As data with enterprises and in the cloud grows exponentially, organizations continue to look for ways to harness it and glean diverse insights to help meet business goals. While there are numerous tools for managing and monitoring data, few can provide a universal approach across all data sources, both on-premise and in the cloud.

Today, many businesses look to Splunk as the ideal solution. With adoption outpacing most similar management and monitoring solutions, Splunk was named a leader in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management for the fifth straight year.

Ultimately, the health, security, growth, and cost structures of businesses ranging from SMBs to enterprises is predicated on the data being generated by machines within, across, and from the endpoints of the network. That makes it imperative to have the tools to monitor, search, visualize and also analyze machine-generated data such as application and database logs, as well as website data and much more.

Things become significantly more complicated when those data sets stretch from on-premise systems to the cloud. Overall, the challenges come in several forms, including:

• Having the ability to enable different users with different needs to have highly specific data access

• Having the ability to visualize the data coming from disparate platforms with different languages in a unified way via a single-pane-of-glass interface

• Expanding that ability from on-premise environments to hybrid cloud environments with the same recognizable interface and language

Data disparity among types and end user needs is what drives actionable analytics that improve operational and business performance. But it is this same high variability and usage that requires a single platform that can make the process more agile and flexible while delivering the best outcomes.

One Platform to Manage All Data and Needs

While most organizations have some level of maturity around on-premise data monitoring and analysis, they are often dealing with different data needs and platforms in the cloud when their use cases are less mature. This is particularly true at the migration phase. The challenge is that many organizations are unsure if their present management and monitoring tools for on-premise will be capable of dealing with the different needs in the cloud.

If not, they are then faced with the challenge of dealing with different platforms for management and monitoring on-premise versus in the cloud. How do they get to a single-pane-of-glass approach for both that gives them the same visibility and flexibility for both?

Splunk has emerged as the leading platform to provide management and monitoring for on-premise data sets as well as the increasingly common hybrid cloud scenario. One of the defining characteristics of Splunk is universal sameness regardless of the types of data it’s monitoring. This makes it easy to handle any type of data from any source while being able to manage and monitor it from a single platform and interface.

Splunk can process security log data, performance data or any type of data generated by or coming into the network via endpoints. The result is that a broad spectrum of users with different needs can use the same Splunk platform to manage and monitor vastly different types of data to gain diverse operational intelligence.

How Splunk Scalability Meets Varied SMB and Enterprise Needs

At its heart, Splunk is a highly effective data aggregation tool with an agile and sophisticated search functionality. Most organizations can start with Splunk based on one or two specific needs in terms of data-set management and monitoring. The scalability of the solution in terms of data aggregation and storage enables them to scale out and meet additional needs as they arise.

Many enterprises have implemented the Splunk platform on a large scale and share the SMB need to reduce on-premise data center storage and compute costs via the cloud. This is where Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud can come into play.

Splunk Cloud allows users to search, analyze, and take apart a wealth of data trawled from various pools such as IoT, websites, and apps all in the cloud. Splunk Enterprise is designed to work seamlessly with Splunk Cloud so that users can conduct searches on data that has been indexed in both spots.

Although there are countless need scenarios among Splunk Cloud users, they generally vary between small-deployment users that work from a self-service model and those that utilize Splunk on-premise as well as via the hybrid cloud model. With security being a foundational concern on-premise as well as in the cloud, Splunk enables users to correlate various security data to ensure tracking across all environments via a single platform.

As data volume and sources continue to grow as part of an agile IT infrastructure environment, organizations must find ways to make the data actionable. Splunk helps SMBs and enterprises harness that data in numerous ways, both on-premise and in the cloud, while providing a common interface for users.