Clive McDonald, Head of Field Engineering, Sumo Logic, explains how companies can get more out of their data.
We are all told that data will help you differentiate. Digital Transformation and cloud migrations are creating more data. However, companies find it hard to use data as part of their processes and workflows. The problem is that turning this data into digital gold is not easy. You must understand the business and what objectives it has, how to turn those business objectives into things that IT can deliver and then track those IT projects successfully.
To achieve this involves looking at what Gartner calls continuous intelligence – the firm describes CI as an emerging category for analytics projects that takes data from multiple systems, combines it for analysis in real time and then uses the output to help teams with their processes and decisions.
There are three main areas where you can start this process – security, developers and operations. Each of these will have different goals, but they all want to use data in new ways. Starting with one of these use cases can begin the journey around analytics with customers, but there are opportunities to upsell and expand once those initial projects are successful.
Security is a good starting point for most companies. Enterprises have security operations centres that are stretched, that are drowning in alerts and need help to prioritise. Looking at CI, there’s a longer term goal alongside helping those SOC teams get ahead.
For security teams dealing with entire networks, getting insight into real threats is essential today. There have been plenty of projects around security operations centres and SIEM implementations in the past, but many of these have not delivered. There are so many false positives that security teams are drowning in data, and the move to implement more cloud applications is not helping this process. Using analytics here can help customers’ teams improve their processes and make better use of their resources over time, so that analysts work on the real incidents rather than looking at issues that don’t affect them.
Where channel organisations can make a difference is by looking at market trends like DevOps and cloud security and then the processes that their customers have in place. Solving these issues and then cross-selling the same platform across to other teams can be a great opportunity. It’s a land and expand strategy that can lead to strong recurring revenue opportunities with customers.
Analytics is a growing market because companies know they need to get more out of their data. However, investing in analytics is not enough on its own as customers tend to have gaps in their systems. Helping customers close those intelligence gaps can be a great opportunity to compete in the new world of data and analytics.
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