Drive Public Sector Efficiencies of Scale with Splunk and AWS

Today’s public sector organizations are tasked with delivering a staggering amount of technology capabilities to support a growing set of digital services, meet IT modernization goals, and continue to protect against a wide range of attack vectors. Cloud technology adoption has played a significant role in ensuring that ongoing IT modernization not only aligns with each organization’s mission-strategic capabilities but also enables efficiencies of scale. Specifically, Splunk and Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer cloud solutions that address the public sector’s budgetary spending constraints, help manage the growing data volume, and execute digital resilience with a measurable return on investment.

Smart Cloud Investments: Planning for Long-Term Efficiency and Value

Naturally, budgets are at the forefront of everyone’s mind when it comes to mission IT modernization. Cloud as a technology has now become a critical capability in which public sector organizations invest time and money to “do more with less” for efficiencies of scale. Here, efficiencies of scale means ensuring that technology investments meet the organization’s capability needs today and deliver measurable value into the foreseeable future.

In many cases, public sector organizations discover that the initial cloud migration costs may seem high, but operational efficiencies and long-term savings can more than make up for the difference over time. It is important to perform cloud infrastructure planning, review supporting technology consolidation, and perform optimization assessments during and after cloud migration. For example, the Splunk team and engineers build cloud total cost of ownership assessment models that reflect real-world use cases. Included in these models are parameters such as the number of years of cloud operation, data center compliance requirements, and data ingest licensing options. The assessments are organization-specific and are comprehensive enough to compare Splunk Cloud hosted on AWS infrastructure against a comparable on-premises architecture or that of another cloud provider. 

An often overlooked cost of operating a cloud that hosts public sector data is the authority to operate. This authority is different from a certification and is specifically granted by the government sector FedRAMP program. Many people do not realize that public sector organizations have strict regulations to operate and store their data in a cloud environment. The authorization is performed by an external FedRAMP auditor who validates that the cloud architecture is operating at the FedRAMP-authorized level; for example, FedRAMP High or Moderate. As a FedRAMP-authorized environment, Splunk’s cloud is authorized to meet over 350 NIST security controls. That means organizations don’t need to stand up, test, and authorize their environments from scratch. 

Data Currency: Unlocking Value Through Smart Licensing and Federated Analytics

Data is the currency for efficiencies of scale. How much and what type of data does an organization have? With the rising data volume, organizations face challenges managing the sheer volume of data across their complicated hybrid environments and sorting the data for analytic use. 

Splunk offers two license types: ingest-based and workload-based. Ingest-based license charges are determined by the daily volume of data ingested (indexed) into Splunk. Workload-based licensing charges are tied to actual resource usage (compute power and memory), not data volume. Therefore, selecting the correct license based on an organization’s daily and foreseeable data utilization helps with managing its forecasted data utilization. 

The other part of that is the ability to index and perform analytics on the data for “fit for use.” Fit for use means the data is presented and analyzed in a way that benefits the use case. For example, an organization can have both on-premises and cloud-based data lakes (a hybrid solution due to clearance classification assigned to the data). Splunk’s ability to federate gives that organization the capability to search across separate Splunk environments (or instances) from a single interface without having to duplicate or move the data. So, integrations such as Splunk Federated Analytics and Amazon Security Lake enable organizations within the public sector to efficiently access, search, and correlate data from various sources.

Resilience With Purpose: Measuring Value and Efficiency

Resilience in the public sector doesn’t just mean checking activity boxes and maintaining uptime. It’s about reducing time to value, lowering risk, and freeing up staff resources to focus on value realization activities. One such value realization activity would be aligning data source type to a use case capability. With multiple use case examples, Splunk and AWS provide a consistent tool set and capabilities — such as mature observability frameworks and Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances — to help organizations stay flexible and sustain their resilience. Splunk Observability is a suite of cloud-native solutions designed for real-time monitoring, troubleshooting, and observability of modern infrastructure, applications, and especially microservices and cloud-native environments.

It’s not the same as traditional Splunk (i.e., Splunk Enterprise), which focuses on log indexing and searches. Splunk Observability is a separate platform, purpose-built for metrics, traces, logs, and user experience monitoring — the core pillars of observability.

Within this context, the overarching use of the word efficiency in technology needs a working definition. When you say efficiency, you should include metrics and units of measure — units like dollars, hours, or gigabytes that are applied to results or outcomes to see value over time. I always say, “It’s not value unless you can measure it in units.” I would add that efficiency of scale is value measured over time.

Final Thoughts

Splunk Cloud runs on AWS’s highly resilient and FedRAMP-authorized infrastructure. It allows organizations to seamlessly ingest, store, and analyze immense amounts of data at scale. It can also perform data normalization from across diverse technologies, accelerating time to insights and facilitating service outcomes. All told, consolidating technology capabilities around cloud solutions lowers organizational infrastructure costs and allows for automation of activities and tasks normally performed by staff resources. At the same time, the automation of cybersecurity tasks adds to an organization’s operational resilience. Look at the cloud’s potential when it comes to emerging and evolving technologies. With AI and automation capabilities integrated into Splunk and AWS cloud solutions, organizations can shorten the time from incident to resolution and deliver service results faster and with fewer resources.

If you missed us at the recent AWS Summit DC, find out more about the Splunk and AWS partnership and how it can help your organization stay resilient. To dig deeper, contact us to set up a meeting.