Delivering on the Nation’s Cyber Strategy Together: GovSummit 2023 in Review

I just returned from GovSummit 2023, Splunk’s largest, free annual event for public sector leaders in our nation’s capital. Registration and attendance far exceeded our expectations and spirits were high.

Every year, GovSummit provides a unique opportunity for public sector leaders to learn, connect and share solutions to meet the government's most important challenges. This was my second time attending GovSummit since joining Splunk as vice president of public sector, and I had a great time hosting the event and seeing so many of you. For those who couldn't make it this time, I’ll try to sum it up. Here are my three key takeaways:

• Building digital resilience for every mission is imperative. 
• AI is most effective when purpose-built and humans are kept in the loop.
• Splunk is your trusted partner to help you deliver on the nation’s cyber strategy. 

Building Digital Resilience

In my role leading public sector business strategy and sales execution at Splunk, I work closely with our customers to ensure they have the best solutions in the industry to support their mission. And I know the challenges government leaders face every day. Digital transformation has accelerated so fast that nearly every facet of our lives is now digitized — even our drinking water. This makes ensuring the security and reliability of these systems foundational to delivering on mission success. Not to mention that with regulations like M-21-31, NSM-8 and M-22-09, it’s now required.

Our opening keynote program helped drive home the reality that as digital ecosystems continue to grow in complexity and scale, so do the opportunities for new threat actors and other digital risks. The good news? With a strong foundation of digital resilience, agencies can prepare and respond rapidly to whatever comes their way. And Splunk empowers public sector leaders to build it. 

Human-In-The-Loop AI for Proactive Problem Solving

AI advancements happen so fast, it’s hard to predict exactly what the next year (or even the next month) will hold, but our work and philosophy is solidly grounded in the belief that the highest value initial application of AI is to accelerate human decision making to improve digital resilience.

When Splunk and researchers at Foundry surveyed more than 200 cybersecurity professionals, 80% of all decision makers said their organization is using AI to address cybersecurity, and almost half of public sector respondents said they plan to use AI to increase productivity through automation. Most respondents say they plan to use AI to advance their missions within a year.

As the threat landscape evolves and our reliance on digital systems grows, we’re all now tasked with finding more needles across more haystacks — and we have to do it faster than ever. That’s why at Splunk our AI strategy is founded on three pillars:

1. To be domain- and Splunk-specific, with insights derived from real-world experience that are specific to your workflows and environment. 
2. To ensure humans are in the loop — and always in the driver’s seat.
3. To remain open and extensible so you can extend our models or bring in your own.

As we continue to advance AI capabilities across our portfolio, I’m excited about our AI future where we’ll bring you specific security and observability insights, combined with context from your Splunk environment, that are tightly integrated into your workflow to make your jobs easier.

Partnering with Splunk

We have to be able to prioritize our efforts in this threat-rich world. Security teams are overwhelmed by the increasing number of attacks on their networks and have to make hard choices about where to spend their limited time and efforts for detection and threat hunting. No one understands that better than SURGe, Splunk’s team of security experts, threat researchers, and advisors, who shared expert strategies for helping security teams focus that energy for the biggest return on investment.

Throughout the day, GovSummit attendees also learned how Splunk solutions can help solve the sector’s most pressing challenges, in workshops such as embracing Zero Trust architecture and using Splunk Attack Analyzer for automated threat analysis.

A big thank you to everyone who attended and our partners and sponsors who helped make it a success. On behalf of the entire team, thank you for letting Splunk help you achieve mission success.

If you’d like to learn more about how sector leaders plan on using AI to achieve positive outcomes, feel free to read our latest research report The Rising AI Tide: Achieving Digital Resilience.

I hope to see you next year at Splunk GovSummit 2024. 

Until next time,
Bill Rowan