To help fend off ever-increasing cyberattacks, Splunk is helping organizations to build a foundation of cyber resilience so they can have visibility into cyber threats, accelerate operations, and meet their mission.
At the Dec. 14 Splunk GovSummit in Washington, D.C., Juliana Vida, group vice president and chief strategic advisor at Splunk, explained that when faced with a cyberattack, an organization needs visibility to identify the root cause.
Without visibility, an organization can face what Vida called “war room chaos,” leaving it unable to return to normal operations, and unable to identify the cause of the attack.
“What if the situation was different? What if you had a partner to help you build a foundation of cyber resilience? So you can face these kinds of issues the next time they come along? And that’s what we’re proud to do at Splunk,” Vida said. “Helping you build that foundation now, so that you can do these things – accelerate your daily operations.”
“With full visibility across your environment, you can then get at actually fixing it and moving on and remediating – get back to your mission. Because without that visibility… if you can’t see it, you can’t defend it. You can’t fix it,” she added. “When you do all of these things, you’re not only executing on your mission, you’re building trust with your citizens. You’re building trust with your stakeholders, and you’re building trust in your organization itself. Wouldn’t that be better?”
Vida explained that Splunk offers a unified security and observability platform, including “best-in-class security and observability solutions.” This unified portfolio can help keep organizations protected, she said, adding that it works across complex hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.
According to Vida, Splunk is trusted and used across all three branches of the Federal government, over a dozen cabinet-level agencies, all five branches of the U.S. military service, the intelligence community, 48 of the 50 largest cities in the United States, and over 900 higher education institutions.
One higher education institution that relies on Splunk to build cyber resiliency is the University of Nebraska. As educational institutions are a prime target for cyberattacks, Chief Information Security Officer Rick Haugerud said his university relies on Splunk to detect cyber threats.
For example, Splunk recently helped his organization to identify a compromise and respond quickly. “Without Splunk, we wouldn’t have noticed it until somebody else complained about the service being down,” Haugerud said.
He also noted that Splunk plays a “critical role” in collecting and correlating data related to the uptime and security of systems.
Also speaking at today’s event, Splunk CEO Gary Steele emphasized that “rich data” is the key to cybersecurity, and that there’s “no better place on the planet” than Splunk to be able to help customers solve their cybersecurity issues.
“I think it really comes down to how you build resilience and, to me, the real opportunity is leveraging the strength and capabilities of Splunk to create that visibility inside that can ultimately drive the ability to see what’s actually happening, to be able to respond quickly,” Steele said. “Because the reality is, you’re not going to keep the bad guys out all the time. And the fact that you can see it and be able to do something about it is a critical element here.”
Steele also emphasized that Splunk wants to serve as a partner that makes cloud “an option,” while at the same time not either deprecating or slowing down on-prem development. He explained that Splunk doesn’t want customers “feeling forced” to move to the cloud and that they can decide if, and when, they want to make the move.
“What I want to ensure that we’re doing is becoming the best partner for our customers as they lead their efforts around cyber resilience,” he said. “We really want to be a resilience company.”
