Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Defend What Matters with Splunk Education

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month – a reminder that protecting data and digital infrastructure isn’t just an IT responsibility; it’s everyone’s responsibility. At Splunk, I lead a team of security-focused technical training curriculum developers, so I live and breathe cybersecurity education and training. I see firsthand how critical it is for both individuals and organizations to stay sharp, stay curious, and stay vigilant. Cyber threats evolve constantly, but so do we. And I believe our evolution starts with learning.

Empowering Defenders Through Splunk Education

At Splunk Education, our mission is to empower users and learners at every level. Whether you’re an analyst who’s triaging alerts, an engineer automating responses, or a leader building a security operations center (SOC) strategy, Splunk’s security learning ecosystem gives you the skills to detect, investigate, and respond with confidence. Our hands-on courses in Splunk Enterprise Security (ES), Splunk SOAR, and our Cybersecurity Defense Analyst (CDA) and Cybersecurity Defense Engineer (CDE) certifications are designed to help you think like a threat hunter and act like an incident responder.

Expanding Access, Opportunity, and Global Reach

But how effective is great training without access and opportunity? Through the Splunk Academic Alliance program more than 300 universities worldwide are training the next generation of cybersecurity professionals using free Splunk software licenses and coursework. I find it so inspiring to know that Splunk is ensuring that students who graduate with a cybersecurity focus are ready to defend critical networks using Splunk on day one. And with our Authorized Learning Partners (ALPs), students everywhere can scale their learning globally while receiving the same quality instruction provided by Splunk instructors. The bottom line is that training and education are the keys to fully optimizing our Splunk technology.

Continuous Learning for a Changing Threat Landscape

As a life-long learner, I am in good company when I say that continuous learning doesn’t end when class does. Splunk Education offers 80+ free self-paced courses, now with many designed with non-English captions. To supplement our product coursework, we offer learners a free resource called Splunk Lantern. This customer success site provides practical guidance, tutorials, and use cases written by experts to assist users in maximizing the value of their Splunk products. And, for a more immersive, community-based experience, learners can attend Splunk University and enroll in one-, two-, and three-day technical training tracks. In fact, this year at Splunk University we led dedicated security tracks, which were new role‑based tracks designed to support users at different levels of SOC proficiency.

Growing with Purpose and with the Power of Cisco

After more than a decade at Splunk, I’ve seen our technology, our learners, and our mission evolve in extraordinary ways. What hasn’t changed is our commitment to helping the world’s cyber defenders use data and Splunk as a powerful, ever-evolving shield of protection. Now, as part of the Cisco family, I think we’re getting even stronger with an expanded reach and moreaccess to shared intelligence. Thanks to our evolving integration, we’re building unified learner paths that merge analytics, automation, and AI-driven security operations.

While I am grateful that there’s a month-long focus on cybersecurity awareness each year, if I had my way, we’d be evangelizing it every day. But, come to think of it, I guess my team actually does do this every day.

If you’re ready to level up your skills or empower your team, visit the Splunk Education website for an overview of our training and certification programs, and follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates, success stories, and learning opportunities.