With the $28B aquisition now complete between Cisco and Splunk, both vendors will soon be in heavy marketing mode as they position their new combined offerings (under Cisco) to “unify the full power of network and endpoint data with leading Security and Observability solutions, all underpinned by our highly scalable, AI-powered data platform“.
The combination of Cisco and Splunk will provide truly comprehensive visibility and insights across an organization’s entire digital footprint, delivering an unprecedented level of resilience through the most extensive and powerful security and observability product portfolio on the market.
Gary Steele| VP Splunk.
So what does that mean?
Unification and Choice
According to the new Splunk website and publicly facing collateral, the combining of forces is destined to offer the following value and connected experiences to their combined customer base.
- Power the SOC of the Future, by
- improving the efficacy, efficiency, and economics of defending organisations and service providers against modern security threats, offering what they claim will be the “most comprehensive security solutions for threat prevention, detection, investigation and response.”
- Continuing to deliver Splunk’s existing security and monitoring platforms, while adding Splunk technology to Cisco’s existing portfolio with enhanced network, endpoint and cloud data for” unparalleled insights and faster remediation“.
- Enhancing Cisco’s security offerings across the board to help organisations secure users, protect infrastructure, and improve prevention, detection and remediation with Cisco’s User Protection, Breach Protection, and Cloud Protection suites which is fed from Cisco’s Talos data intelligence platform.
- Enrich Observability across all and any environment by:
- Offering a comprehensive full-stack observability solution, enhancing customers’ ability to deliver seamless digital experiences and prevent downtime across any environment, combining and joining Cisco Thousand Eyes and App Dymanics with Splunk’s portfolio of products.
- Continue to offer choice to customers, by offering unified solutions as well as the individual Cisco and Splunk whilst providing unified management and insights.
- Create a world leading observability platform through the Integration of the best of Cisco and Splunk technology leading to an holistic ability ability to detect and remediate incidents, empowering IT Teams to focus on enablement, security and digital transformation rather than troubleshooting performance and issues.
What about AI?
Yes… Cisco and Splunk also talk alot about AI empowerment and execution. After all, AI workloads are intense, drive traffic into different places and have a profound impact on how people use and access data and applications.
Aimed more at organisations who build and operate on their own data, rather than consume SaaS, the fuel of AI and its ability to provide information and serve requests is reliant on fast and secure access to models trained on huge volumes of the data.
Cisco beleive that their combined forces will bring an unmatched breadth of data through allowing organisations to build, scale and tune, highly scalable data platforms while ensuring performace and security at scale.
The competition?
The race to empower and secure both traditional and AI powered workloads continues up pace. Cisco have a great history of building arguably the best networking technologies in the world, have one of best SaaS performance monitoring platforms and now with the added arsenal of products from Splunk, puts them in a great position to win over customers, partners and MSPs with a unified offering.
Cisco have struggled to win hearts and minds with security for years but this combining of forces gives them an ACE card to play. Whether they will get this right (from a hearts and minds, price and integration) is yet to be seen, but Cisco have a great track record of integrating technologies from vendors their aquire.
More information
More information around the combined entity of Cisco and Splunk are coming in fast and late last week, Cisco ran a customer and partner briefing which is now available on demand here.
Continue reading “Cisco and Splunk – For Security and Observability.”