 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.conf 19, brought to you by Splunk. Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage from Las Vegas for Splunk.conf 2019. It's the 10th anniversary of their end user conference. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is our seventh year covering Splunk. Riding the wave of big data. Day three of our three days were winding down our show and great to have on this next guest. Nitin Medouk, Executive Director, BI, Business Intelligence and Advanced Data Analytics at Clemson University, big ACC football team. Everyone knows that, great stadium. Great to have you on. Thanks for spending the time to come by on our day three coverage. Yep, thanks John for having me over. So, you know, hospitals, campuses, some use cases just encapsulate the digital opportunities and challenges. But you guys have that kind of same thing going on. You got students, you got people who work there, you got IOT or a campus, you got campuses. You guys are living the real life example of physical digital coming together. Tell us about what's going on in your world at Clemson. What's your job there? What's your current situation? So, like you mentioned, we have a lot of students, so Clemson's about 20,000 undergraduate students and 5,000 graduate students. We have faculty and staff, so you're talking about a lot of people. Every semester, we have new devices coming in. We have to support the entire network infrastructure, our student information systems and research computing. So, we are focused on how can we make students' lives better, their experience better, and how can we facilitate education for them. So, we try to, in my role specifically, I'm responsible for the advanced data analytics, the data that we're collecting from our systems, how can we use that and get more insights for better decision-making. So, that's- Is the scope university-wide or is it specifically targeted for certain areas? So, it is university-wide, so we have some key projects going on university-wide. We have a project for student success. There's a project for space utilization and how we can utilize space on campus more efficiently. And then we're looking at energy usage across buildings, campus, emergency management area. So, we've got a couple of projects and then there are some projects that most higher eds, most universities work on as far as retention, enrollment, graduation rates, how the academics are, so we're doing the same thing. What's interesting is that the new tagline for Splunk is data to everything. You got a lot of things there, right? You got data, a lot of horizontal use cases. So, it seems to me that you have a view and we were kind of talking on camera before we went live here was, data is a fluid situation. It's not like just a subsystem. It's got to be native everywhere in an organization and it touches everything. How do you guys look at the data because you want to harness the data because the data you're gathering on, say energy or spatialization might be great data to look at endpoint protection, for instance. I don't know, I'm making it up, but data needs to be workable across areas. How do you view that? What's the state of the art thinking around data everywhere? So, the key thing is we've got so many IOTs, we've got so many sensors, we've got so many servers. It's hard when you work with different technologies to sort of integrate all of them. And in the industry, there have been some software companies that try to view themselves as being the king, but really the way to address it is you look at each system, you look at how you can integrate all of that data without being the king. So, you basically analyze the data from different systems. You figure out a way to get it into a place where you can analyze it and then make decisions based on that. So, that's essentially what we've been focused on working on. Tell me about Splunk's role in all this is because one of the things that we've been doing, I've been following Splunk for a long time. Been a very fascinating with how they take log files and make value out of that. And their vision now as it grew, as it grew, is they're enabling a lot of value of the data, which I love, I think it's a mission that's notable, relevant, and certainly going to help a lot of use cases. But their success has been about just dumping data into Splunk and then getting value out of it. How does that translate into this kind of data space that you're looking at? Because does it work across all areas? What specifically are you guys doing with Splunk? Can you talk about the use case? So, we're looking at it as a platform. Like, how can we provide a self-service platform to our analysts who can go into the system, analyze the data. We're not focusing on a specific technology. So our platform is built up of multiple technologies. We have Tableau for visual analytics. We're also using Splunk. We also have a data warehouse. We've got a lot of databases. We have a Kafka infrastructure. So how can we integrate all of these tools and give the choice to the people to use a tool? The place where we really see Splunk helping us originally in our journey when we started. Our network team used Splunk for getting log data from switches. So it started off as a troubleshooting exercise if a switch went down. What was wrong with it? Eventually, we pulled in all of our server logs. That's where security got interested. Apart from the traditional IT ops monitoring, security saw value in the data. And then we thought about the whole ecosystem that Splunk provides. It gives you a way to bring in data with role-based access control. So you can have data in a read-only state that you can change when it's in the system. And then give access to people to a specific set of data. So that's really game-changing, even for us. Having people be comfortable to opening data to analysts so that they can make better decisions, that's the key. With a lot of product announcements made during .conf, I think the exciting thing is it's not just the data that you index in Splunk anymore, especially with the integration with Hadoop and S3. You don't have to bring in your data in Splunk. So even if you have your data sitting in S3 or your Hadoop cluster, you can just use the data fabric search and search across all your data sets. And from what I hear, there are going to be more integrations that are going to be added to the tool. That's awesome. Well, that's a good use case shows that they're thinking about it. I got to ask you about Clemson to get into some of the things that you guys do. In knowing Clemson, you guys have a lot of new things you do. You're a university, you're building stuff. You've got people, you know, you're in research. So you guys are bringing on new stuff to the network, a lot of new technology. Is there security concerns in terms of that? How do you guys handle that? Because you want to encourage innovation for students and faculty. At the same time, you want to kind of have the data to make sure you get the security without giving away the security secrets or things that you do. How do you look at the data when you got an environment that encourages people to put more stuff on the network to generate more data, because devices generate data, projects create more data. How do you view that? How do you guys handle that? So, our mission and our goal is not to disrupt the student experience. So we want to make it seamless. And as we get influx of students every semester, we have challenges that traditional corporate sector doesn't have. If we think about our wireless infrastructure, we're talking about 20, 25,000 students on campus. They're moving around. When they move from one class to another, they're switching between different access points. So having a robust infrastructure, how can we use the data to be more proactive and build an infrastructure that's more stable? It also helps us plan for maintenance so we don't disrupt students. So looking at key usage patterns, what times are our colleges more active? When are submissions happening? When are IT computing services being accessed more? And then finding out a time which is going to be less disruptive to the students. So that's how we view it. What's been the biggest learnings or challenges that you've overcome or opportunities that you see with data at Clemson? What's the exciting areas? And or things that you guys have tripped over on or what have you learned from? Share some experiences of what's going on there for you. So I think sky is the limit here, really. There is so much data and so less people in the industry. It's hard to analyze all of the data and make sense of it. And it's not just the people who are doing the analysis. You also need people who understand the data. So the data stewards, the data trustees, you need buy-in from them. They are the ones who understand what data looks like, how it should be structured, how it can be provided for additional analysis. So that's the key thing. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now? So I'm specifically working on analyzing data from our learning management system, Canvas. So we're getting data in form of snapshots that we're trying to analyze. We're using multiple technologies for that. Splunk is one of them. But we're loading the data, looking at key trends, how are colleges interacting, engaging with our LMS? How can we drive more adoption? How can we encourage certain colleges and departments to sort of move to a digital classroom, a content delivery experience? This LMS part of the curriculum, which is more of an online portion, more is it integrated into the physical curriculum? So at this time it's more online, but we're trying to engage more classes and more faculty members to use the LMS to deliver content. So right now online, soon to be integrated in. Yeah, I was talking with Don on our team from theCUBE and some of the Splunk people this week. You look at this event, this is a physical event. You get physical campuses digitizing everything as kind of a nirvana. It's kind of an aspiration. It's not, people aren't really doing it 100%, but people are envisioning that the physical and digital worlds are coming together. If that happens, and it's going to happen at some point, it's a data problem or data opportunity, data is everything, right? So what's your vision of that as a professional or someone in the industry and someone dealing with data at Clemson? Because if you can digitize everything, then you can instrument everything. If you can instrument everything, you can start creating efficiencies and innovations. Yeah, so the way, I think you structured it very accurately, it's the amalgam of the physical world and the digital world. As the world is moving towards using more of smartphones and digital devices, how can we improve the experience by analyzing the data and sort of be behind the scenes without even having the user notice what's going on? It's really the experience, if the first experience isn't good that the user has, they're not going to be inclined to continue using the service that we offer. What's your view on security now? Splunk obviously has been talking about security for a long time. I think about five years ago, we started to see on the radar, data is driving a lot of the cybersecurity now as everyone knows that. You guys have a lot of end points. Security is always a concern. How do you guys view the security picture with data? How do you guys talk about that internally? How do you guys implement data? Without giving me any secrets, you don't have to. So we do have a very good cybersecurity operation center that's run by students and they do a tremendous job at protecting our environment. We monitor a lot of activity that goes on. Higher ed is a challenge because we have, in the corporate industry, you can have a set of devices in the higher education world. We have students coming in every semester that are bringing in new end point devices. It poses some unique set of challenges. Knowing what devices are getting on the network, if there's phishing campaigns going on, how can we protect that environment and protect those sort of things? It's great to have you on. First of all, I'd love to have folks from Clemson on. It's a great university. Got a great environment, great conversation. Congratulations on all your success there. Final question for you. Share some stories around some mischief that students do because, yeah, students are students. They're going to get on the network. And most students now, like when I was in school and we were learning, they're all a lot of coding. They're all throwing who knows kiddie scripts out there, hosting blockchain, mining algorithms. They're going to cause some, curiosity is going to cause potentially some issues. Can you share some funny or interesting student stories of you caught them in the dorm room, put a server in there, run a web farm. Is there any kind of cool experiences you can share that might be interesting to folks? That students have done that have been kind of funny, mischievous, but innovative. So without going into much detail, I'll just say, like motion universities, we have students and computer science programs and people who are programmers and sort of trying to pursue the security route in the industry. So they, we also have a lot of research going on the network. And sometimes a research going on may affect our infrastructure environment. So we try to account for those use cases and silo specific use cases into a dedicated network. So they hit the honeypot a lot, huh? So they're freshmen, they'll go right to the, I'm only kidding, of course. Yes, so we do try to protect our environment and make student experience better. I know you don't want to give any secrets, Nitin, thanks for coming on. Always fun to talk tech with you guys. Thanks so much, appreciate it. Okay, CUBE coverage, I'm Sean Furrier here. Day three of Splunk.com. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.