Microsoft unveiled two cloud-based cybersecurity technologies of its own, Microsoft Azure Sentinel and Microsoft Threat Experts. The company said these tools “empower security operations teams by reducing the noise, false alarms, time-consuming tasks and complexity that are weighing them down.”

The big tech companies’ cybersecurity plays have already sent ripples through the stock market. Shares in rival Splunk fell 5% on news of Alphabet’s move, reports The Information.

According to a blog post by Forrester Research principal analysts Joseph Blankenship and Jeff Pollard, Alphabet and Microsoft are poised to disrupt the cybersecurity space. “These vendors have a unique advantage over legacy on-premises tools since they also own their cloud infrastructures and aren’t dependent on buying cloud at list price from would-be competitors,” they write.

Jon Oltsik, a senior principal analyst with technology research firm Enterprise Strategy Group, made a similar point. “Security professionals are in short supply and prefer to spend their time actually doing security work instead of managing the security data infrastructure,” 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.”

Others pointed out that Big Tech will face plenty of competition as it enters the cybersecurity space. “Unless Google does a meaningful security acquisition, this product is on the outside looking in with many entrenched players in a crowded market,” Daniel Ives, a Wedbush analyst, told MarketWatch.

The Forrester analysts noted that incumbent cybersecurity providers will speed up their cloud-based product development in response to Alphabet and Microsoft. “Embrace the change,” the analysts wrote. “What Google and Microsoft have introduced will make the entire industry better, and that’s something to applaud.”