Google will reveal details of its Titan computer chip this week, according to Reuters, with the security chip expected to be marketed as a reason to move to the tech giant's public cloud.
The Titan chip is apparently the size of an ear stud, and it has been already installed on equipment in the company's data centres, such as servers and network cards, to prevent them being tampered with, Reuters reported.
The chips were first announced back in March, but Google didn't provide much detail about them then, only that they work by scanning hardware to see if anything's been tampered with and, if so, that the chip would block the affected machine from booting, preventing any malicious activity from spreading around the network.
At the moment, it's being used on Google's own servers to protect its search, email and video services, but now it's thought the company wants to release it to customers to safeguard their applications and services hosted on Google's cloud platform.
What is Cloud computing?
Google has previously explained it wants to differentiate itself from its biggest public cloud rivals - Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft - to appeal to the enterprise market and specifically businesses working in highly regulated sectors.
"It allows us to maintain a level of understanding in our supply chain that we otherwise wouldn't have," Neal Mueller, head of infrastructure product marketing for Google Cloud Platform, said, as reported by Reuters.
The company told Reuters it's already won some customers off the back of Titan, such as Metamarkets, a real-time analytics firm that needed a secure environment in which to store data.
However, some critics think Google has a lot of work to do before it can keep up with its main competitors - simply adding another layer of security won't necessarily mean it's able to swallow any of AWS's 41% marketshare or Microsoft's 13%.
Main image sredit: Trey Ratcliff on Flickr
