All About Splunk

Author Kathy Burger did intense research to find the Top 7 Biggest Data Players to watch, and Splunk showed up as one of her Top 7! Splunk is one of the highest profile and most successful big data companies. Global Equities research analyst Trip Chowdhry said in a recent article, "What Google is for Web searches, Splunk is for machine-generated data.” 

Now if representatives from Global Equities are saying such a stand up comment, you know that Splunk has to have some of the best qualities to help you learn about and then use this generated data program to improve your business.

Splunk has made its name from analyzing unstructured data that companies and organizations

obtain from websites, servers, mobile devices and other machines to understand behaviors, user actions, application and system performance and cyber threats. This kind of data can represent more than 91% of the data that any given organization receives, according to the company's estimates.

Splunk works with successful organizations such as Major League Baseball, Cisco, more than 200 government agencies and several financial institutions including Bank of America.
Splunk’s most recent partnership was with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The partnership will help FEMA analyze data from social media sites. By doing this they are better able to help find people in distress during and after natural disasters.

The partnership was announced in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area late last year. Many individuals who were affected by Sandy turned to social media to seek help when cell phone towers were knocked out by the storm. Splunk’s ability to analyze the social media data is impressive.

Splunk offers the best software programs to analyze web data at the most affordable price. It is a trusted business that goes out of their way to take care of their customers.

Creative Minds: SIEM Tools – Two is Better than One

Creative Minds: SIEM Tools – Two is Better than One: SIEM tools combine two different types of functions to help businesses efficiently managing their online websites. The first function ...

SIEM Tools – Two is Better than One

SIEM tools combine two different types of functions to help businesses efficiently managing their online websites. The first function of a SIEM tool is Security Information Management. The second function of a SIEM tool is Security Event Management

These technologies work together to make networks more secure by making sense of log data to determine when security events have occurred, and then generating security metrics to reduce the expense of regulatory compliance and security reporting. There’s no better way to secure a network.

Technologist and networking expert, Gordon More said that data processing power doubles every 18 months. “A similar growth pattern is evident in the world of security. Over the years, for instance, stand-alone firewalls and VPNs have given way to unified threat management (UTM) devices, centralized tools that protect the network perimeter.” SIEM tools are solutions that are leading the charge when it comes to industry growth in depth of reach and strength of data retrieval.

This is why security experts have improved traditional security management tools to now include both Security Information and Event Management proving that two is better than one.

With information and event management incorporated into one tool, SIEM eliminates the need to purchase additional software or the need to integrate one solution with an already installed base of network security solutions. This is because many SIEM tools work across platforms, further simplifying deployment.

When utilizing the strong duo of SIEM Tolls, business owners will improve their organization and marketing strategies and gain greater knowledge about what their clients are doing by viewing activities in their networking environment. This knowledge will provide the tools necessary to improve productivity and marketing efficiency.

SIEM tools enable IT and marketing teams to work together to take specific calculated approaches to increasing traffic generation to business websites, blogs and social networking sites.

The History of SIEM Tools and Their Integration with Log Storage

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and log management tools have been complementary for years. But now the technologies are expected to merge. This change will be able to help online business owners run an even more successful, more productive website thanks to analysis of data.

SIEM began as businesses and companies found themselves spending tons of money on Firewalls, Malware and other intrusion detection software. These systems were helpful in detecting external attacks; however,they were not always accurate since the information was generated from search engines.

SIEM technology was designed to reduce this “signal-to-noise ratio” to help show the most critical external viruses and threats. Using rule-based correlation, SIEM helps IT teams discover real attacks by focusing on a set of firewall and IPS events that are unwanted. Traditionally, SIEM solutions have been expensive and time-consuming to maintain. But they solve the big headache of sorting through excessive false alerts and effectively protect companies from external threats.

These updates with SIEM tools was another step in the right direction; however when the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) mandated stricter internal IT controls and assessment, it became harder for SIEM tools to monitor information and events.
To help improve SIEM tools to now comply with the PCI, professionals have integrated them with log storage tools. This merge not only detects external threats like viruses, but it also providesdaily reports and data logs of user activities and create forensics reports surrounding any given incident.

Though SIEM technologies already collected logs, they weren't designed to handle the sheer volume of log data generated from IT components such as applications, switches, routers, databases, firewalls, operating systems, IDS/IPS and web proxies.  Now that SIEM tools have integrated with Log Storage, this is all done with ease.

With this great integration of SIEM tools and Log Storage, data analyses are easier than ever. They can help your online businesses track needed data to increase traffic generation, block unwanted viruses, and overtime, increase your productivity.

Creative Minds: The Avalanche of SPLUNK

Creative Minds: The Avalanche of SPLUNK: Big news just erupted on April 4, 2013 that Data Analytics Software creator, Splunk Inc. is looking to increase their customer base by ...

The Avalanche of SPLUNK

Big news just erupted on April 4, 2013 that Data Analytics Software creator, Splunk Inc. is looking to increase their customer base by approximately 40% this year. That means that they are hoping to add at least 2,000 customers annually. For a start-up data analytics business, this is great news.

Splunk had about 5,200 customers and less than 800 employees at the beginning of the year in 2012. Since then, they have enjoyed an extremely high revenue growth rate.

The CEO of Splunk, Godfrey Sullivan said, “Our investors are encouraging us to continue to run at a breakeven pace so that we can capture fast moving market opportunities.” Previously, Sullivan was the head of the Data Analytics firm Hyperion Solutions, which was later bought out by Oracle Corp for $4.5 Billion in 2007.

Godfrey is planning to make Splunk just as successful as Hyperion and quoted, “[our clients] are pretty pleased. You see that reflected in the stock price.” In fact, shares of this small San Francisco-based company debuted at $17 on NASDAQ and have more than doubled since its IPO made a splash in April of 2012.

Splunk’s software indexes and manages machine data from computers, mobile devices, and servers. It also uses an interface similar to Google’s that makes it is easy to search and navigate through each company’s database.

These are some of the reasons why Splunk is avalanching towards success.  There are dedicated people running the company that care about the quality of their data analytics and log storage product and service. They realize the importance that data found from this software can bring to a company.  With the right data, a company can analyze ways to improve their business to be more successful by being more productive.

Splunk’s CEO Sullivan concluded his speech saying, “Now just like we make it easy for you to look at your server traffic, we can also show you your web traffic or mobile traffic and you can analyze that just as easily.”0020x`

Splunk really is Avalanching towards success by providing valuable analyzing tools. Sullivan says that “Splunk is the next generation of business analytics” and I believe him.

’S Path to the Top of Log Management Platforms

SIEM tools began as two separate entities: Security Information Management and Security Event Management. These two systems were merged together to make log analyses easier and more simple.  Now, the other areas being combined with security information and event management is GRC.

GRC is the umbrella term covering an organization’s approach to governance, risk management and compliance. Because these concerns, much like the security concerns are closely related to each other, they are being aligned to some extent in order to avoid conflicts, wasteful business overlaps and gaps in coverage.

Most people in the industry expect further consolidation as more vendors try to pull three prongs of SIEM, GRC and security infrastructure together.”

Info-Tech Research Group Member Jessica Ireland stated that over the past few years “The (security event and security management ) products keep getting better. We are seeing a lot of fluid and intuitive interfaces which make SIEM easier for clients to use.”

One of the great things Jessica Ireland mentions about SIEM tools is the “replay” function that makes interface extremely simple. This enables the administrator to develop a new policy for times when specific events or incidents occur.

Recently, SIEM platforms have evolved even more to collect data and information about users’ behaviors and data access. Now, they can collect data from hundreds of different sources such as hardware devices, virtual machines and applications. Examples of these sources are Microsoft Exchange and Oracle Databases.

With all of these great new SIEM technology offerings, it is becoming easier and easier to improve business productivity with log data analyses.

When you stop to think about it, it is incredible the way technology has advanced over the past few years. As a business owner, it is crucial to take advantage of valuable products like SIEM tools and Log Analytical Software.