University Case Study
How a top University used Splunk to help proactively prevent and predict attacks across all aspects of their security and IT operations
Splunk’s anomaly detection system helps the university monitor an enormous volume of data by using AI to automatically spot potential threats that a manual process would miss and alert staff to the risk.
Splunk helps the university to balance this open access with cyber defences that would protect the university’s reputation, research income and day-to-day operations, while giving students and staff the digital tools they want to learn and teach.
Splunk’s ability to ingest, correlate, index, search and visualise data at scale gives the university the ability to look at things in a different way and respond quickly.
Customer Profile
This particular university is a research-intensive Russell Group institution with around 22,000 students and 4,500 staff. The university’s annual income is around £415.5M, of which £76.1M is derived from research grants and contracts. The university generates £1.117B in economic output and supports 11,000 jobs.
Technology Products
Enterprise
The easiest way to aggregate and get IT, Security, IoT and business answers from your Machine Data at a massive scale and speed to give you true insights.
Enterprise Security
Gain end-to-end visibility into your security posture with actionable intelligence that helps you prioritise and act fast.
Challenges
Universities have a variety of challenges in the current digital age. Many hold large quantities of intellectual property from research which is a high value target to both foreign and domestic institutions. Research shows that higher education institutions are increasingly becoming the target of security threats.
Many universities were at the leading edge with digital technology and networking before the turn of the century helping to develop the modern internet as we know it. This has led to many legacy and bespoke solutions still existing within their environments which struggle to conform with modern security standards and requirements.
The University approached Somerford to help them develop a solution that took them from reacting to threats, to proactively prevent and predict attacks across all aspects of their security and IT operations.
Solution
A rollout of Splunk Enterprise with Splunk Enterprise Security over a three month period by Somerford Associates provided a strategic change to security operations with the following benefits and values being provided:
Visibility
Complete visibility of data flow across all layers.
Real-Time Analysis
System data available in real time for analysis as soon as source is identified and ingested.
Productivity
Increase business productivity through real time analytics and dashboards.
Isolate Risks
Reduce risk to the business through complete visibility of potential risks and rapid identification of threats.
Why Somerford?
The quality and capacity of Somerford’s certified and security cleared consultants, its end-to-end assured delivery model and its value added package of knowledge transfer workshops and webinars, support desk on-site health checks and business value assessments. Somerford were able to deliver a zero to full SIEM solution in only 8 weeks.Â
