ManpowerGroup Employs Splunk to Deliver Insights 60x Faster and Ramp up Global Security

In the people business, resilience can mean the difference between a person out of work and one earning a living. 

ManpowerGroup is a people-driven staffing company that puts over 600,000 associates to work each day — an astounding number, considering the ripple effect created by over half a million people having meaningful and sustainable employment. Serving customers and employers in over 70 global territories, ManpowerGroup maintains a hometown feel, centering its mission and daily operations around the power of work to change people’s lives.

Organizationally, the company is a matrix of business units, multiple brands, offices and regions. “The biggest challenge we face is complexity,” says ManpowerGroup CISO Randy Herold. “That complexity translates into the business and makes some of our operations more challenging, risky and expensive.”

To continue delivering on its promise and keep people at the heart of its business, ManpowerGroup turned to Splunk as part of a strategic evaluation of its tools and processes. The resulting partnership has helped the organization pivot toward a more secure, resilient future of “doing well by doing good” — for its clients and associates, and as an organization

Taming complexity, fostering cross-team collaboration

ManpowerGroup actively seeks opportunities to provide ever-better service to clients around the world. But as the company grew, so did the complexities across its infrastructure — it could take longer than a month for critical security and infrastructure data to make it into the right stakeholder’s hands. “I was buried under spreadsheets and formulas,” says Mike Friedel, ManpowerGroup’s director of global information security. “That was a chronic problem. In today’s security world, you can’t wait that long. You can’t wait 30 days.”

With Splunk Cloud Platform, Friedel automated the tedious tasks that were stealing time from mission-critical work and putting the business at risk. “Automation helps,” he says, “because the quicker we get the information out to the teams to go fix things, the more resilient the business is.” 

With all ticketing information in Splunk, all of ManpowerGroup has full, instant visibility into the SOC — information that once took Friedel more than 60 hours to pull together and distribute to senior leadership or the board. “Different teams look at our InfoSec dashboard — built on Splunk Cloud Platform — for different reasons,” says ManpowerGroup CISO Randy Herold. “Our audit team looks at it for policy compliance. Our IT teams may look at it for patches.” Any team at ManpowerGroup can access the data it needs to quickly identify and mitigate gaps or issues that could affect client experience. “With Splunk, we’re all playing from the same sheet of music,” Friedel adds.

When resilience is personal

In a global organization, issues and threats are inevitable. “Every day somewhere around the world, something goes wrong,” Herold says. “Knowing we are able to overcome that and ensure that our associates are able to go to work, get paid and have meaningful and sustainable employment is most important to us.”

With Splunk Cloud Platform, the team at ManpowerGroup now identifies incidents before they happen. This means smooth operations from the second a resume is safely downloaded from the internet to an interview uninterrupted by network issues. “It also means that when we hire someone, that person is going to be placed into our front office system and later see a paycheck land in their mailbox or their bank account,” Herold says. “That’s resilience to us — and at ManpowerGroup, that's the reason we all come to work every day.”