Latest / Buzz Off / Episode 3: Lauren Wilson, Splunk

Transcript

Episode 3: Lauren Wilson, Splunk · Buzz Off

• 0:08
  Hello and welcome to Buzz Off.
• 0:10
  My name is Oliver Chapman.
• 0:11
  I am solution area director for networking and security at Computacenter.
• 0:15
  This is a web series designed for customers by our customers.
• 0:19
  The idea is I invite a different partner on each episode.
• 0:23
  And there are three buzz words or phrases selected by our customers.
• 0:27
  If they mentioned during the interview, one of the buzz words,
• 0:30
  you will hear this noise.
• 0:34
  If they mention all three,
• 0:35
  I will forcefully eject them from the studio.
• 0:38
  This week's buzzwords are “secure by design”,
• 0:42
  “low hanging fruit” and “best of breed”.
• 0:45
  This week's guest is Lauren Wilson, field CTO at Splunk.
• 0:49
  Good luck Lauren.
• 0:50
  Right. Lauren, welcome to Buzz Off.
• 0:53
  How are you feeling?
• 0:54
  Very excited. The studio is insane.
• 0:56
  Nervous at all? Yeah. Yeah, a little bit.
• 0:59
  Okay. There's, there is a bit of jeopardy.
• 1:01
  Yeah. I'm not going to lie. Right.
• 1:02
  So what keeps you at Splunk?
• 1:05
  So, like, when I was looking at where to go after my kind of career in
• 1:07
  gov and C&I, and I wanted to have a kind of global reach.
• 1:10
  Splunk is steeped in history, like in terms of security, pedigree
• 1:14
  and like comes the data which is fuelling the AI revolution, but also kind of like
• 1:18
  where I seeing most of the challenges that organisations see.
• 1:21
  I think it was a natural home, and particularly the Cisco,
• 1:24
  acquisition of Splunk, the kind of the strength of the brand is only growing.
• 1:28
  So that kind of injection of support and innovation and the ability to deliver
• 1:31
  change more globally, made natural sense to me.
• 1:34
  Amazing.
• 1:35
  So out of the local, into the global and helping customers to change the world.
• 1:38
  Exactly. And that's our steeped in like kind of mission.
• 1:41
  And what I see my career goal to be. love that.
• 1:44
  So from your perspective, why Splunk and Computacenter as a partner?
• 1:48
  Yeah, I suppose we operate in similar enterprises, right?
• 1:51
  Splunk isn't for all organisations
• 1:54
  it kind of operates at a level where, your customers also align with us,
• 1:59
  and we need a partner that has that deep Splunk expertise
• 2:03
  across all the personas that we work with
• 2:05
  and your ability to have both a dedicated Splunk practice, but also have,
• 2:10
  from architecture all the way through to kind of post-sales implementation.
• 2:14
  That breadth of expertise that you have, is the kind of partnership
• 2:18
  that we need to get the implementation.
• 2:20
  It's like I speak to CISOs and CTOs all the time,
• 2:22
  and it's not often kind of like a technology,
• 2:24
  you know, blocker in terms of getting stuff done.
• 2:26
  It's that kind of change and implementation.
• 2:28
  And I think partners
• 2:29
  bring in that resource and the skill set to kind of make that happen.
• 2:32
  Yeah.
• 2:32
  And I expect making the technology a reality for their individual
• 2:35
  use case as well. Right.
• 2:36
  So on that note, what what makes us unique for enterprise organisations?
• 2:42
  And it is that kind of like
• 2:44
  breadth and depth that you've got in organisations,
• 2:46
  the fact that you have so many different practices
• 2:48
  working across the entire stack with all the different personas,
• 2:50
  all the different kind of,
• 2:51
  units that a business needs in terms of I.T infrastructure and, you know,
• 2:55
  getting stuff done in the AI sphere but also security,
• 2:58
  observability, the whole, the whole stack that you operate in.
• 3:01
  Again, it's achieving the same kind of missions that we are too.
• 3:03
  So, yeah, hand-in-hand. We can do that together. Fantastic.
• 3:06
  So this is for customers
• 3:07
  where we're putting this out to a certain type of audience.
• 3:11
  What right now, given the conversations you're having with customers
• 3:13
  as well, what question do you think every CIO should be asking their teams?
• 3:17
  Good one. So for me it's about criticality.
• 3:20
  So my, my my background in incident management.
• 3:22
  And I kind of saw that the bad cyber days for organisations
• 3:25
  and something that happened time and time again,
• 3:27
  if I could get out that one message to CIOs, it's kind of
• 3:29
  do you really understand your business criticality, in terms of systems,
• 3:32
  processes, because when it comes down to, say, a cyber armageddon scenario,
• 3:37
  you've got AD down or something that's kind of completely critical
• 3:40
  and you're almost at ground zero.
• 3:42
  Having defined what the business priorities in terms of critical business
• 3:46
  services look like ahead of time, help that kind of recovery.
• 3:49
  Exponentially, because I've seen it where organisations have that
• 3:53
  that moment where all IT systems think that the most important
• 3:57
  and actually they're not, right?
• 3:58
  There's always going to be ones that truly are business critical
• 4:01
  and having those decisions and priorities ahead of time,
• 4:04
  but also treating those business services and then the systems
• 4:07
  with that kind of risk profile at mind.
• 4:10
  Because if they are truly critical
• 4:11
  things like, you know, backup, hygiene, recovery,
• 4:13
  patching, the kind of stuff that, you know, you should definitely be doing.
• 4:16
  Depending on the criticality in the business,
• 4:18
  you should adopt a risk profile that matches that.
• 4:20
  So are CIOs really, truly aware of the kind of business criticality
• 4:24
  of their different systems?
• 4:25
  And observability, which is kind of a key part of the offerings
• 4:28
  from Splunk, is a massive support to that as well for those individuals.
• 4:32
  So on that, I suppose keeping on that, that customer theme specifically,
• 4:37
  when you think about the outcomes that we've delivered, like the really
• 4:40
  impressive outcomes and things that customers care about, saving money,
• 4:43
  saving time, what would be the use case that springs to mind for you?
• 4:47
  Good one.
• 4:48
  So, there's a telco organisation and we work together to do a real overhaul
• 4:53
  and kind of onboard many, different services onto ITSI
• 4:57
  and your ability to kind of get hands on keyboard
• 5:00
  and really support that implementation, save them, you know, so much in terms of,
• 5:04
  kind of the time, but also the kind of, if they had to get
• 5:07
  those skills internally, upskill staff to be able to do that kind of stuff.
• 5:10
  By that time, many resource and moving people away on to kind of more
• 5:14
  of project based support rather than, you know, the current day job.
• 5:17
  So the ability to kind of parachute in the hands on keyboard,
• 5:21
  you know, exploit that implementation, allowed them to realise the value
• 5:24
  so much more quicker, than just if they had tried to do it alone.
• 5:27
  Yeah.
• 5:28
  And I think obviously the skill shortage is still a massive problem.
• 5:31
  Right. And finding these people is definitely a challenge.
• 5:35
  So obviously you mentioned earlier this the Cisco acquisition,
• 5:39
  what's the vision for Cisco, Splunk, as a combined entity for customers.
• 5:45
  And how are you seeing that playing out?
• 5:47
  Yeah, it's it's exciting.
• 5:48
  Like I say, it was one of the reasons
• 5:48
  why Splunk was like a very solid kind of brand and particularly
• 5:51
  in a vendor landscape, right, where do I go?
• 5:53
  And it was really, really kind of Cisco acquisition
• 5:55
  that kind of strengthened that.
• 5:56
  And I think it's
• 5:57
  because alone, particularly in this AI revolution, we really need each other.
• 6:01
  So Cisco has the hardware, you know, the deep expertise
• 6:05
  that Splunk has in the data world together, kind of, the synergies
• 6:09
  and how we're going to really bring that together, was super important.
• 6:12
  So seeing that over time and then how we're working together
• 6:15
  and building more of an integrated capability
• 6:17
  and just kind of bolting on the side like we're really focusing on integration
• 6:21
  and and yeah, I don't think there's any other players that can do the full kind of
• 6:24
  from user to silicon kind of visibility and then ultimately protection.
• 6:28
  So, yeah, it's exciting.
• 6:29
  And seeing how that we're going to make that a reality is.
• 6:32
  Yeah, it's exciting and why I'm here.
• 6:34
  And it sounds almost like
• 6:35
  kind of a full nervous system for, for an enterprise customer.
• 6:39
  And so final question.
• 6:41
  You doing really well, by the way,
• 6:43
  what excites you most about the Splunk portfolio or roadmap?
• 6:47
  You are a technical individual.
• 6:49
  You know, I'm assuming you get excited by technology.
• 6:51
  What kind of things are you hearing that that kind of just get you,
• 6:54
  make you feel like you're in the right place?
• 6:57
  Yeah, yeah. And that's right.
• 6:58
  And that you want to be in a vendor that does that. Right?
• 7:00
  You don't want to be kind of thinking, oh, are we really tackling problems here?
• 7:03
  Or are we just adding AI to wherever we want to you know.
• 7:06
  No we're really focusing on putting AI implementation in the right places
• 7:10
  and the place that I see that most and going back to my kind of previous
• 7:13
  career in the incident management as a SOC analyst,
• 7:16
  like I know how difficult it is to be you know, in the trenches there
• 7:19
  and some of the stuff that we're doing with kind of Agentic SOC.
• 7:21
  So creating agents
• 7:23
  actually hand-in-hand with the SOC analyst make their lives easier.
• 7:26
  So triage agent helping them make those really difficult calls.
• 7:29
  That alone, you know, just yeah, I can't I can't even imagine how beneficial
• 7:33
  that would have been back in the day.
• 7:34
  And things like, malware, reversing agent like that, that's a skill set
• 7:38
  that you either have to contract out
• 7:39
  or you might have one guy in a room that might and help do that kind of stuff.
• 7:42
  But having agents in the SOC hand-in-hand with the analyst
• 7:45
  kind of really augmenting the human skillset,
• 7:47
  that's yeah, that kind of agenetic SOC of the future.
• 7:50
  Yeah, I wish I could have had it.
• 7:51
  And then that that's turning those individuals, I suppose, more
• 7:54
  into supervisors, almost like having to having to do to do.
• 7:58
  Yeah, a bit of both. Right.
• 7:59
  I think that's where...
• 8:00
  I think this going to buzz it it - but like it's very much a trust journey
• 8:04
  and like as much as it is a technology journey, it's very much about trust.
• 8:07
  So we see that an automated or kind of almost autonomous future
• 8:11
  doesn't really feel in reach for most CISOs and CTOs right now.
• 8:15
  So having that kind of human in the loop still and having that, like I say
• 8:18
  more of the agentic hand in hand
• 8:19
  that your best friend in the SOC, that kind of supplements your skill set
• 8:23
  rather than, you know, automating it entirely today.
• 8:26
  I think just build that trust to hopefully, you know, take more of that.
• 8:29
  autonomous approach to to SOCs.
• 8:31
  Okay. Well look you've made it through the core questions.
• 8:33
  So congratulations.
• 8:35
  I did feel like you were playing a little bit faster and loose with us there.
• 8:38
  You're definitely dropping in some buzzwords every now and again.
• 8:40
  I think you're playing an aggressive game, I quite like it.
• 8:42
  Well, Lauren, thank you so much for joining us.
• 8:45
  You did a fantastic job.
• 8:46
  You avoided being ejected from the studio and you avoided buzzwords as well.
• 8:49
  So congratulations. Thanks for having me.
• 8:52
  She made it!
• 8:53
  Didn't she do well.
• 8:54
  Lauren, what a fantastic job.
• 8:56
  Thank you for joining us.
• 8:57
  Great to hear about how Splunk has been integrated into the wider portfolio.
• 9:01
  And delivering for customers in security, observability and really creating
• 9:05
  that nervous system for enterprise organisations.
• 9:09
  We're back next time with a new partner and three more buzzwords or phrases.
• 9:14
  Thank you for watching. See you later.