Splunk Cloud Platform Ushers in New Era of Data-Driven Transformation at .conf21

Splunk Inc. announced the latest enhancements to Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk Enterprise, propelling Splunk’s 20,000+ customers into the next wave of digital transformation. Splunk is equipping organizations with the solutions they need to manage and thrive throughout their cloud journeys, leaning into Splunk’s unified data platform to become resilient, secure and innovative in their increasingly complex multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

“Over the past eighteen months, the transformative power of data moved to the forefront of how organizations have been reinventing themselves and their customer experiences. In an unpredictable world, organizations with a strong data foundation thrived despite unforeseen changes,” said Shawn Bice, President of Products and Technology, Splunk. “As we enter this next era of opportunity, we understand the responsibility and partnership with our customers, and Splunk is committed to their success. Data is everywhere – public clouds, on-premises data centers, the edge, apps, third party tools – and Splunk will be right there with our customers to help them turn data into doing.”

Splunk Cloud Platform Helps Overcome Complexity in Organizations’ Cloud Journeys

Splunk has the unique ability to help customers make radical data transformations to further accelerate their cloud-driven initiatives. Moving to the cloud provides organizations with greater resilience and agility, but may also add more complexity, which is why Splunk is crucial for helping customers manage their data and thrive throughout every stage of their cloud journey.

“For organizations that aspire to make cloud-centric IT their de facto operating model and a primary infrastructure strategy, they need a platform to access all data, search and get quick answers about the health, security, costs and performance of their hybrid cloud environments to deliver consistent user experiences,” said Archana Venkatraman, Associate Research Director, Cloud Data Management, IDC Europe. “The data platform organizations choose should be cloud-centric and ingest data from multiple hybrid cloud sources effectively, at scale, and in an automated way. More organizations and service providers are demanding the ability to adopt cloud in their own terms and pace. This means transparency, flexibility and choice around cost models, experience, and infrastructure are also key factors.”

With the enhanced Splunk platform, customers gain the latest innovations as well as increased flexibility and reliability in how they do business. At the annual user-conference, .conf21, Splunk introduced features and updates that allow customers to customize Splunk’s solutions for their unique needs, improve end-to-end visibility, enhance investigation, and drive faster actions. Platform enhancements include:

• Going further with data through end-to-end visibility from edge to cloud: Splunk launched new capabilities for accessing cloud data, and working with data in motion, before it gets indexed within the Splunk platform. The new Data Manager, currently in preview, provides a modernized user experience in Splunk Cloud Platform for simple and automated cloud native data onboarding starting with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft 365 and quickly expanding to include Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure data sources. Also, Splunk’s new Ingest Actionscapability, also in preview, gives customers the ability to take action on data in motion to redact, filter, and route data to Splunk or to external AWS S3 storage. Additionally, Splunk is continuing to innovate to ensure that the Splunk platform provides cost-effective indexing and storage options for all customer data. To support this, Splunk added two new capabilities to its already robust storage and value-based pricing tiers within the Splunk platform. The new Flex Index, available in preview for Splunk Cloud customers on workload pricing, allows for cost-effective ingest, search, and storage for lower-value data that may have long retention periods and is used primarily for historic forensic investigation and compliance. Splunk is also expanding cloud storage with SmartStore, which is now available on Microsoft Azure as a preview capability in addition to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, allowing Splunk’s Azure customers to grow to even larger scales while controlling storage costs. Features available in preview for Splunk Enterprise are accessible via the Splunk Enterprise Beta program. For the purposes of this release, preview and beta are used interchangeably.
• Drive actions faster with enhanced investigation for all data through a more robust search experience: With Federated Search, customers will get a unified search experience across all deployment types providing them with the ability to break down silos and search across their entire Splunk platform ecosystem. To drive faster action with data, the Splunk Dashboard Studio is now available on Splunk Mobile, and helps customers showcase their most complex data insights into visually compelling dashboards that anyone in the organization can understand and take action on. These dashboards can now go anywhere with Splunk Mobile and Splunk TV helping remote workforces securely turn their data into actionable insights. Both Federated Search and Dashboard Studio are now generally available. “The new Splunk Dashboard Studio helps us to easily visualize even our most complex processes in rich, interactive dashboards. The native customization capabilities free up both new users and experienced creators from custom coding to focus on what matters: data analysis,” said Roberto Besick, Splunk Specialist, Sapura Navegação Marítima S.A (Sapura Energy).
• Customize the Splunk platform for any use case: Whether an organization is in the cloud, on-prem or hybrid, Splunk is providing system administrators and developers new self-service capabilities that lets them easily deploy and maintain full visibility into their Splunk environment and applications. With Splunk Operator for Kubernetes, now generally available, administrators and developers can seamlessly install, scale, and manage on their selected cloud environment. They can also tap into Splunk’s thriving community and enhanced developer tooling with the new Splunkbase user experience with curated collections and categories that make it simple to find or develop any app for each organizations’ unique business needs.

Additionally, both Splunk partners and customers can leverage Splunk’s data innovation platform across every Intel-based architecture from the edge to the cloud. With more than 83% of the world’s cloud instances powered by Intel technology, Splunk and Intel are enabling customers to achieve faster insights and greater deployment flexibility, at lower costs. Splunk’s partnership with Intel delivers a high performance data innovation engine to accelerate the development of new solutions across infrastructure and business operations.

Strengthening Customer Value with Increased Flexibility, Scalability and Data Investments

As the types, sources and volume of data organizations need to analyze continually grows, having a trusted data platform is imperative for business success. Splunk’s workload pricing allows customers to buy based on infrastructure used to deliver services. It is now available for all Splunk Cloud Platform customers, making it easier than ever before for customers to get more from their data.

“The move to workload pricing has given us the freedom to pace our efforts with less worry about approaching data ingest limits,” said Trina McGhie, Chief Information Security Officer, Co-Operators. “Since we made the move to Splunk Cloud Platform and workload pricing, our highly skilled and innovative security team has nearly doubled our bandwidth of data with Splunk, our security posture has improved, and the ability to use Splunk to measure and monitor our organization’s posture has been invaluable.”