Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

We use Splunk for log analytics, blocking dangerous files, etc. It helps to shape our security policies. Splunk is managed by our service provider, but we regularly get security insights from them.

I like the search feature and the indexing. It's very fast and comprehensive. It's easily tuned by your service provider, so I can quickly find the results I'm seeking. So it's very practical. We are working with the search feature and using multiple indexes that combine devices from different environments, so it's easy to collect information across environments. 

We can relatively quickly detect some malicious activities based on attack patterns and implement use cases configured by our service provider with help from Splunk. It improves the speed of threat mitigation because you can gather information about the attack patterns from a few days of online activity to block threats and take the necessary actions. 

We implemented Splunk at the end of 2020, so it's been around three years. 

Splunk Enterprise Security is scalable.

We have not been in direct contact with Splunk except for a workshop where I met a few of them. My impression was that they were skilled, experienced experts. They seemed helpful, so I had a good impression.

The service provider deployed Splunk, so I wasn't involved. I had heard that they experienced some difficulties setting it up, but I don't think it was harder to install than other solutions.

Splunk is very expensive. The license is based on the volume of the logs ingested. I was responsible for managing the contract with our service integrator. I don't know the precise details of the competing solution, but I have heard that Splunk is more expensive than others. I don't know what the going rate is on the market, but I think there are at least two competitors that are less expensive. We have experienced a few issues with our service providers in terms of log filtering and ingestion, so we continue to pay a bit more per day for our logs.

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of 10. 

We use the solution for tracking successful and unsuccessful logins. We track privileged account activities and also a variety of other things, like developing use cases for data exfiltration or integration with ETRs and other security tools for data analysis. 

We wanted to solve the issue of unauthorized access, brute force attacks, and exfiltration. It's helped with MITRE ATT&CK frameworks. 

The organization has been able to quickly triage issues and investigate if something is a true threat or not. Most times, it helps our security posture. The level of confidence we have is high. With Splunk, you can query accounts when you see some strange activity. 

It gives me notifications of notable events. 

The default dashboard is very good. We can see our security posture from there.

On-prem and cloud data analysis are good. You can aggregate it if you need to in order to get good data.

Splunk has proven to be great when tracking down anomalous behavior. The logs are excellent. It is the platform in the industry.  You can integrate anything. The amount of information and usability you get out of Splunk is very good.

We do use the Threat Intelligence Manager. It can be integrated with third parties. The actionable intelligence we get is useful. There is sequencing where you can gauge some actionable steps. 

I use the MITRE ATT&CK framework when I am developing a new use case. It helps us discover the overall scope of an incident. Using Splunk is essential in developing that. 

It's good for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. I'd rate it highly in its capabilities. However, if you don't have the knowledge, it may be difficult. You might get a lot of false positives.

It's helped us detect threats very fast, in almost real time. 

We have reduced our alert volume. I'm not sure of the exact number, however, instead of having 100 to 200 false positives, we might get 20 to 30. 

It has helped us speed up our security investigation, although I don't handle it directly. I simply do triage, and it definitely helps there. 

There are a lot of false positives which can cause a lot of fatigue. 

Sometimes, there is latency in the logs. 

When you deploy Splunk, you need a high level of knowledge. You really need to know what you are doing. It requires a lot of things.

They need to come up with straight steps to get things done, to have a step-by-step process to achieve this or that. 

I've been using the solution since 2020.

The stability is okay.

Splunk would tell you, especially on the different licenses they have, your storage, and your level of ingesting, it can vary. 

Splunk needs to be more clear between storage and performance. 

We worked with a client where almost immediately their storage was already in red. They didn't understand their storage needs as that wasn't clear. 

The solution cuts across countries. I'm not sure how many end-users we have.

The scalability is okay. It scales well even though you have to consider your licensing and storage.

Technical support is good. 

Positive

I have used ELK previously. 

I have been involved in the deployment of Splunk in the past.

The initial setup is not so straightforward for those new to it. I'm accredited and have four years of implementation. You really need that level of knowledge. It's straightforward to make a feed, make it compliant, and do field mapping, however, there are many things you need to do before deployment. 

We had six to eight people deploying Splunk. They were all mostly Splunk professionals, who understood the product and devised a plan and timeline for implementation. We integrated the relevant stakeholders into the process. We were connecting to the Splunk Cloud. 

There is a little bit of maintenance required to maintain the infrastructure. 

We used all in-house resources to implement Splunk.

I have witnessed an ROI while using Splunk. There were some incidents previously in which the company lost millions of dollars. Bringing in Splunk has curbed that. 

The pricing is on the high side. It's not a solution for SMEs.

I'm not sure if any other options were evaluated by the company. 

Currently, we are just Splunk customers. 

We do not monitor various clouds; we only monitor one. However, they have a good solution in that we don't need to worry about maintenance if we do. 

We've never used the Mission Control feature.

If someone is looking for the cheapest SIEM solution, there are a lot of open-source options out there. However, Splunk definitely is an option. If a company is bigger, it would benefit from Splunk. They will be paying some money for it, however, it's worth it.

Resilience is important. To some extent, Splunk addresses this as we haven't had any issues. It's important to have resiliency. If your solution is not resilient, you risk security issues. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I would advise others to spell out what you really need and make it measurable so that you will understand if Splunk is right for you. If you are going to use Splunk, it's important to do your due diligence. 

We use Splunk Enterprise Security as our primary security event manager. We collect data from various log sources into our Splunk SIEM to build context around what is happening in our environment. We then use the capabilities of Splunk Enterprise Security and other tools to enrich this data and help us manage the data, events, and detections.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us focus on security. It provides us with data and a number of pre-built learnings that allow us to view the content in very useful ways. We can apply filters to the data to get more value out of it. This is the primary use case for Splunk Enterprise Security: to help us analyze and leverage the content we have.

Monitoring multiple cloud environments can be relatively easy, but it depends on the vendors. There can be challenges, such as ensuring that all of the data is ingested and aligned correctly. This is because vendors, especially in the cloud, can change their log formats at any time. Additionally, some vendors may not provide the same log feeds in the cloud as they do with on-premises solutions. As a result, it is important to be aware of these potential challenges and to take steps to mitigate them.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides reasonable visibility into multiple environments by harnessing the power of Splunk and the data it ingests to unify and provide a consistent view.

Splunk Enterprise Security's threat detection can help our organization find unknown threats and anomalous user behavior. We are early adopters of the user behavior piece, so we are still working to normalize our data. Splunk is working with developers to ensure that they can intake our data. We use Windows Log Forwarding for a lot of our host-based logs. We are leveraging this with an on-premises GPO. The gathering mechanism is a little bit different than what Splunk has seen, but it is still within the realm of acceptable. We are working through this issue.

We have a few different STIX and TAXII feeds that are being processed by the Threat Intelligence Management feature. We are members of a few different organizations that provide these feeds, and we use them as needed. The feeds also feed into some of our security products.

Actionable intelligence provided by Threat Intelligence Management is valuable, but it is important to be aware of its limitations. Threat intelligence can help organizations to correlate and build context around security events, but it is important to remember that the information provided is often brittle and can change quickly. For example, an IP address that is associated with a threat actor today may be used by a legitimate user tomorrow. Additionally, some threat intelligence feeds may be contaminated with false positives, which can lead to false alarms. It is important to carefully evaluate the quality and reliability of the threat intelligence before taking any action. Organizations should also have a process in place to verify and validate any threat intelligence before using it to make security decisions.

Splunk Enterprise Security is a valuable tool for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. I am glad we added it to our security stack. Previously, we ran for a year or so without it, and while we had some capabilities, we were truly missing out on some things by not having Enterprise Security. It definitely added value for us, and I would not go back to not having it. I think it has been a solid addition to our security posture.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us detect threats faster, but the lion's share of the work is still in the process of customizing it to our needs. Taking enterprise security and modifying it to apply to our needs is where we see the biggest bang for the buck. From that perspective, it is probably better for us.

A lot of the prebuilt capabilities in Splunk Enterprise Security are extremely beneficial because they cover all the use cases. I think another important aspect is the consistency of their approach and how methodical they are. This is very helpful because it sets a structure for how we view our data and what we can leverage from it. This page clearly drives us to what is happening and what we need to do, and it has a workflow associated with it. This also helps to reinforce the process. When we deal with security issues, this can always be a challenge. We are dealing with a fire drill, and we need to be able to react. We don't want to make mistakes, and it is easy to do so if we are trying to wing it. However, the structure of this approach helps to reinforce that. I think this is another area that is beneficial in terms of the workflow and how it approaches what it does.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us reduce the volume of alerts we receive. However, we still have to take action on a number of items. Splunk Enterprise Security helped us to do this by ensuring that our input data is accurate and reliable. We are still evolving and maturing in our use of Splunk Enterprise Security, and we believe that it will continue to help us to reduce the volume of alerts we receive and improve our security posture.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps speed up our security investigations to a degree. The workflow is improved, and when we encounter an incident, we can take ownership of it, manage it, dive into individual facets of it, run queries, and expand on them. It makes some items easier to access or understand.

The varied prebuilt feature is the most valuable because it ensures that we have complete coverage over all of the key questions. By seeing how others analyzed the data, we can develop new dashboards and approaches. It is always helpful to see how someone else used a tool to spark ideas about how we can enrich our items based on our specific needs. This feature covers a lot of our core general questions and is helpful, but it also allows us to see what someone who is really focused on this area has done and how we can tune and tweak it to our needs.

It is important to make sure that everything is built off of the threat models and all the underlying items within Splunk. This includes making sure that the log feeds are aligned correctly so that when we look at data and alarms, everything makes sense. Sometimes, I see alarms that are caused by data sources that have snuck in. For example, if my firewall says something about AV, it might get mapped into antivirus. This can happen because firewalls are multipurpose devices, and they can end up in models that aren't really applicable. Part of the problem is the infrastructure within Enterprise Security with how they group data types. For example, authentication data, firewall data, network data, and user-based data are all gathered in different ways. This can lead to confusion, especially when multifunction devices are involved. For example, if a firewall says that antivirus is not enabled, it might still detect something as if it was antivirus-related. This can blur the incidents and the information we have. It is important to identify items that creep in or issues that need to be cleaned. This will help us identify problem areas and their root causes more effectively and quickly. We can then clean up the data model, make sure the lines are correct, and get higher-quality alarms.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for over a year. We have used Splunk as a security SIEM for at least three to four years.

We previously used free Splunk apps.

I believe that Splunk Enterprise Security is worth the price, but it is expensive. I am always trying to balance the need for security with the need to be cost-conscious.

I give Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten.

Using a SIEM is not cheap, no matter how you slice it. So, the first question I would ask is, what are we trying to do with our SIEM? In my opinion, Splunk, including ES shines when we are willing to invest in learning and modifying our SIEM, our solution, and our environment to align it with what we do and how we do it. If we are willing to make that investment to contextualize the security and visibility, then Splunk is a tool that can help us do that. If we are looking for a turnkey solution, where we can just throw logs at something and then pull the arm of the slot machine and get things out, then Splunk is not necessarily the right tool for us. We can get there, but it will be a pricey slot machine. I think we will get the most value out of Splunk if we want to get things that are more contextual to us. We may need to enhance or build off of the Splunk dashboards that ES includes, and that will help us to create dashboards that are extremely relevant to our environment. If we are comfortable with creating Splunk queries, then we will have a lot of power at our fingertips.

To those looking into the solution, I would ask: What are they looking for? What are they willing to invest in? Do they want to understand queries? Do they want to build the knowledge around how to structure them? Are they willing to put in the effort to get the real power out of it, or are they expecting something to tell them what is going on? They need to realize that it is never going to be built for them at that point. So they are going to be getting something generic. They have to consider their specific situation, such as how many people they have on their team, etc. They should also probably take a good stock of what they are trying to log and how long they have to retain it. I have been very happy with our Splunk Cloud instances. They have been very reliable. I think it has been incredibly powerful for us. I think that is also another aspect of whether they are going to have their SIEM in their environment or outside of their environment. They need to think about some of these items. Obviously, Splunk can go either way. They have to make their decisions there. We have been very happy with our Splunk Cloud instance. So that's what's been really good for us. And, also, it takes some of the administrative aspects and puts them on somebody else. That's valuable for us too.

I work on the engineering side, so we build for the SOC. The use cases revolve around how the SOC can better leverage the toolset and how we can improve the tool for the SOC to better identify threats within the environment.

I have used it in previous jobs and found it very useful there. It's important for our organization to have end-to-end visibility. 

We don't have SOAR products from Splunk. I believe that's an important piece if it is offered with this platform to fully have the enterprise end-to-end visibility. While Splunk's offering is great, and we should consider leveraging it, we do have another platform in place. We need to carefully evaluate how Splunk's offerings integrate into the environment to provide that end-to-end visibility.

From the threat landscape view within Splunk Enterprise Security, it is valuable. The fields that are available provide a high-level overview of what is in front of us and drill down further to see the threat landscape that is in your environment. You can further investigate these threats in the Attack Analyzer. So, even with our current setup, we can achieve a degree of end-to-end visibility and threat analysis within the platform.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped improve our organization's ability to ingest and normalize data.

Before this, we used a different SIEM solution, but there was no visualization to it. Splunk gives us the ability to correlate data from different sources, see it in real-time, pull it all together from different landscapes of data sources, pull it all together, and look at the timelines of events about what's going on. It helps to narrow down quickly.

The recent feature updates with AI integrations are even more promising. I believe these will further enhance the SOC's ability to quickly identify threats and, hopefully, mitigate them before they propagate throughout our environment.

The most valuable feature is the ability to look at threats and link them to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. This helps our staff identify threats within our environment and appropriately landscape them.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with relevant context to help guide our investigations. 

At a high level, we can see threat details and then drill down further. It maps to important frameworks, like MITRE ATT&CK, to help us fully understand the origin of threats and where we need to go next to go in our investigative process.

It integrates with other platforms like Attack Analyzer and SOAR, and soon, AI integrations. These will further help us reduce the threat landscape.

We don't have SOAR and AI integrations yet. 

I've been using Splunk Enterprise Security for about a year, but we recently just onboarded Splunk to the organization, so we're still working on permissions that we used at a previous job. 

We're still working on permissions within the organization.

It's a stable product. I've used other SIEMs. It is much easier to navigate. It is more user-friendly. It is understanding SPL (Search Processing Language), coming in, not knowing it at all. 

It is much easier to go to the Splunk documentation, read the Splunk documentation, and understand, "Okay, this is what I'm looking for!" 

At my previous company, they rolled out Splunk and said, "Okay, we're ingesting all the logs in Splunk. Now go and just do it." 

There was no training involved, so I had to go and learn it on my own. And because while the logs were in the environment, I had to just go and go get the logs out of Splunk; I couldn't go to a server anymore or get logs the old-fashioned way. 

I had to learn Splunk quite quickly. It was easy to navigate the documentation, read the documentation, go to the community site, and navigate the community site; getting that information was quite easy. 

So it was a good experience, a much better experience in dealing with some other vendors. I've dealt with things like QRadar, and I had a difficult time even figuring out what their query language was and understanding how to translate that into actually getting a search to pull back data.  

I've worked in some environments where it's been used extensively with enormous amounts of data. 

In my current environment, we're still figuring out how much data to ingest and how it will be managed. We can adjust whatever we want, but it is an enormous amount of it because we are a "Big Data World" now. 

I have used it in environments where we had data lakes upon data lakes. Scalability from Splunk's point of view wasn't an issue. It was able to scale quite easily. 

The issue lies more on the business side like:

• How to maintain that growth? 
• How do you account for that growth? 

I don't think the issue is really from the Splunk standpoint. It's on the business side: How do you make sure you account for that growth in your models?

I had a good experience with support.

Positive

Based on my limited experience, I'd rate it a seven out of ten. However, I have high expectations due to the integrations I see possible, such as SOAR and the upcoming AI integrations. The roadmap for it is out of this world. 

I'm excited to see what Splunk has to offer with the Cisco offerings and the interconnectivity with Cisco.

Our security relies on Splunk Enterprise Security to analyze data models for malware, threats, and MITRE ATT&CK techniques. Pre-built dashboards and multiple correlation searches help us identify anomalies. Any suspicious events flagged by the MITRE framework are categorized and assigned as tickets to our engineers for investigation and mitigation.

Splunk has streamlined our incident response by automating key processes. For instance, alerts trigger upon exceeding three failed login attempts, automatically assigning tickets for review. Similarly, unauthorized access attempts from unfamiliar regions are automatically blocked. These automated data-driven responses significantly improve our overall incident response efficiency.

The customizable dashboards offer great visualization and extra add-ons.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us to easily monitor multiple cloud environments.

Mission Control lets us monitor and manage our security from a single panel.

Based on my short experience, I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of ten for its ability to analyze malicious activity.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps reduce our alert volume.

Splunk Enterprise Security streamlines our security investigations by providing a central platform and offering a growing library of add-ons that expand our investigative capabilities.

Splunk Enterprise Security stands out for its ability to integrate with existing security tools, provide informative dashboards, and offer IT Service Assurance functionality that goes beyond basic threat detection to include service performance monitoring.

Splunk Enterprise Security offers a vast amount of information to learn and comprehend, resulting in a challenging initial learning curve.

Extracting logs from Splunk for analysis in other applications is crucial for me. This would allow me to identify correlations between data sets and make informed decisions about next steps. Unfortunately, the current Splunk workflow seems to hinder data verification.

The licensing cost could be more competitive, as some of our competitors offer lower prices.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for one year.

We have encountered issues when updating features where Splunk Enterprise Security doesn't work properly. I would rate the stability of Splunk Enterprise Security seven out of ten.

The technical support team is always supportive but their response time and knowledge can be improved.

Positive

The initial deployment was straightforward.

The license for Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of ten.

We have Splunk Enterprise Security deployed across multiple locations.

The resilience Splunk offers is good.

I recommend Splunk Enterprise Security to others.

We are using it for our SOC. We integrated it with our SOC.

We have had a couple of benefits. We are using it as a SIEM. We do log extraction and analyze them. We also use reporting and dashboards. We are using it for security assessment. It is very helpful for us to be able to see what it has been like. Based on the incidents, we can take measures to cover any gaps.

Our security posture has definitely improved since we started using Splunk Enterprise Security. We are scaling it in stages. We are not yet using it at an optimum level. We are using 50% to 60% of it. Based on the analysis that we are doing, our security posture has definitely improved.

The end-to-end visibility that it provides is very important for any organization. It is the right tool to get end-to-end visibility. We get 360-degree visibility.

Like most organizations, we are moving to the cloud. We have a hybrid environment. We have a SaaS, PaaS, and on-prem environment. It is a very good tool for identifying security incidents. There are statistics, and we can go back and forth to see exactly what happened.

Splunk Enterprise Security has improved our organization’s ability to ingest and normalize data.

It is a real-time tool. What I like about it is how they are able to bring all the logs into a single dashboard. We can quickly get what we are looking for. We have queries. That is amazing.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigations. We are not using it completely, but based on our usage, it is up to our expectations.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped reduce our mean time to resolve. Previously, if an incident used to take us an hour, it now takes us a few minutes.

The dashboard is amazing. Out-of-the-box dashboard is very good. It is very user-friendly. It is out of the box. With a few clicks, the dashboard is there.

Its performance can be better. Sometimes, it takes longer when we do queries.

Their support can also be better.

We have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for the last seven or eight years.

It is very stable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

Scalability is there. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

As we are increasing our cloud and on-prem infrastructure, logs are increasing. We have to come up with policies on our side for log retention and other things, but we are able to collect logs from multiple sources.

I would rate their support a seven out of ten. Its implementation was a big challenge, and sometimes, the ticket went from one person to another person.

Neutral

We were using Alert Logic. It is good, but there are performance issues with the dashboard and other things. At times, it takes ages, whereas Splunk Enterprise Security is real-time.

Its deployment is not easy. It is difficult. It is a one-time job, and once it is done, you get the benefits. 

We had to engage a third party or a channel partner. It was the right choice.

Application-wise, we have seen a lot of improvement in our application delivery. On the security side, we are still learning.

It is pretty straightforward and based on the sizing. If I compare it with other competitors, it makes sense.

We looked at LogRhythm, but Splunk is more mature.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a nine out of ten. It is not a ten because of the support.

We use Splunk Enterprise Security for security log investigation. It is a SIEM platform. Many cybersecurity and technical alerts generated by Splunk turn out to be false positives. We then analyze these alerts to determine if they indicate a genuine security threat.

We will be ingesting logs from various sources, including firewalls, databases, Windows devices, and Linux devices. These logs will be used to investigate security incidents and troubleshoot system issues. Our use cases will be brief and focused, allowing us to leverage pre-defined queries in Splunk for efficient analysis. These queries will trigger alerts based on specific security or operational criteria within the predefined use cases. We will then investigate the triggered alerts by further analyzing the corresponding logs.

Splunk Enterprise has improved our incident response time. For instance, if an end user attempts to log in to a system with an invalid password from a device using an unusual port number, we will receive an immediate alert. This could be indicative of a brute-force attack aimed at stealing credentials, making it a suspicious activity. This is just one example of how Splunk Enterprise enhances our security posture.

Splunk's threat detection capabilities are strong, and Splunk is a leading platform for SoC monitoring. To maximize effectiveness, we need to develop strong query-building skills. Additionally, we have the flexibility to fine-tune existing queries or remove them altogether once an issue is resolved.

The customizable dashboards of Splunk are good for visualization. It gives a better understanding, and the graph is highly customizable.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a nine out of ten for analyzing malicious activities.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped the organization control suspicious and malicious activities.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations.

Splunk Enterprise Security's customization capabilities enable integration with other tools like EDRs, providing real-time event insights.

I like the Splunk dashboard and search engine.

Although the technical support is adequate, there is still room for improvement.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for 2 years.

I would rate the stability of Splunk Enterprise Security 9 out of 10.

I would rate the scalability of Splunk Enterprise Security 9 out of 10.

The technical support is adequate.

Positive

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of ten.

While I understand the desire for a cost-effective SIEM solution, prioritizing security over budget is crucial. In cybersecurity, even a seemingly minor breach can have significant consequences. Therefore, choosing the best SIEM for your needs, even if it has a higher upfront cost, can ultimately save money and protect your organization.

We have Splunk Enterprise Security deployed in four locations in one country.

Splunk takes care of the maintenance of the solution.

I recommend Splunk Enterprise Security to others.

The primary use case is security and data analytics. In general, we manage and maintain it for our customers.

Application-wise, it's good. Searching and reporting of data analytics is also fine. The dashboard presentations are also a good feature. Overall, its functionality is great and that's why we use it.

I would like additional support for custom add-ons, as well as cloud integration. Right now we have concerns because we have to customize applications for direct integration. But on-prem, it is all functional. We have to build it on our own. Previously, they developed custom connectors or add-ons for a lot of applications. But that number can be upgraded still. There are a lot of applications in the world that are not supported.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for over two years. I received Splunk certification six years ago.

The stability of the functionality is good, but there are still bugs that keep hindering things. I am waiting but they are there and that is quite common. I think they have not yet been resolved from the older versions. The stability is a seven-plus out of 10.

It's scalable for all environments. Splunk Cloud can be scaled to a small or medium company, depending on their inputs or log resources. Businesses at the high end of medium-sized, and large companies, can go with the on-prem solution.

The technical support is good. 

However, there is a lot of delay nowadays. The last time we raised a case, it took quite a long for them to come back with their first response. That's not for a P1 or P2, but if it is a P3, they don't respond at the earliest. When they respond, it is quite late and we have to ask again. The first response is never an answer. It's always a query.

Still, the people I have worked with there are all an eight-plus out of 10.

Positive

It can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud. With the latter, it is Splunk's own cloud. 

The deployment of the solution is straightforward, but there is a lot of engineering activity involved in designing the architecture. Architecture-wise, it is fine, and bringing things together is not that tough, but maintaining and managing it is a tough job because we don't work in a normal environment. We work on something that is very defined to the network. That means we have to build everything from scratch and deploy it.

The implementation strategy depends on how the customer wants things done. But in general, I go through research and then develop and design. I ask the client what sort of environment is flexible or cost-effective for them. It's done in stages. It's a matter of understanding the infrastructure and then implementing,  or designing and handing it over to them.

If there are 1,000 log sources, it takes six months to a year to deploy, depending on how the customer is supporting the process.

Every on-prem solution involves maintenance, including keeping things upgraded, whereas Splunk Cloud is managed by the vendor. The number of people involved in on-prem maintenance depends on the size of the environment and how long our update window is. For example, if we have a green zone at midnight for three hours, and we want to upgrade at least 20 to 30 servers, it will take eight to 10 people working in parallel. But for a very small environment of 10 servers, it will take four people to manage it, or if we have a large window, even three people can do it.

We do it ourselves.

The pricing depends on the bandwidth of an organization and is good compared to some SIEM tools. IBM, for example, is quite costly. But Microsoft Sentinel is notably cheaper. I have seen a lot of organizations running on Sentinel.

IBM is for quite large organizations that don't want to have their data on the cloud. Splunk has both on-prem and cloud modules and, cost-wise, Splunk is better. Internally, we cannot push everything to the cloud. That would become too expensive for us. So we have it sitting in our data center and that is good.

I have worked with a number of other solutions including RSA enVision, IBM QRadar, as well as Microsoft, McAfee, and LogRhythm. 

If we want to build an add-on feature in Splunk, we have to build an application and then integrate it. But in other applications, there is a direct integration that only requires partial development and it will start functioning.

Also, there is something called correlation in a lot of other tools. Splunk also has it but it consumes a lot of memory. If we tag all the data, it is better, but tagging consumes storage and it makes it a little tough for us to run a search. 

If we want to work towards SOAR, if there were a little bit more integration so that our customers could taste SOAR, they could then move to Splunk Phantom or other tools. Right now, people are not using automation. Everything is done manually. Hopefully, that's the next goal. Security operations will surely use SOAR and, once they start tasting it, they'll get to know how it works. They can design playbooks and start using it. That's an additional feature I would like Splunk to bring in. 

Splunk's advantage is its search capability. Its search is notably faster. With Splunk, I can search easily on keywords. That is great. It also has something called "stats" and it runs much faster. Within minutes, it gives the data from a very large set. Spunk's dashboards are also a very good thing. No other application or tool is as versatile in presenting the dashboard. It all comes down to presentation. It may take a little bit of engineering work to develop and customize, to parse the fields and fetch the data, but the presentation is good.