The "Q1 2020: Splunk Ideas" blog is officially live! This blog post is the first in a quarterly series that aims to educate and deliver status updates on "Splunk Ideas." In this post, I will cover the history and goals of Splunk Ideas and supply some information about our initial success. Next quarter’s post will focus on the lifecycle of an Idea, with details on our internal process of reviewing, considering, and prioritizing your ideas.

Like the sailor in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” who is surrounded by salt water that he cannot drink, many financial services professionals contend with similar challenges: data is all around them, but it’s not doing them much good. Firms need to drink deeply from their data, developing greater expertise not only at data discovery, but also at data valuation. Because at this point, data is the only true source of ompetitive differentiation.

With most of the world on lockdown due to the COVID-19 virus, many aspects of IT services and digital transformation have been put into the fast lane. There are reports of massive surges in the use of tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Office 365, etc. in order to communicate and collaborate. At the same time organizations are required to scale up access to their internal applications.

Ransomware is a serious threat to institutions of all kinds, resulting in mounting costs for organizations that must literally pay ransom to regain access to their essential systems. A ransomware attack takes place when a cybercriminal denies an organization access to the data it needs to conduct business, usually by encrypting the data with a secret key. The attacker then offers to reveal the encryption key in exchange for a payment. The payment can vary in amount or kind.

Businesses who operate along supply chains, like manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, have innovative systems and processes for predicting demand and keeping consumers satisfied. Until a crisis hits. When demand for essential SKUs spikes due to panic buying and fear-based hoarding, organizations in essential consumer categories can find themselves forced to make critical decisions without reliable information to base them on, significantly increasing their risk exposure.

Potential attackers are really good at what they do. Security analysts see this firsthand with the amount of phishing emails their organizations see daily. A newly released State of the Phish report reveals that nearly 90% of organizations dealt with business email compromise (BEC) attacks in 2019. End users reported 9.2 million suspicious phishing emails globally for the year.

Managing a network more effectively has been something our customers have been asking us about for many years, but it has become an increasingly important topic as working from home becomes the new normal across the globe. In this blog series, I thought I’d present a few analytical techniques that we have seen our customers deploy on their network data to: Better understand their network and Develop baselines for network behaviour and detect anomalies.

A difficult question we come across with many customers is ‘what does normal look like for my network?’. There are many reasons why monitoring for changes in network behaviour is important, with some great examples in this article - such as flagging potential security risks or predicting potential outages.

As many of us are rediscovering an interest in board games, it feels relevant to make reference to Hasbro’s classic Clue. Understanding what’s going right or wrong in your sprawling digital business can feel a lot like a murder mystery: it was the authentication service in the east region with the memory exhaustion error. This analogy has a weakness when applied to modern operations. The Clue board game had 6 weapons, 6 suspects, and 9 rooms. That’s 324 combinations.

The use of Serverless execution models is expanding extremely rapidly and cloud providers are continuing to enhance their platforms. Per Flexera’s “State of the Cloud” report: Leading this trend for the last two years, Amazon has released a few features that address AWS Lambdas’ pain points and make them a more feasible choice for large scale deployments consisting of numerous applications.