SAN FRANCISCO – August 14, 2019 – Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK), delivering actions and outcomes from the world of data, today announced Clemson University is unlocking new levels of data-driven decision making. By leveraging the Splunk® data platform and its machine learning capabilities, the university is gaining institutional insights into security, IT operations, online learning and overall student success.

Driven by the global rise of data, higher education institutions are evolving rapidly to embrace technology, establish connected campuses and improve the student experience. As campuses become more digital and connected, higher education is also seeing an ever-growing challenge with taking action on data in order to achieve institutional goals.

Recognizing the importance of data-driven decision making to remain secure and competitive for talent and students, Clemson initially embarked on its data journey with Splunk Enterprise in 2015. The opportunity to use data to inform decisions at the institutional level provided real strategic value to the university, especially when it started ingesting data from Canvas, the school’s learning management system (LMS) of choice.

“Before adopting Splunk, we made decisions based on intuition and had siloed visibility into our IT, network and security operations,” said Nitin Madhok, director of business intelligence and advanced data analytics, Clemson University. “Splunk gave us a unified view of our enterprise and allowed us to begin exploring how data could solve challenges at the institutional level, not just in security and IT.”

Splunk sits at the heart of Clemson’s digital infrastructure, where it helps investigate, monitor, analyze and act on more than two terabytes of data per day. With Splunk, analysts across Clemson’s Security Operations Center (SOC) and Network Operations Center (NOC) can take action on data, leading to outcomes that can improve student success. For example, Clemson uses Splunk to interpret LMS data reflecting students’ log-in habits, interactions with the platform and material download/review patterns. This helps Clemson create a complete picture of a successful student and use it to identify at-risk individuals and provide additional support to improve grades.

"The ability to visualize long-term data from our learning management system has supported multiple efforts within our department,” said Matthew Briggs, interim director of Clemson Online. “Splunk has given us the ability to quickly and accurately analyze course activity, including tool integrations. It has significantly reduced the time needed to develop reports while giving us the ability to share effective visualizations with campus leadership. Future phases of this project will not only continue to inform business decisions, but will support best practices with education at Clemson.”

Clemson also uses Splunk to analyze and act on data from its IT helpdesk, which receives more than 40,000 calls and 20,000 walk-in requests every year. With Splunk, Clemson can better predict and prepare for issues that create campus-wide downtime, such as load balancing and planning. By using Splunk to provide increased data visibility to help desk personnel, Clemson has reduced misreported errors and mean-time-to-resolution for support tickets.

“We’ve seen data grow more tangled and chaotic in a very short time. Clemson University has done a tremendous job taking advantage of their data to fuel positive change on-campus impacting not only IT and security but the student body’s success,” said Frank Dimina, vice president of public sector at Splunk. “Splunk is proud to provide this leading science and engineering institution with the unique ability to turn data into action.”

To learn more about how Clemson University and other leading higher education institutions are using Splunk, please visit the Splunk website.