Strengthening Australia's Government Data and Digital Services with Splunk Digital Resilience

As the Splunk Industry Advisor to the Australian public sector, I work closely with government organisations and their leaders to understand their goals, objectives and the challenges they face in achieving digital resilience. This blog shares perspectives on how Splunk works with Australian government to provide a unique approach to solve some of the public sector's toughest challenges. 

The Australian Government has an ambitious Data and Digital 2030 vision to deliver simple, secure, and connected public services for all people and businesses through world-class data and digital capabilities.

Minister Gallagher's foreword to the strategy highlights the opportunities that data and digital technologies can have in improving government service delivery and decision-making, with a goal of better outcomes for all people and businesses.

The Data and Digital 2030 vision has an associated roadmap and implementation plan, which is made up of the following core components:

1. Delivering for all people and business
2. Simple and seamless services
3. Government of the future
4. Trusted and secure
5. Data and digital foundations

Splunk has been supporting Australian governments in implementing their respective Digital visions. We have a dedicated and passionate team of professionals spread across the country, supporting our Federal, State, and Local Government customers. 

For over 15 years, we have been partnering with key government agencies to support cyber resilience and missions, data-driven decision-making and implement robust data-sharing systems. Building upon this trajectory, Splunk will continue to leverage our team’s expertise and explore opportunities to extend our capabilities to serve the government effectively.

The government has strongly emphasised cooperation between industry and government to ensure Australia can address cyber risks effectively. This is an opportunistic time for Splunk to lead the way for new solutions.

Splunk's Approach to the Australian Public Sector

Splunk’s primary approach for the Australian public sector is strengthening public services through digital resilience and increasing cyber preparedness. Citizens depend on the public sector and expect public services to be efficient and always available. 

Splunk is committed to helping build digital resilience into government services amid rising cybersecurity threats, compliance mandates and increased reliance on data and digital. Splunk operates across all levels of the Australian government; it does so with the knowledge that digitally resilient business outcomes enable the nation's prosperity. As a result of the work that Splunk has delivered, our partnership with government has grown to:

1. Serve over 85 Australian Federal Government entities who use Splunk to protect government services
2. With our major partners, we safeguard data and digital services consumed by more than 85% of Australian citizens

Splunk's world-leading security capabilities underpin cybersecurity operations centres, protecting governments and enterprises. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond supporting cybersecurity operations, we have a three-pronged approach that enables digital resilience and drives business outcomes across the Australian public sector through:

1. Accelerating digital transformation
2. Service delivery excellence and exceptional citizen digital experiences
3. Secure and resilient operations

This approach to enabling digital resilience  directly addresses some of the public sector's toughest challenges including:

1. Meeting citizen expectations that digital services are high-quality, consistently available, fast and easy-to-use
2. Tackling rapid IT landscape change, making it harder for public sector organisations to keep up with innovation and meet budget demands
3. Maintaining public trust and national security

So, how does Splunk intend to continue to help the Australian Government build increased digital resilience?

Build Digitally Resilient Australian Government Data and Digital Services

When it comes to digital resilience, it's important to start by defining what it means. To us, digital resilience is “the ability to prevent, detect, recover and respond to events that have the potential to disrupt business processes and services.” In more detail, this means:

• Visibility: How well teams can see across their technology environment, including quality and fidelity of data and completeness of coverage
• Detection: How well organisations leverage data to identify potential issues, including detection coverage and alerting
• Investigation: How well organisations use data to search for potential issues and accelerate analysis, including enrichment, threat hunting and searching logs, metrics and traces
• Response: How quickly security, IT and DevOps teams respond to day-to-day issues or incidents
• Collaboration: How well teams and their tools facilitate working cross-functionally across security, IT and DevOps

In Summary

Our work at Splunk never stops. As citizens and Splunkers, we are passionate and committed to building increased digital resilience into government services and sourcing insights from across the globe to enable innovative delivery of data and digital services for Australians.

Splunk will continue to help Australian governments build a foundation of resilience that:

• Enables public sector organisations to minimise downtime, mitigate risk and prepare for change 
• Supports agencies to manage digital transformation more effectively and integrate new technologies more efficiently 
• Drives crucial cross-functional communication and collaboration within teams and across agencies to build stronger digital resilience capabilities
• Empowers public sector leaders to be prepared to adapt to anything and achieve mission success

This blog is the first in a series that explains how Splunk enables Australian public sector organisations to deliver the ambitious Data and Digital 2030 vision.

For more details please visit our APAC Public sector website.