Strengthening Your Digital Backbone: Building Resilience Using Splunk

In this digital era, organizations are constantly bombarded with security threats. Cyberattacks and adverse security incidents have become extremely common today. Using a solution like Splunk can prove to be extremely efficient and build resilience in your system. To maintain the safety of their systems and become digitally resilient over time, organizations must possess certain qualities:

• Ability to swiftly detect, investigate, and respond to such threats
• Pivot quickly when the situation demands it
• Avoid making the same mistakes in the future

Unfortunately, many organizations lack these qualities and end up being prone to various cyber attacks. Let us dig a little deeper into this point. 

Why organizations fail to achieve resilience?

Many organizations fail to achieve resilience because their teams lack the contextual visibility of the threats. Teams operate in silos and do not share key information with others, which results in unwanted delays in responding to threats. To make it worse, most security and IT processes are slow and complex, making it impossible to take proactive measures to protect the systems. 

And this is where Splunk’s comes into focus. It offers innovative solutions that can detect and resolve security incidents at a quick page.

How Splunk is able to resolve security incidents faster?

• It combines threat detection, investigation, and response processes and enable users to access them in a single system - Splunk Mission Control. In other words, you do not have to constantly switch between Splunk SOAR, SIEM, and Threat Intelligence Management. 
• It optimizes the workflows and data processing with the help of Splunk Mission Control, Splunk Observability Cloud, and Edge Process. This will offer improved visibility to the teams. 
• It streamlines SecOps, ITOps, and DevOps with the help of Splunk Mission Control and Splunk Application Performance Monitoring. Thanks to the automation capabilities of these modules, your teams are free to proactively safeguard your systems.

Let us now go through each of the modules in detail and how they can build resilience for your organization’s SecOps, ITOps, and DevOps.

Splunk Edge Processor: Streamlining data processing

Edge Processor is a cloud-controlled dynamic solution from Splunk that works at the edge of your network. It helps in filtering, masking, and transforming your data nearer to its source so that it can be safely routed to external environments. Here are the different ways in which it helps your ITOps team -

• Since Edge Processor has a configuration console in the cloud, users can experience free-flowing data in minutes. They will enjoy better visibility into all incoming and outgoing data streams. This ensures that the ITOps team can react to issues faster, resulting in digital resilience. 
• Since Edge Processor uses SPL2, which is a powerful search and data preparation language, customers can effortlessly create transforms on every field of an event that was created to filter, mask, and route data. This gives the users the ability to control the costs of data transfer and storage. Also, it ensures that the data is secure and doesn’t cross predefined boundaries.

Splunk Observability Cloud: Improved Visibility Across Environment

For any organization, it is very important to regularly modernize the infrastructure, application, and end-user experience. However, this becomes a major problem for your ITOps and DevOps teams. They start experiencing difficulties when troubleshooting problems, thanks to disconnected tools and functions. They need to constantly switch between multiple IT incident management tools and have to manually correlate different data to find the root cause of an incident which can eventually lead to slow response times.

And that’s why Splunk has rejuvenated its Observability Cloud to improve visibility across different environments, creating a more unified approach to incident management. Observability Cloud is a turn-key solution of all the tools that an ITOps or DevOps team would need to monitor a stack. It provides endless visibility, along with contextual workflows that allow you to find the root cause of an incident in seconds.

An enhanced Splunk Observability Cloud:

• Modernizes your IT Ops with the help of automated alerting. Your team will be able to respond to incidents faster thanks to machine learning which improves the alert accuracy of Splunk services. The highly accurate alerting drastically reduces the manual effort needed for configuration.
• Simplifies your troubleshooting processes thanks to enhanced visibility across your stack. The Observability Cloud offers a holistic view across every user session, which enables your team to troubleshoot faster. They will also have a clearer view of how an issue impacts the end user.

Splunk Mission Control: Taking Control of SecOps

An organization’s SecOps is often riddled with challenges that hinder them from attaining digital resilience. Even though they own robust tools for threat detection, investigation, and response, these tools operate without coordination. Teams fail to gain situational awareness of security events and resolve incidents inefficiently. And let’s not forget that the Security Operations Center(SOC) is forever inundated with a continuous flow of security alerts and complex attacks. It creates a huge backlog of threats and heightens the risk factor. Manual investigation and response might help, but it prolongs the resolution time. The inability to close cases will create a perennial state of defense and reactivity for the SOC.

Splunk Mission Control is the magic bullet to mitigate the above problems. It is an integrated security operations suite that enables you to identify, investigate, and retaliate to security threats from a cloud-based module. It can be accessed from Splunk Enterprise Security (Cloud), where all the data appears in the form of incidents.

With Splunk Mission Control, you can:

• Merge the processes of detection, investigation, and response into a single system. This will help you to act faster as you will have a 360° view of the threats. You also do not have to keep shifting between different tabs (SIEM, SOAR, Threat Intelligence, or any other consoles) to manage the threats.
• Streamline your security workflows by coding your processes into predefined templates. It will enable your team to generate repeatable processes that can quickly kickstart the investigations process during a security incident.
• Automate your SecOps and various integrated security stacks by executing playbooks. The platform will automatically detect and execute the right workflow (For example, investigation or response workflows). Your team will be free to focus on other mission-critical activities.

To get started with Splunk Mission Control, you must be an existing customer using:

• Splunk Enterprise Security (Cloud) (Splunk Supported Vesions - 6.6 and higher)
• Splunk Enterprise versions (Splunk Supported Vesions - 8.0 and higher)

Implementing Splunk for improved security and visibility

Setting up Splunk in your organization can be a complex and resource-intensive process. It requires specialized skills and expertise. By joining hands with a Splunk Implementation Partner like Positka, you can fully leverage the experience and knowledge of a dedicated team of professionals who specialize in Splunk deployment and management. We will ensure that Splunk is configured to meet your specific needs and objectives. Thanks to our optimized Splunk implementation techniques, you can achieve your goals faster and in a more efficient manner without the need for expensive in-house resources. Schedule a call with us to kickstart your Splunk journey.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is Splunk SOAR?

SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR). It is a security automation solution that executes machine-based security actions to identify, investigate and resolve threats in a programmatic way. It also uses playbooks to automate responses from different interfaces.

• What is Splunk Cloud?

Splunk Cloud is an enterprise-ready cloud service that provides total visibility across on-premise Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud deployments. It enables organizations to deploy Splunk as a software or SaaS according to their precise requirements.

• Why should I partner with an MSP for Splunk cloud migration?

Partnering with an MSP for Splunk cloud migration can offer you multiple benefits, such as access to expertise, cost savings, time-saving, scalability, and ongoing support. Most MSPs specialize in cloud migration as they have a team of experts, who can efficiently manage the migration process.