Splunk inspires customer confidence in AWS cloud | #AWSSummit by Rachel Schramm | Apr 10, 2015 Splunk Inc. is sweet on Amazon Web Services, Inc.’s AWS platform — and the feeling is mutual. “We couldn’t be more excited with the growth we’re experiencing,” said Marc Olesen, SVP & GM of Cloud Solutions at Splunk. The relationship between Splunk and AWS is “very strategic,” said Olesen. In a world where “every customer has a cloud strategy,” according to Olesen, it’s essential that customers are confident that their workloads will be as secure and perform as well as it would on-premises. The security and performance that Splunk provides helps ensure workload security, facilitating their move to the AWS cloud. Different licensing ensures customer choice While Olesen values the relationship with AWS, he acknowledged that it’s important that customers have a range of choices. At Splunk that means “[giving] them the flexibility to buy the way they want,” said Olesen, in the form of perpetual subscription licensing. Splunk also has a hybrid solution that enables clients to “deploy Splunk on-premises and Splunk Cloud at the same time,” Olesen explained. What’s key about the hybrid solution is that it functions seamlessly between the different environments: “users don’t have to know where data is when they search,” Olesen said. Open to new possibilities Machine learning is an exciting prospect for Splunk, because of the possibilities it offers for new functionality opportunities. This possibility offers all kinds of prospects, Olesen explained, including analyzing data that’s been in flight and correlating it with “other sources of data.” This concept would enable Splunk to tap into new opportunities. Indeed, Splunk is looking to the future and seeing possibilities beyond it’s current focus on IT operations. New areas of focus include application operations and security. Splunk and Security In fact, Olesen pointed out, security use cases makes up around 40% of Splunk’s use cases. His company adds value to the security picture by indexing data sources. Once data sources are indexed, “now you have aggregation,” Olesen explained, and it’s much easier to achieve correlation across data sources. Splunk’s capabilities dovetail well with current security trends, which are “so much more about detection right now,” according to Olesen. The ability to aggregate and correlate data enables fast compliance audits that give clients the abilities to see “who’s doing what, who’s logging in where” the better to “detect breeches,” he stated further. The future of Splunk Olesen reported that Splunk is moving towards what he called a “solutions focus.” That means building a new series of groups within the company, including “security markets group, IT markets group, Cloud business group,” and a “business analytics group,” Olesen said. Furthermore, Olesen said that that Splunk is excited about the Internet of Things. In comparison to Splunk’s currently very horizontally focus, Olesen says that he predicts IoT will be very “vertically-oriented” and address customers of all sizes. Splunk, Olesen remarked, is “excited about the solutions we can build” with new technologies.