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IMPROVED
OPERATIONAL
INTELLIGENCE
for
Industry Perspective
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Government agencies are creating more data than ever before, yet they often fail to
capitalize on all of the information theyre collecting. A recent Forrester study found that
organizations are only analyzing 12 percent of their data, leaving the rest to sit idle, never
to be capitalized for better decision-making.
Today, a big data solution offers hope for governments to unlock potential from all the data they collect,
store and manage. Through better data management, governments can re-imagine their business
processes. At a time when public sector resources and budgets are shrinking and citizens are demanding
improved services, big data promises much needed relief for government agencies.
Now is the time for agencies to capitalize on their data. For years, government has been developing data
lakes, or locations where they aggregate and store massive amounts of data they collect, all resting on
the promise that someday the information will be valuable.
That day is today. The technology now exists to quickly process and analyze data. Organizations can
finally derive value from their data lakes as well as from their machine data, or data that is created
without the intervention of humans, from transactions, APIs, call centers, sensors, and more. Machine
data is growing at an exponential rate, and requires organizations to take a new approach to manage all
the information and extract value.
In this industry perspective, we will provide an overview of how big data is reshaping government, the
challenges agencies face in extracting value from this information, and ways to work around common big
data roadblocks.
We will also highlight how Splunk, an operational intelligence company for government, is helping
government organizations leverage their data in new ways. Specifically, this report will:
Explain how Splunk can help agencies unlock new value from their information
Describe what machine data is and the role it plays for big data programs
Highlight an interview with William Von Alt, Sales Engineering Manager at Splunk
Show how big data can mitigate the risks of insider threats
Public sector managers now realize that their data has high potential to transform their business, and
they are ready to turn their data into insights.
There is a lot of value that could be extracted from this data, and agencies are trying to figure out where
the value is and how to gain knowledge from the information, said William Von Alt, Sales Engineering
Manager at Splunk.
For government to reach the goals of their complex missions, they must learn to extract knowledge from
their data to find new trends, patterns and identify business value from information. But in order to get
there, agencies must first understand what big data is, and how to overcome some common challenges.
1 // Industry Perspective
Understanding the
Big Data Landscape
Many organizations still struggle to define big data, especially in the
context of what a big data solution can do to transform their agency.
To make the task of characterizing data even more challenging,
every agency, city and municipality defines big data differently. Due
to various missions and organizational needs, how the Department
of Defense (DoD) defines big data is different than Department of
Commerce, and how the City of Hartford is going to describe big data
is different than how Baltimore County will.
But there are some commonalities across governments, like the four
Vs of big data:
The promise of big data lies in its ability to unlock new insights,
trends and patterns from your information to drive improved
business and mission outcomes. In order to do that, agencies must
overcome one of the most common barriers of big data: selecting
the right problem to solve.
VOLUME
VELOCITY
VARIETY
VARIABILITY
Often you dont know in advance what questions you will have to ask
of your data, so it is impossible to determine in advance what data is
relevant to you, or which will be important later on, he added.
SPLUNK SOFTWARE OPERATES AS AN OPERATIONAL
INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM, AND WITH IT, ORGANIZATIONS
CAN BEGIN TO ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT THEIR DATA THEY
PREVIOUSLY COULD NOT.
However, if data is removed, deleted or not consolidated, valuable
insights might be missed.
We help our customers determine which data is very low return
on investment, but prior to that, you shouldnt take that data off the
table. You just dont know what might be valuable, and so trying to
retain as much data as possible is key, said Von Alt.
Every environment has its own unique footprint of machine data. Here are a few examples:
DATA TYPE
WHERE TO FIND IT
Application Logs
Business process
management logs
3 // Industry Perspective
Examples contd.
DATA TYPE
WHERE TO FIND IT
Clickstream Data
Configuration Files
How database data was modified over time and who made
the changes
Management and
Logging APIs
Message Queues
Packet/Flow Data
SCADA Data
Sensor Data
Syslog
Windows Events
Wire Data
5 // Industry Perspective
About Splunk
About GovLoop
www.splunk.com