Data Analytics

Indiana U Selects Splunk to Deliver Operational Intelligence Across IT and Security Departments

• By Sri Ravipati
• 03/28/17

Indiana University (IU) recently launched a connected campus initiative to tear down silos and better analyze, scale and leverage its machine data. To this end, IU has implemented two solutions from Splunk that give campus leadership a consolidated view of IT and security infrastructure for the university’s eight campuses, in real time.

IU selected the Splunk platform to centralize and monitor its growing IT infrastructure (upwards of 5,250 servers and 100 departments) while staying on budget. The Splunk Enterprise solution monitors and analyzes machine data from any source to deliver operational intelligence to IT teams, while Splunk Enterprise Security, a security information and event management (SIEM) solution, enables security teams to quickly respond to internal and external attacks.

In addition, IU’s University Information Technology Services (UITS) team customized the Splunk dashboard — improving the log aggregation and authentication process. As a result, UITS has automated much of its data ingestion process.

“Like every public university IT or security team in the country, Indiana is being asked to manage an ever-increasing volume of data on a tight budget. Splunk has helped us do more with less by delivering a return on investment in ways we did not imagine possible,” said Allen Tucker, director of IT, HELPnet Technology Services at IU, in a news release. “While we first brought on Splunk to help drive university policy and compliance alignment, we immediately saw value in security applications as well. Fast forward a few months and Splunk has already helped our entire IT team automate tasks that would traditionally require significant headcount. Creating this kind of automation and scale has saved time, decreased costs and increased compliance.”