Despite good intentions, big-data frameworks and platforms like Apache Hadoop created a lot of murky data swamps. The time and effort needed to make the data therein useful left a lot of users unimpressed. The new breed of data platform builds on those lessons so users can get out as much as they put into it without endless preliminary legwork.

Big, versatile, and use-case-friendly Splunk Inc. is the latter type of data platform. All data in the hybrid environments of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc.’s hybrid environment eventually finds its way into Splunk, according to Siddhartha Dadana (pictured, left), associate director of cybersecurity at FINRA. It “basically flows into our Splunk cloud indexes, and we use the rule-based access management to actually give everyone access to whatever data they need to be looking at,” Dadana said. 

Dadana and Gary Mikula (pictured, right), senior director of information security engineering at FINRA, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf18 event in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. They discussed how Splunk is spreading through FINRA and how Splunk and cloud changed their security and developer operations culture. (* Disclosure below.)

Splunk, AWS blend is good to the last drop

FINRA began using Splunk for security. Now, it’s integrated the platform throughout the organization, and on any given week, about 35 to 40 percent of its technology leveraging Splunk in some way. FINRA is currently taking advantage of Splunk use cases in areas like database-activity monitoring and line-of-business.

Amazon Web Services Inc. tools, particularly Firehose for loading streaming data into data stores and analytics, blend well with Splunk, according to Mikula.

“Splunk worked with AWS to create this integration between the two tools, and we think we’ve taken it to a high level. We use it for Lambda [AWS serverless platform] to grab those logs; we use it for [virtual private cloud] flow logs; we’re using it for SaaS providers [to] provide APIs into their data … and finally, we’re going to be doing database activity monitoring — all leveraging this same technology,” Mikula concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Splunk .conf18 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Splunk .conf18. Neither Splunk Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE