How can Splunk Support the Public Sector?
Author: Grace Dolby
Release Date: 01/11/2022
In recent years the Public Sector has had to quickly change their IT Infrastructure, priorities and goals rapidly due to fast changing environments and external pressures. This has shifted focus away from “keeping the lights on” to a more proactive approach to modern IT and an understanding that IT keeps the organisation going, rather than being separated from the business.
With our vast experience in the Public Sector we have identified five key trends that have been a focus for our customers, and how Splunk can assist you on your journey to meet these key goals.
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1. Proactivity Vs. Reactivity
Gone are the days where we waited for a ticket to come in to become aware of an issue that impacts an internal or external service, now we are expecting to not only be alerted ourselves to an error as it happens but in those moments before. With Splunk, whether you want to leverage Machine Learning or you would prefer to set manual alert triggers, you can have alerts delivered to you before an outage occurs, on average, Splunk customers can predict outages 45 minutes before they happen. Alerting on even the most bespoke triggers can be set due to our complete verbose search language, allowing you to focus on keywords, event codes, or even a set of events that follow each other.
2. Securing the Supply Chain
The Pandemic accelerated the need to change the way the public sector interacts with private sector technology offerings. With this new way of working, it becomes more and more important to be able to audit your suppliers, and have a safe centralised location for reviewing the data from these. Utilising Splunk you can ingest structured or unstructured data from your suppliers, in a secure location that can be protected from other prying eyes. Further developments in Supply Chain monitoring such as Security Scorecard allow you to track key KPI’s from all the organisations you work with, and Splunk allows you to easily ingest this data and make historical analysis and predict trends.
3. Citizen Experience
Citizens are expecting more and more from their local and central governments, from easier access to services, more information available quickly and easily and smoother transactions between all the varying services. Splunk allows you to dive into the way your citizens use the applications, services and information currently available to them, and also provides you a clear way to understand where these may be failing. If you have an online form or similar to collate citizen feedback, Splunk can act as a great sentiment analysis tool to focus your efforts on the issues held by the most of your constituents.
4. Edge Computing
Edge computing allows more analysis to be completed where the data is collected, and for leaders to only see the necessary subsection of data. The emergence of edge computing will allow IT departments to cut costs, preserve bandwidth and be able to react and make decisions more quickly. Furthermore, geospatial data that can be gained from the rise of edge telemetry can assist in mapping out areas in a crisis, that can help mitigate such issues as long term climate impacts, farming plans and where populations are becoming more vulnerable.
5. Further focus on Security Monitoring
Echoing the U.S. Government in the 14028 Executive Order, we predict that threat intelligence sharing will become more prominent between private and public sectors, and that Ransomware and further targeted attacks will occur against both the Public and Private sector that will further drive that need for data sharing. Splunk allows you to centrally correlate all internal and external security threats across your on premise, cloud or hybrid infrastructure and download an anonymised selection of this data to share with your trusted private or public sector security agencies.
