EDITOR’S
30Q&A
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
INTELLIGENT
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS TECH CHANNELS Issue
CLIVE MCDONALD, HEAD OF FIELD
ENGINEERING, SUMO LOGIC
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
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.
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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