While many public sector agencies have gone through a digital transformation to address the challenges arising out of the COVID-19 pandemic, much work remains to be done, according to Splunk Inc.’s new “State of Data Innovation 2021” report.

The survey, conducted with researchers from the Enterprise Strategy Group, found that 33% of government agencies haven’t accelerated data innovation projects since the pandemic started and that 67% of government organizations are still considered “data beginners.”

“There were pockets of excellence that we saw in the last 18 months where agencies really responded to things like the requirement for vaccinations and the requirement for monitoring health status in general,” said Jeremy Rissi (pictured), global vice president of public sector at Splunk. “But we also saw in our report that there were many agencies that haven’t yet been able to modernize in the way that they want.”

Rissi spoke with John Walls, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the recent Splunk .conf21 Virtual event. They discussed the current state of public sector innovation, the role of data in this transformation, Splunk’s certifications to operate in this environment, and the changes brought about by the new cybersecurity Executive Order. (* Disclosure below.)

Ready for the cybersecurity mandate

As there is more data available than ever before, both in the public and private sectors, the natural path to innovation is to better use that information to generate valuable insights, according to Rissi. This is where the Splunk data platform comes in.

“We allow our customers, be it the agency customers or the industry customers, to ask questions of data that they collect from any source, be it structured data or unstructured data,” he explained. “Using Splunk, a customer can say, ‘What’s happening? Why is it happening? Where is it happening?’ And that’s incredibly powerful.”

The company is getting ready to increasingly help government organizations in this mission. Splunk recently received U.S. Department of Defense provisional authorization Level 5, which allows agencies to use cloud platforms for higher sensitivity Controlled Unclassified Information.

“That allows them to rest assured that they can decide anything they want to about their data without worrying about the sanctity of that data itself or the platform that they’re using to process that data. That’s incredibly exciting,” Rissi said.

Splunk has also expanded its offerings to follow new government rules, such as President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on improving the nation’s cybersecurity. Among other things, it indicates what types of data that agencies should store on their systems and for how long.

“We’re making some offers to our customers about how they use Splunk, how they take advantage of our cloud-based storage within our product, how they take advantage of our services in mapping their data strategy to this enterprise logging maturity model,” Rissi explained. “And it represents a great opportunity to sort of take a step forward in cybersecurity for these agency customers.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of during the Splunk .conf21 Virtual event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Splunk’s .conf21 Virtual conference. Neither Splunk Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Jeremy Rissi