.conf20 is ‘Virtually' FREE – Are You Ready to Rock the Data Age? (Federal Edition)

If you are a Splunk customer or even follow us, you know that .conf20 is virtual this year and it is FREE! That means you don’t have to go looking for budgets for the conference – no airfares, no boarding & lodging and no conference fees. You can experience our annual ‘superbowl of events’ from the comfort of your (home) office. Yes, we know… because of the pandemic most events are virtual and you probably are contemplating whether you should attend another virtual event, but we promise you, this is not going to be just another event!  

One of the exciting aspects of .conf is that there is something for everyone, regardless of your Splunk maturity. Close to 200 sessions filled with educational value on how you can leverage data to drive confident decisions and take decisive actions at speeds your missions demand.  And sessions from our customers on all the ways they are leveraging Splunk across their ecosystem to solve a variety of challenges – IT, security, DevOps and beyond.

You can go to our .conf20 site and immerse yourself into all the activities we have in store for you. And you can see all the sessions you could learn from across roles, industries and technology areas. Each and every session has its own merits and it would be impossible for me to provide details and what I think about each one. But I wanted to highlight a few, for public sector attendees, that caught my eye:

• First off, you do not want to miss "ITO1831B – Addressing telehealth delivery challenges in real-time." In today’s new normal, telehealth is prevalent but don’t skip over it just because your focus may not be healthcare! Because the crux of this session is how data is playing a fundamental part in helping agencies troubleshoot complex services and deliver superior experiences while the IT environment experiences a rapid geographic shift away from within agency walls.
  
  
• Another exciting session is PLA1850 from our friends at Lockheed Martin. It speaks to how a condition monitoring ecosystem built in Splunk has enabled them to enhance visibility into the manufacturing of the F-35 Lightning II aircraft and Sikorsky helicopters. This newfound ability to troubleshoot, improve, and automate workflows has led to the capture and improvement of ongoing business processes. Downtime events are decreasing in frequency and duration, asset performance is captured and improves O&M activities, and remote visibility improves accountability.
  
  
• If you are in cybersecurity, tune into "SEC1671 – Cybersecurity in Government: During and beyond the pandemic." It's a panel that brings together three well-known leaders – Alma Cole from CBP, Matthew Shallbetter from HHS and Alicia Lynch from SAIC who discuss how their cyber tactics during the pandemic and what their strategies look like for cybersecurity in the future. They discuss lessons learned, what worked and didn’t and how these insights are shaping their approaches for the future.
  
  
• With the security discipline perennially understaffed, agencies are increasingly looking to automation tools to fill the gap.  If you are curious or are on an automation journey, we have many to whet your appetite and one I would call out is "SEC1428 – Utilizing Splunk Phantom to orchestrate framework controls." The unique aspect about government security is the myriad of compliance mandates. This session will highlight how you can identify controls that are apt for automation integration and how you can improve audit reporting and decrease associate time for evidence gathering.
  
  

And there's more. What you start to see is that Splunk is indeed the Platform for the Mission – beyond security, compliance and IT monitoring. Check out the sessions in our catalog for yourselves or use one of the learning paths already curated for you by experts at Splunk.   

We are well on our way to getting a record number of attendees representing our public sector and education customer base. We hope you have signed up and look forward to seeing you on October 20-21!

Until next time, 
Ashok 

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Thanks!
Ashok Sankar