As the Trump Administration comes to a close, there is no better time than the present to reexamine the Department of Defense Digital Modernization Strategy and its potential sustainment beyond January 2021.

Recently, I’ve been on a mission building a new Microsoft Office 365 Email Add-on for Splunk. This has been built for use with Splunk Enterprise, while making sure that it properly supports Splunk’s Common Information Model (CIM). CIM is paramount when wanting data to play nicely with Splunk Enterprise Security.

With Kinesis Firehose being Splunk’s preferred option when collecting logs at scale from AWS Cloudwatch Logs, we’ve seen plenty of posts on setting this up, automation and examples on transforming event content. But what about when things go wrong?

Machine learning (ML) and analytics make data actionable. Without it, data remains an untapped resource until a person (or an intelligent algorithm) analyzes that data to find insights relevant to addressing a business problem. For example, amidst a network outage crisis a historical database of network log records is useless without analysis. Resolving the issue requires an analyst to search the database, apply application logic, and manually identify the triggering series of events.

I hope I’m not alone in starting 2021 with some sense of optimism. While several hard months remain ahead of us, I am hopeful and also expecting that some sense of normality will return by the summer months. Either way, this gives us an opportunity to reflect on the challenges we have faced. 2020 was testing. We learnt a lot about ourselves and our businesses in the most challenging of circumstances.

In early October 2020, the Department of Defense released its long-anticipated and much needed Data Strategy. This strategy is the latest installment under the Department’s Digital Modernization Strategy, which was released in July 2019, and focused on the key strategic pillars of enterprise cloud adoption, artificial intelligence, command, control, communications, cybersecurity, and IT reform.

Fraud rates for Unemployment Insurance Benefits (UIB) and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) are out of control. In May 2020, Brian Krebs of Krebsonsecurity published two articles detailing fraud that was occurring in several different state’s UIB portals. These states had been warned by the US Secret Service to be on the lookout for this. Reading the articles, the common theme is that many states are missing rudimentary controls for combating fraud.

In our last blog, "What's New in Splunk Cloud: Part 1," we reviewed a host of new Splunk Cloud features that we have delivered through our accelerated releases since the beginning of 2020. A large part of this effort focused on empowering Splunk Cloud admins and making their experience as self-service as possible. In this blog, we will examine our latest effort to continue this empowerment: Splunk Cloud’s Admin Configuration Service (ACS).

From store shutdown to temporary closure and limited occupancy for non-essential retail businesses, 2020 was filled with many disappointments. America’s stores were in rough shape even before the pandemic, but COVID-19 has significantly compounded the challenging retail landscape, leaving behind businesses that could not adapt to the abrupt change in the operating environment.