Getting Started with Splunk Cloud
Hello Splunkers!
Before we start, on behalf of Crest Data, I would like to thank all our customers and Splunk for trusting us as your preferred vendor for their Splunk deployment to be recognized by Splunk APAC Services Partner of the Year at Splunk Global Partner Summit in March, 2019. This award is a validation of 5+ years of customer obsession helping 50+ customers around the globe successfully.
Data is the new Oil:
We live in a data-driven cloud age, where businesses build an edge over competition with superior data.
Exponentially growing data requires to be processed using smart data processing tools and technologies to reap immense benefits such as forecast demand, deep customer insights, refine business strategies, and bring new business models. Earlier the organization starts understanding and interact with their data, better poised they are for a head start against their competition.
Machine generated data is one of the largest and fastest growing areas within an organization which is usually gathered from smart devices, servers, sensors, applications, networks, etc. that comprises your IT infrastructure.
Splunk Operational Intelligence converts and processes such as diverse machine-generated data into intelligence and allows gaining valuable operational insights and real-time visibility into one’s IT infrastructure without the need to purchase, manage and deploy additional infrastructure.
What is Splunk Cloud?
Splunk Cloud delivers Splunk-as-a-Service hosted securely on the public cloud. With this cloud-ready service, one can enjoy all of Splunk Enterprise features without worrying about hosting the infrastructure and without paying the upfront Splunk licensing cost. Splunk Cloud supports all Splunkbase apps including Premium applications (e.g. Enterprise Security, ITSI, etc.) with pre-packaged searches, dashboards, and reports to create the right story from the data with the power of self-serviceability.
It seamlessly allows end users to store, search, analyze and visualize data from different sources of one’s business or IT infrastructure. Splunk Cloud follows the state-of-the-art cloud ready deployment strategies in line with continuous integration/deployment pipeline which is designed for high availability, efficient change management, and robust architecture.
Secure:
Splunk Cloud has already achieved the rigorous SOC 2 Type 2 attestation and ISO 27001 certification. Dedicated cloud environments for each customer along with encryption in-transit and optional encryption at rest are some of the robust security features available within.
Instant ROI:
With Splunk Cloud, you get the advantage of moving from POC to Production in a matter of days rather than in months allowing the Business to gain –
End-end visibility across your departmental silos
Strengthen the overall global monitoring posture
Move from Reactive to Proactive Monitoring
Takes you away from managing infrastructure/administration, allows saving time & money. Reduce the overall TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
Highly secure environment at your finger-tips
No Infrastructure Management Pain:
When it comes to Splunk Cloud, one gets multiple benefits as compared to an on-premise Splunk infrastructure. Consider a scenario where you have an on-prem Splunk Enterprise, in that case, you will have to manage, scale, monitor and ensure timely backups of your Splunk Infrastructure and manage the Splunk upgrades locally. However, with Splunk Cloud you leverage the advantage of the fast time to value, security, the reliability of outsourcing your infrastructure management and administrative tasks, lets your core employees focus on the high-level task.
Splunk Cloud stores data on S2 (Smart Store) which is designed for 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of your data. “Your Data Is In Safe Hands!!”. In Cloud, scaling in and out of infrastructure is as easy as pie and convenient as it can be deployed in just a matter of minutes as it is designed to be highly elastic in nature regardless of scale in or scale out requirements. So it’s totally on-demand and is fully adaptive per your Business requirements. Major and minor Splunk upgrades are handled in a hassle-free manner with zero to minimal downtime per required customer schedules. Timely backups, immediate data restoration, high availability and integrity of the data is maintained in the cloud infrastructure to ensure Business continuity and overcome disaster recovery scenarios.
Why Splunk Cloud
Performance:
Splunk Cloud as its hosted on dedicated Splunk arrangement for every customer; hence the performance remains unaffected by other customer’s operations and stack. Splunk recommended compute and storage resources are assigned to each cluster for optimal utilization of Splunk workloads in the cloud.
Hybrid Support:
Splunk Cloud can be utilized alongside with your existing on-prem Splunk Enterprise as a hybrid solution. It gives single-pane of glass visibility over software and SaaS deployments. You can seamlessly search your on-prem data as well as your Splunk Cloud data using Hybrid Search. Feel free to raise a Support request to enable it.
Security:
Data is highly valuable for the customer, Splunk Cloud guarantees that one’s information is totally isolated and available for search in real time. Splunk further can allow role-based data access controls which allow maintaining data integrity in alignment with the LDAP groups. Data during transit or rest remains secured using industry-standard encryption frameworks.
Far reaching Use Cases A far reaching set of use cases including security, consistency, against extortion, IT tasks, correlation searches, DevOps, application conveyance, business investigation, IoT and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
The ability to extend capacities with access to 200+ applications for visibility, security and operational insights.
Customizations through customer-built apps that let you tailor your solution to your business needs.
The powerful and easy to use search language (SPL) gives you a chance to make inquiries for any kind of information and run workloads to find a needle in the haystack.
Wide flavors of visualizations/dashboards can be created to present C-level views, geographic pinpointing of Business outreach or deep drill-downs to investigate your use case.
Industry Regulated Splunk Cloud Deployments
Splunk Cloud provides a regulated cloud environment to assist you meet the compliance requirements by providing these optional subscriptions in a total isolation to meet country and industry compliance requirements.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): Splunk Cloud (HIPAA) is compliant with the HIPAA Security Rule and HITECH Breach Notification Requirements. These guidelines set up a standard for the security of any environment that accesses, processes, transmits, or stores electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI).
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS): Splunk Cloud is compliant with the PCI DSS v3.2 standard. This standard applies to any entity that processes, transmits, or stores payment card data as well as their critical service providers.
GovCloud: Splunk Cloud provides special compliance to US Government for security purpose.
Let’s get Started with Splunk Cloud!
Splunk Cloud free trial provides pre-populated data sets. Simply forward your own data to Splunk Cloud indexers using Splunk Forwarders. You would be required to install forwarders on your on prem machines that have access to the source data.
When subscribed to the Splunk Cloud service, you get a dedicated Splunk deployment that is hosted in AWS.
Click here to Start Your 15-Day Free Trial
Login to your Splunk account or reate one if you don’t have it already.
And there you will have your Splunk Cloud Instance up and running. Click on “View My Instance”
Accept the terms and click “OK”
And there you are, ready to play with Splunk Cloud.
Happy Splunking in the Cloud…!!
Author
BHAKTY DALSANIA
Bhakty Dalsania is working as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Crest Data. She is an AWS Certified Solution Architect and is working in technologies like Splunk, AWS, Puppet, Terraform, etc. to help run 24×7 Splunk Cloud operations. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from Charotar University of Science and Technology, India.