Managed cloud services company Rackspace Inc. has revealed how it’s using Splunk Inc.’s data analytics software to ensure its well-oiled business processes function smoothly.

Rackspace, in fact, said it’s also planning to adopt Splunk’s machine learning tools in the near future. Rackspace described on Wednesday how its been using Splunk’s Enterprise and Enterprise Security tools to power its decision analytics engine across its security, compliance, business intelligence, application management and information technology operations.

Rackspace needs Splunk because it digests almost 3 terabytes of data per day. It analyzes that data to spot things like anomalous activity in its data centers and to repair any broken processes. According to Splunk, this helps the company save money by speeding up security fixes and other issues.

The biggest benefit is security, because Splunk helps Rackspace to speed up security event detection times by up to 70 percent. In addition, security and compliance teams are able to investigate “high-priority” incidents 70 percent faster and reduce the financial impact of related outages by 50 percent.

Splunk allows Rackspace’s IT teams to “gain visibility across thousands of endpoints continuously – including servers, network devices, security scans and threat feeds – enabling faster threat detection and resolution for our customers,” said Dave Neuman, vice president and chief information security officer at Rackspace.

Neuman explained that Rackspace began using Splunk at “the grassroots level” for things like log analysis, application management and IT troubleshooting. “Once our leadership realized the full potential of Splunk, we broadly deployed Splunk ES to help ensure the success of a major PCI compliance initiative,” Neuman said.

The company added that Splunk was incredibly useful in this regard, as it needs to comply with more than 10 areas of Payment Card Industry Data Security standards. Splunk’s key advantage is that it has the ability to scale, retain historic data and enable ad-hoc forensic searches.

Rackspace said it intends to adopt Splunk’s Machine Learning Toolkit to power machine learning projects across its IT, business and security operations.

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