What are the challenges facing higher learning these days? Indiana University is now a Splunk, Inc. customer, and the school is using technology for more than just bringing students YouTube videos and Instagram photos.

Allen Tucker, manager, HELPnet Central Systems for Indiana University (IU), sat down with John Furrier and George Gilbert on theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at Splunk .conf 2015 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas to provide insight into what the IT issues Universities today.

It’s true that the modern college student probably uses more bandwidth than ever before, but as Tucker told theCUBE hosts, with 10 gigs of fiber running across locations, bandwidth is not the biggest issue. “Gaming is an issue so we have developed gaming networks to isolate that data,” he said.

School policy

The main challenge Tucker sees for the University is security and policy compliance. IU has over 5,200 servers across campuses, and it is using Splunk to assist with compliance.  According to Tucker, there are 112 different departments and there is no consolidation of ownership for the servers in one central department. Splunk has solutions to keep IT compliant with the school’s policies in order to reduce risk factors.

Access control is another issue for the IT team. They are using Splunk to track successful and failed logins and file accesses. Before using Splunk, review of these items was difficult because of the time and cost associated with doing it.

Higher learning through data

IU just began deployment of Splunk about a year ago, so it is just starting to see the benefits, as well as the potential. Some of the benefits include IT policy alignment and improvements in IT operations. Tucker, however, sees the potential for app development and learning to pull out meaningful data.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk .conf 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE