If you have an on-premise Splunk Enterprise solution you should consider moving to Splunk Cloud. A successful transition can be challenging for in-house Splunk teams, so in this use case we outline the best approach for a successful migration.
Why move to Splunk Cloud?
As most clients adopt a ‘cloud first’ strategy, Splunk has evolved their Splunk Enterprise application into a new SaaS offering known as Splunk Cloud. It aims to ensure their platform continues to be responsive and fault tolerant. Consequently, new features and apps will be available on Splunk Cloud well before they appear on Splunk Enterprise.
If you have on-premise Splunk Enterprise, you should move to Splunk Cloud to keep up with the latest features and threat detection from Splunk. It will help your teams achieve benefits faster.
The benefits of moving to Splunk Cloud
A successful and smooth transition to Splunk Cloud can be achieved with minimal to no down time and result in the following benefits:
- Simplified platform support with Splunk managing and maintaining the solution
- Reduced cost by leveraging Splunk platform support
- Access to the latest features and reduced vulnerability with regular, seamless updates
- Infrastructure efficiencies such as enabling cloud to cloud technologies
- Reduced capital expenditure – achieving a better return on investment sooner by taking hardware costs out of the equation.
The challenges of moving to Splunk Cloud
While moving to Splunk Cloud will empower your teams, you should be aware that any migration to cloud poses significant challenges. It’s important to understand the risks associated and mitigations needed. This is where Avocado can help.
In our experience, the top 5 areas where teams should ensure thorough planning include:
- Ensuring your Splunk Cloud architecture meets governance requirements such as:
- Data sovereignty
- Data encryption in transit and at rest
- Immutability standards for data
- Auditability
- Retention requirements for different types of data
- Ensuring correct access controls have been applied in the cloud
- Engineering the most efficient methods for data onboarding for a cloud environment
- Minimising downtime and performance risks
- Automating the process where possible to greatly reduce migration timeframes.
Investing in a cloud migration strategy
Before you decide to move to Splunk Cloud, it’s good idea to get sound advice on your approach. This advice should consider the complexity of your business, data needs and dependent platforms.
It’s important to analyse your existing on-premise Splunk Enterprise platform and undertake an initial discovery. This discovery will generate a report detailing the current state, and a roadmap to achieving the proposed future state. At Avocado, we can help you undertake this discovery to ensure a smooth, cost-efficient transition. As part of the process, we run Splunk apps and carry out investigations into all aspects of your on-premise Splunk Enterprise platform to create a complete picture.
Some of the questions that will guide your decision-making at this point include:
- Should you migrate everything at once or use a phased approach?
- Are you going to need a data lake to service longer retention periods for your data?
- Do you need to consider a hybrid solution and how will that work?
Avocado’s approach
Avocado finds the right approach for you and ensures that the risk of disruption to the platform is minimised. Our long standing partnership with Splunk, ensures we can help clients negotiate the best architected an cost effective pricing for a move to Splunk Cloud.
An Avocado cloud migration will involve measures such as:
- Parallel data ingestion
- Phased deployment
- Use case segmentation
- Specialised Splunk components
- Hybrid components.
Avocado will guide you every at step of the journey to ensure your migration is successful:
- Current State Report
- Architecture and Detailed Design for the future state solution
- Roadmap for migration
- Risk analysis
- Migration timeline
- Professional Services to carry out the Migration
- Platform testing
- Support for the migrated platform.
Our approach uses a combination of automated tools and apps along with a manual investigation by our team of professional Splunk consultants.
Avocado has extensive experience in Splunk Cloud migrations having successfully completed them at some of the most complex Splunk platforms deployments in Australia.
Book your initial discovery session below, today.
