2020 was a challenging year for modern enterprises. In under a year, we experienced a decade's worth of transformation while a global pandemic raged on. And while the worst of COVID-19 will hopefully soon be behind us, the need to continuously transform our digital environment is unequivocally here to stay. We've already seen an example of this, thanks to a significant increase in data generated from across the business.
You may have seen the announcement that Splunk and McLaren Racing have expanded their partnership, which sees Splunk as an Official Global Partner of the McLaren Shadow Esports team and the Logitech McLaren G Challenge. As a budding Esports fan and data enthusiast, it’s really exciting to see these two worlds collaborate and accelerate the virtual racing experience.
Many organizations today are migrating from on-prem solutions for email / calendar / communications to Microsoft 365. If this is you, this is your productivity cloud across work and life, designed to help you achieve more with innovative Office apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security.
We all know that faster is better. Research and results clearly indicate that faster experiences with fewer errors result in increased usage, conversion, and revenue. With the desire to improve business metrics in mind, organizations often seek immediate improvements in customer experience across digital properties. However, without proper planning and coordination, these attempts consistently fail.
Customers have had a lot to say about the new Splunk Observability Cloud since we announced general availability on May 5, 2021. For the first time ever, IT and DevOps teams can get all their data in one place with unified metrics, traces and logs — collected in real time, without sampling and at any scale. What makes Splunk Observability Cloud unique from other solutions? We’ll let our customers do the talking.
We have a saying at Splunk. It goes something like “if you’re ever having a bad day, go and talk to a customer”. What organizations around the world are doing with their data and Splunk brings a huge smile and an eyebrow raising, positive “can’t quite believe you’ve done that” very-impressed nod of the head. That’s never more true than with our security customers.
“If you ain't first, you're last.” While that famous one-liner from Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) in the cult hit Talladega Nights is more joke than catchphrase, it hits home for those of us in the world of DevOps and Observability. Faster is better. And in our technology-driven world of online transactions and complex environments, faster isn’t just better — it’s crucial.
Published in late 2020, the DoD Data Strategy emphasizes the importance of unlocking and operationalizing data-value from across its enterprise to support mission operations and maintain battlefield advantage. The strategy highlights seven goals and objectives that the DoD believes will align the DoD's Data Strategy with industry best practices.
When you’re operating a web application, the last thing you want to hear is “the site is down." Regardless of the reason, the fact that it is down is enough to cause anyone responsible for an app to break out into a sweat. As soon as you become aware of an issue, a clock starts ticking — literally, in some cases — to get the issue fixed. Minimizing this time between an issue occurring and its resolution is arguably the number one goal for any operations team.
Operational resilience is currently a hot topic in Financial Services, largely because of the impact that COVID has had on how customers interact with financial institutions. Almost overnight, the financial services industry had to cope with a large volume of transactions moving to digital channels at the same time as its employees were forced to set up home offices so that they could continue to work remotely.
For years, security practitioners have kicked and screamed about their reality. There are too many alerts to fully investigate and manually resolve every day. There is a massive talent shortage of qualified security professionals across the globe. Then couple that with analyst burnout and siloed security point-products. All of these factors are preventing security operation centers (SOCs) from operating at their full potential, with increased efficiency, performance and speed.
To say that the past year presented its fair share of cybersecurity challenges to the InfoSec community would be a drastic understatement. The rapid migration to remote work at scale left 80% of CIOs unprepared, and SecOps teams struggled to confront the evolving threat landscape with disparate toolkits and skill sets. Not to mention that as more organizations shifted to hybrid and multi-cloud environments at scale, cloud complexity (and cloud-based threats) skyrocketed.
We at Splunk know that data drives better decisions. We see this with customers, and we live it every day in our own operations within Splunk. Running large cloud services across multiple cloud providers, we have to manage data policies and data processing needs against an increasing set of use cases, as well as the backdrop of regulatory, privacy and security frameworks.
The ongoing news of massive cyberattacks on manufacturing and energy companies has been a wake-up call. Operational Technology (OT) Security had not been on the radar of many CISOs and plant managers until they got hit. After reacting in a defensive mode last year it is time to step up with a proactive security strategy including OT. Secure Factory by Splunk helps manufacturing companies better understand and address their unique security challenges.
As my colleague, Tim Frank, wrote about recently in his blog post, "The Department of Defense Data Strategy: An Important Start," in late 2020 the Department of Defense (DoD) released its new Data Strategy — providing focus and direction for the Department’s efforts to become data-centric at all levels of its enterprise.
As organizations increase their cloud footprints, it becomes more and more important to implement access control monitoring for as many resources as possible. In previous playbooks, we have shown examples of AWS and Azure account monitoring, but the series would not be complete without also supporting Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Are you the type of person who loves the command-line? Is tab-complete your friend? Do you move faster on a keyboard than with a mouse? Then Phantom Slash Commands are for you!
The Splunk Threat Research team recently developed a new analytic story to help security operations center (SOC) analysts detect adversaries executing password spraying attacks against Active Directory environments. In this blog, we’ll walk you through this analytic story, demonstrate how we can simulate these attacks using PurpleSharp, collect and analyze the Windows event logs, and highlight a few detections from the May 2021 releases.
On Tuesday June 8th, the Content Delivery Network Fastly experienced an outage that made large swaths of the web unavailable for nearly an hour. To focus on the positive, this outage can serve as a wakeup call for Observability teams, because it shows how much modern sites depend on resources beyond their immediate control, and how hard it is to "observe" these kinds of issues with an incomplete Observability mindset.
At Splunk, we’re constantly on the hunt for new and emerging threats — tirelessly developing detection techniques to zero in on bad actors, while sharing key intelligence around cybercrime activity. But because threat intelligence can relate to so many different things — ranging from spear phishing campaigns to dark web dealings — it can be a challenge to cover and define all the specifics of what (or who) to look out for.
Today’s business is powered by data. Success in the digital world depends on how quickly data can be collected, analyzed and acted upon. The faster the speed of data-driven insights, the more agile and responsive a business can become. Apache Kafka has emerged as a popular open-source stream-processing solution for collecting, storing, processing and analyzing data at scale.
In a previous blog post, "Monitoring Kafka Performance with Splunk," we discussed key performance metrics to monitor different components in Kafka. This blog is focused on how to collect and monitor Kafka performance metrics with Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring using OpenTelemetry, a vendor-neutral and open framework to export telemetry data. In this step-by-step getting-started blog, we will.
On June 2nd, 2021, the White House released a memo from Anne Neuberger, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology. The subject? “What We Urge You To Do To Protect Against The Threat of Ransomware.” It outlines several recommendations on how to protect your organization from ransomware. The memo was a follow-up to President Biden’s May 12th Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity Order (EO14028).
If you’re an active Splunk Phantom user, it’s safe to assume you know what a playbook is. If not, here’s a quick summary: Phantom playbooks allow analysts to automate everyday security tasks, without the need for human interaction. Manual security tasks that used to take 30 minutes can now be executed automatically in seconds using a playbook. The result? Increased productivity and efficiency, time saved, and headaches avoided.
