Can Data Drive Insightful Decision-Making? Splunk Says Emphatically Yes!
Few people would argue they don’t have access to enough data. It’s easy to suffer from data overload, especially when trying to connect disparate data sources from multiple locations to make business relevance out of it all.
Let's face it: Companies possess a wealth of data. But, all too often, they lack the bandwidth to process and effectively extract its pertinent value. Furthermore, silos compound the data issue.
In large organizations, the data needed to make decisions is often spread across numerous internal and external departments. Then you’ve got an array of supplier channels and customers across the globe, potentially complicating your access to data even more. Again, this is counterintuitive to productivity.
Splunk can help delete this struggle from your company’s list of pain points by enabling you to build a strong data foundation and helping you remove the barriers between data and action.
It All Starts with Data
In order to make informed decisions, companies need a "big picture" view. Unfortunately, that’s a tricky vantage point to achieve if they’re forced to dig for relevant data and manually compile distributed reports.
Enterprise data is everywhere. And organizations use a multitude of tools to access and gather that data. Below are just a few examples:
- Network monitoring tracks and collects data for various network parameters like availability, throughput, packet loss, and storage performance.
- Database monitoring measures and tracks key metrics like business transaction response time, query performance, and hardware capacity, such as CPU cycles.
- Security information and event management (SIEM) tools collect log data and live network traffic from network devices, servers, and domain controllers. This allows organizations to discover trends, detect threats, and investigate alerts.
While decision-making is driven by data, you need more than data alone to make strategic and sound business calls. First, you need information. Next, you need insights.
How Data Becomes Information
Data and information are often used interchangeably, a reasonable assumption as they are so tightly related. However, distinct differences do exist between these two terms.
Data is the most basic “level” of knowledge. It’s often collected as the result of recording a system or an environment action. Typically, it represents numbers, characters, or symbols. Simply put, data is raw input and often has little to no significance when it exists in that form.
Data gains context, relevance, and meaning when multiple streams are grouped and processed. This organization of data is called “information.”
Here’s an easy way to illustrate the difference between data and information: A medical professional may first take your body temperature if you’re not feeling well. A reading of 98.6 Fahrenheit may be considered “normal;” however, that one single data point alone is not sufficient to determine your overall health. Your doctor may also measure your blood pressure, heart rate, and listen to your heart and lungs. The additional vitals taken during the exam are organized to create a diagnosis, also known as information.
How Information Becomes Insights
While you can use information to make decisions, having context and business relevance elevates your ability to make better decisions. The combination of these three is known as “insights.”
What are insights in business?
Insights look at trends and patterns to create a more detailed view. Insights also create an environment where knowledge is easier to share and digest.
While information is vital for making decisions, insights offer that “aha” moment. Suddenly, you’re able to see information in a more purposeful context. You gain confidence in decision-making because it has backup, which can trust itself. Better outcomes.
Let’s take the medical exam analogy a step further. A doctor honing in on a diagnosis looks at additional factors to understand the context of the illness. For instance, time of year, weather, patient stress level, and diagnoses of others could help provide a more detailed and insightful analysis of that patient's overall health and potential causes.
Just like a doctor pulls data from other sources to specify a diagnosis, Automox works with leading SIEM partners, like Splunk, to collect and centralize Automox endpoint details, events, and policies to drive further data information and insights.
Automox and Splunk Help Drive More Insightful Decisions
Automox has created two apps for Splunk customers to integrate our data within Splunk to drive deeper insights:
1. The Automox Technology Add-On for Splunk extracts, transforms, and loads (ETL) Automox data within your Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud environment with endpoint details, policy details, and Automox console events.
2. The Automox Dashboard for Splunk enables the curation of views that can be customized and expanded upon. This helps create additional context and business relevance within a single pane of visibility through the Splunk console.
What are the benefits of adding Automox to your Splunk environment?
- Triage events faster
- Enhance cross-team visibility
- Access merged contextual data with Splunk data sources to make faster data-driven decisions
- View a single source of truth for quick operational and security decisions
- Uncover device patterns and trends with enriched data insights and viewing capabilities
Now, you can stop guessing which devices require attention. You won't have to cross-reference the data from separate reporting tools. That old process drained your time and allowed your adversaries to expose outstanding vulnerabilities.
With Automox and Splunk, you’ll stay better informed and more secure with a single source of truth that provides insights for fast, data-driven decisions.
You can learn more about how adding Automox to Splunk will help you make faster, data-driven decisions here. Also, be sure to download the Automox + Splunk Solution Brief on getting a single source of truth for faster data-driven decisions.
– How can I secure my data with automated patching?
– How can I improve remote employee data security?
– How can I grow and mature my vulnerability management program?
Automox for Easy IT Operations
Automox is cloud-native IT operations for the modern distributed workforce. It makes it easy to keep every endpoint up to date automatically across Windows, macOS and Linux – anywhere in the world. With the push of a button, IT admins can fix critical vulnerabilities, power workforce productivity, and win back hours in their day.
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