 Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Splunk.com 21. I'm Lisa Martin here. I've got Simon Davies with me, a VP and APAC at Splunk. Simon, welcome to the program. Hey, Lisa, great to be here. Thanks for having me. So here we are, unfortunately, at another virtual conference, but there has been a tremendous amount of, there's an understatement, right? That we've seen in the last 18 months, we've seen this massive distribution of the workforce. We've seen the huge increases in the threat landscape. We've seen things like solar winds, ransomware increasing significantly, acceleration and digital transformation as companies tried to do whatever they could to enable digital workspaces. I wanted to unpack with you this 2021 State of Security report that Splunk has. What are some of the key findings and then we'll dig into some of the things that you're seeing in the APAC region? Yeah, look, we're excited about the report. It really highlighted, I think, what a lot of organizations are going through. One of the statistics that stood out for me was 75% of infrastructure users are multi-cloud, but expecting to, that is expecting to increase to 87% of customers will be using multi-cloud environments. And the reason why that's important is the complexity that creates for cyber professionals in terms of trying to protect and defend becomes exponentially harder with every new iteration or generation of infrastructure that companies consume. Most interesting, we actually saw about a third of users are already using three cloud providers, but that is going to grow to 50% of customers will grow to being using three cloud providers or more within the next two years. So again, just that trend is going to continue. The leveraging of cloud infrastructures is a core way of businesses digitizing and modernizing and as cyber professionals, we have to think about how we're going to address that. Definitely, one of the things that I've been seeing and hearing in the last 18 months from a security perspective is that organizations say, you know, it's really not a matter of if we get hit with ransomware, it's when. And I was really surprised to see that the state of security report found that 78% of security and IT leaders worry they're going to be hit by a solar winds style attack. So the security landscape changing dramatically in the last 18 months. Yeah, look, absolutely. I think the research is feeding back what we were already hearing from the customers around how this is a critical motion. And I think the one thing that we've seen as well is the board level agenda now, the risk and cyber has and an organization's ability to react or recover when you have an event is now becoming, a high priority for organizations. We're seeing a lot of increased spending inside security as this becomes more and more pretty for organizations to press. So yeah, the on the ground experience is certainly matching what we're seeing in the research there. And look, all of that is a data problem, right? Security is a data problem. When something happens, how do I know where, how do I know when, how do I know what and then how do I know what actions to take based upon the data that we need to get. So security being a data problem, we talked about the complexity of the multi-cloud environments, the percentages of organizations that are adopting that now, what that trend is moving towards. Also complexity, I can imagine with data volumes only increasing. What are some of the key challenges that APAC organizations specifically are seeing as they are accelerating digital transformation and doing what they can't enable this distributed workforce? Yeah, so the hybrid or multi-cloud environment is I guess an indicator of increased complexity. I think we often overlook the fact that I think the hybrid world is yesterday as well. So nobody is the 100% cloud and nobody is the 100% on-prem anymore. It's very much an environment now where I need to protect and defend across that entire surface area and increasingly with edge computing. And as we're looking at organizations pushing processing out to the edge of their operations and whether that's a distributed workforce or sensor-based environments, that becomes critical as well. We've got organizations like Intel that use us to basically monitor not only the cyber infrastructure but the entire customer infrastructure that they're providing with fabric-based sensors across environments where you can imagine that the security becomes even more important. So I think that complexity and the data sources that are now being generated and the explosion of that is kind of critical. For APAC specifically, we saw some interesting trends. We saw about 37% of organizations are using data to now support their compliance environments. About 36% are bringing in non-security data and about 36% are really starting to use AI or machine learning tools to help them in that large-scale data volume processing that they weren't able to do before. And then lastly, security analytics really is starting to become a critical tool in the arsenal of cyber professionals with 34% of organizations saying they're already using some form of security analytics to help them address the threat actors. Is there a silver lining in terms of the IT folks and the security folks becoming better, collaborating better, anything that you've seen in this report? Well, in the report, but also in the way that we're seeing SOC organizations use tools. So the orchestration remediation and automation is a big industry trend, particularly when you look at things like implementing zero trust and how you would use that for putting that additional layer of protection around an organization. And that's where the ability to identify using machine learning or AI trends or events understand the actions that need to be taken, understand the data sources that help address and remediate those and be able to automate that. Freeze up the time of cyber security professionals. And that's a critical step we're seeing because there is a shortage of skills and that's been an ongoing challenge not only in Asia Pacific, but I think worldwide. Right, it has been a challenge worldwide. I was actually doing some cyber security work in the last month or so and I read that this is the fifth consecutive year of that cyber security skills gap. So definitely a challenge there, but also if you flip the coin, an opportunity. So in terms of some of those challenges that you mentioned, what are some of the key things that organizations and APAC can do to confront and combat those security challenges that are no doubt just only going to grow? Yeah, so I think it's about visibility and getting control. And that's where again, data becomes key to that. So making sure you're capturing the right data, making sure that data is available to your professionals or if you're using a service provider, making sure that data is captured and available to the service providers because that is increasingly what we see is the critical step to be able to, when something happens, how do you recover what should mean time to remediation as the kind of critical motion? And so that's again, what we keep coming back to is security is a data problem. Security is a data problem, got it. I do want to unpack a little bit some of the visibility challenges. That is one of the things that was identified. You mentioned that with so much complexity, multi-cloud being as hybrid work, something that's going to stay. What are some of the things that organizations can do and how can Splunk help to remove and mitigate those visibility challenges? So we just another interesting piece of research. It's called the State of Data Innovation Report that really looked at the way organizations that categorize their data and organizations that actually build a data strategy are actually much more prepared to react, to engage and then to leverage that data for competitive differentiation in their markets. And interestingly, 33% of APAC organizations particularly rated their usage of data as better than the industry average. And 54% of APAC organizations already said they're using technologies like observability, which really helps them innovate around the data thinking about that next generation of service they're trying to provide. Did you see those are great numbers. Just about a third are working on implementing technologies. 54% work focused on that observability. Did you see any industries in particular that were leading edge there? Of course, every industry being affected by the pandemic. But I'm just curious if there were any ones that stood out. Yeah, well look, there's so many great customer examples that we've got where we see organizations thinking differently about the way they engage their customers as a result of digital transformation. For me, one of the ones that stands out is Lenovo, 50 billion plus multinational company servicing 180 markets around the world when they looked at their observability approach and tried to understand how they were going to approach troubleshooting when they had issues if you think about the e-commerce experience for their consumers. They were able to reduce the downtime and improve the remediation time when there were incidents even though they had a 300% increase in traffic. And so for the ability for an organization to handle that kind of surge in digital interactions with their customers and do that to have clear visibility using metrics, traces, and logs to understanding exactly what's going on across complex siloed multi-services environments was critical to Lenovo's success. And not only from a cybersecurity point of view but also having real-time visibility into their infrastructure became critical as they service their customers. Right, that one of the things I think we learned Simon during the pandemic, one of the many things is that access to real-time data, real-term visibility real-time rather visibility is no longer a nice to have. It was something that in the beginning was sort of organizations needing it to survive now organizations needing it to thrive. It's that real-time visibility is really table stakes for organizations in any industry. We kind of saw organizations go through three phases. There was the react phase, then there was the adapt phase. So reacting was first of all, can I keep my people safe? The adapt phase was how am I going to work? And now we're seeing that next generation which is really the evolve phase, right? Given the pandemic is still, well COVID is still with us. Whether it's you're in one of the countries which are treating it more as an endemic or whether you're on the number of the country still on that journey and here in Asia Pacific we see different levels of vaccination status, different levels of companies starting to open up or countries starting to open up their borders and life getting back to what is the new normal. All of that is still going to evolve with a different way of working moving forward a different way of engaging our customers and our constituents, if you're a public sector organization and data is underlying all of that. And for that we're kind of excited to be helping some of the largest organizations with that across the region. Data is absolutely critical. One of the things that we've also I think observed in the last year and a half is the patience or the fuses of people getting smaller and smaller. So for organizations to have that visibility into data so that they can service their customers whether it be healthcare or financial services or the tech sector for example the access to that data is critical for brand reputation, reducing churn and of course ensuring that the customers are getting what they need to from that data. Yeah, 100%. Gosh, so many examples across the region. One of the ones that jumps to mind is Flinders University when they had to go remote, they had to go virtual 25,000 students overnight suddenly needing to be interacting by digital channels. How do you keep them secure? How do you keep them safe? How do you get insights in terms of the services that they need to protect that student population? So if you kind of distill this down into data opportunities for organizations we'll start with APAC. What do you think the top three data opportunities are? If security is a data problem what are the opportunities to combat that for an organization to be really successful? So I think visibility is the first one. So making sure we're capturing the data making sure we're capturing the right data. And so the ability not only to capture the data but to time sequence the data so I can actually understand what's happened and when. The second then is control. So ensuring that the right people have access to the right data but we control that in a way that is specific to our organization. And then lastly compliance. And I think we've seen a lot of new legislation start to come in around critical infrastructure recognizing the importance of the digital infrastructure to the broader economy and making sure that you're compliant with that critical infrastructure kind of requirements and environments as well as then the traditionally regulated industry such as healthcare and financial services become critical in that approach. So thinking about those three elements and then thinking about how do I then use tools like automation and security analytics to really accelerate the capabilities that we have as an organization to defend. So observability control compliance. Give me the 30 second pitch of how Splunk can help organizations achieve all three of those. So observability really is about getting insights into all of your environments. So it's all about metrics, traces and logs which is about understanding exactly what's going on with every experience of every digital interaction I have with every customer. And the ability of Splunk to do that with zero sampling or full fidelity of that data is something we see our customers critically needing. Security look for me that's all about orchestration and analytics. So how do I get that understanding that user behavior understanding the analytics around that and then how machine learning becomes a critical part of that to help me scale my cyber infrastructure and defend. And then lastly, resilience is really the core for all IT systems in a digital world and being able to not only harden deliver resilient services like Lenovo was able to do with a 300% increase in their web traffic but also when something does go wrong be able to remediate quickly become critical as well. Right that quick remediation is critical because like I was saying earlier it's no longer a if we get hit it's when organizations need to have that resilience baked in. Well, Simon, thank you for joining me breaking down some of those reports what's going on in APAC some of the trends and also some of the opportunities security being a data problem and organizations what they can do to remediate that we appreciate your time. Great Lisa thanks for having me. My pleasure for Simon Davies and Lisa Martin you're watching the cubes coverage of Splunk.com 21.