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Rackspace shoves Splunk in its data trunk

Managed cloud biz’s next move? Machine learning, obviously

Managed cloud provider Rackspace has announced it is using Splunk to power its decision analytics engine - and plans to use the software provider’s machine learning tool next.

The deal, revealed today, sees Rackspace leveraging Splunk’s Enterprise and Enterprise Security across all its business processes, including business intelligence, DevOps, compliance and security.

Rackspace ingests nearly 3TB of data every day, and then uses Splunk to diagnose anomalous activity and fix issues across its processes - something Splunk claims speeds up security fixes and saves the company cash.

According to the analytics-flinger, it will increase the speed of the company’s security event detection times by 70 per cent, allow security and compliance teams to investigate high-priority security incidents 70 per cent faster, and cut the financial impact of security outages by “at least 50 per cent”.

Dave Neuman, vice president and chief information security officer at Rackspace, was full of praise for Splunk ES, saying it allowed his IT team to “gain visibility across thousands of endpoints continuously – including servers, network devices, security scans and threat feeds – enabling faster threat detection and resolution for our customers”.

The company started off by using Splunk at the grassroots level, Neuman said, with small network teams running log analysis and application management to streamline IT troubleshooting and operations.

“Once our leadership realised the full potential of Splunk, we broadly deployed Splunk ES to help ensure the success of a major PCI compliance initiative,” Neuman added - his company must comply with 10 areas of PCI security standards in order to host sensitive customer data.

Splunk’s senior vice president of security markets, Haiyan Song, said the aim of the PCI work was to “maintain compliance and improve operations”, and then led on to the broader adoption of the firm’s software, beyond small IT and security teams and into the company as a whole.

The next step for the Rackspace partnership will be machine learning; it said it plans to use Splunk’s Machine Learning Toolkit for its IT, security and business operations in across the company’s automated business processes. ®

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