A day in the life of cybersecurity. Splunk customer stories of SOC-cess

We have a saying at Splunk. It goes something like “if you’re ever having a bad day, go and talk to a customer”. What organizations around the world are doing with their data and Splunk brings a huge smile and an eyebrow raising, positive “can’t quite believe you’ve done that” very-impressed nod of the head. That’s never more true than with our security customers. 

The work CISOs, security analysts and threat hunters do every day keeps us all safe and their organizations protected. We’re celebrating this with the “Summer Of Security” and the launch of our Splunk Security Cloud. You can find more about that here and catch up on the launch. To accompany that, I wanted to share a “day in the life of cybersecurity” story and how thinking about security as a data problem is part of everyday life and our daily routine, even if we don’t know it. 

🕒 07:00 🕒 

Wake up, it's raining. Think about booking a cruise somewhere sunny. Log into Raymond James to see if you can afford it. Raymond James adopted Splunk Cloud for security information and event management (SIEM). Their initial deployment completed in one weekend.

🕒 07:30 🕒 

Get on an early morning Zoom with your parents in the UK and see how they are getting on and if it is raining in London (it probably is). Zoom has teamed up with Splunk to deliver connectivity and happiness, securely.

🕒 08:30 🕒 

Jump in the car and head out to university. Fill up at a Shell petrol station. Shell moved to the cloud with AWS and use Splunk as their cloud based SIEM. Oskar Brink, Shell’s CyberDefence Manager said “Using Splunk Enterprise on AWS, we have a much better way of protecting Shell … than we ever had before.”

🕒 09:05 🕒 

Pick up your favourite chocolate at the petrol station (obviously a Milky Way from Mars). Mars use Splunk Data Stream Processor (DSP) and it allows their security team to create a single repository of security-relevant data from numerous tools across the entire Mars subsidiary portfolio and their respective SOCs. This helps the team accelerate troubleshooting issues and improve overall security posture. 

 🕒 09:30 🕒 

It's still raining and you’ve forgotten your coat. Pop into REI and buy a new one. With AWS & Splunk, REI enhanced edge security during its cloud migration while also gaining threat intelligence and real-time visibility across applications, services and security infrastructure.

🕒 10:00 🕒 

Arrive at Arizona University who are using Splunk to help the shift to remote work in the pandemic to help ensure students could work effectively. They unified data from the school’s VPN, SSO and MFA systems, wireless network usage and Zoom traffic for better and stronger security practices. There’s more from Lanita Collette, Deputy CIO and CISO in their latest case study. 

🕒 10:30 🕒 

Open up your Dell laptop for your economics class. Dell are using Splunk Phantom for SOAR.

🕒 10:31 🕒 

Dell laptop has an Intel chip inside so super fast boot and update. Intel’s Information Security is much more agile than it’s ever been in the past thanks to their use of Splunk and they are using machine learning to significantly increase the depth and speed of their cyber intelligence.

🕒 12:00 🕒 

Complete your lecture on international economics using The Bank Of England as a case study in financial stability and modernization. The Bank Of England have used Splunk to build their SOC 2.0 which is protecting the trillion dollars (£700 billion) or so that moves through their systems every day.

🕒 13:00 🕒 

Get home and time for some cardio and a 3 mile personal best. Put on your ASICs running shoes and head out for a sub 20 minuter. Asics have heightened business security due to real-time visibility into incidents and threats thank to their use of Splunk. 

🕒 14:30 🕒 

Get on a secure Slack call with your classmates. Slack use Splunk for their 12 million daily active users. Larkin Ryder, Slack Director of Product Security talks about Splunk as “a key part of Slack’s ability to operate a zero trust network because Splunk gives us the visibility into all the activity that’s happening across all of our cloud services."

🕒 15:30 🕒 

Work through the next self learning unit as part of your university course with a McGraw Hill online class confident your information is secure.

🕒 17:30 🕒 

Still raining. Book that cruise with Carnival that you’ve been looking at. Gary Eppinger, chief information security officer and global privacy officer, Carnival Corporation says “Our biggest security challenge from a Carnival and an industry perspective is the shipboard applications and systems. My role is all about security — and that includes protecting customers’ information every day.” Carnival use Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise Security to help with that. 

🕒 17:45 🕒 

Pay for the cruise using your Mastercard. Mastercard is fighting fraud with Splunk.

🕒 18:30 🕒 

All this shopping and studying is hungry work. Time for Domino’s Pizza, who are using Splunk to proactively identify external threats, mitigate threats faster, ensure internal system health and protect customer data.

🕒 18:45 🕒 

While you’re waiting for the pizza - check out flights to the Caribbean to start the cruise you just booked with Skyscanner. Their deep dive technical presentation from .conf can be found here.

🕒 19:00 🕒 

Someone comes to the door - see if it is Domino’s on your Arlo connected home security camera. Arlo uses Splunk Cloud for security and Jishnu Kinwar, Arlo’s VP of Cloud Platform Engineering explains “Do we get attacked? Absolutely. But Splunk allows us to see what’s happening in real time, so we can immediately act on our data and prevent those issues”.

🕒 22:00 🕒 

Go to bed and repeat tomorrow (and hope it’s not raining). 

We’d love to see you at the Summer Of Security that kicked off with the launch (that’s conveniently on-demand) - it really is time for a breach vacation. :-) 

As always, thanks for reading. 

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Thanks!
Matt Davies