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Splunk: Follow the money, follow the data

By Professor Herman Singh, CEO of Future Advisory

Johannesburg, 25 Aug 2021
Professor Herman Singh, CEO of Future Advisory.
Professor Herman Singh, CEO of Future Advisory.

Obscure Technologies, cyber security specialist and distributor of Splunk in South Africa, is hosting a series of events that demonstrate the drive to digitisation and outline how digital firms are structured for cloud, the role of observability, how agility aids responsiveness, customer experience versus security trade-offs, and the challenges of scaling and deploying new functionality fast.

In a world prioritising agility and speed to market, businesses today are challenged in balancing doing it fast, doing it well and doing it securely.

In trying to innovate, there is huge pressure on businesses to be agile, but with that comes a risk that because we move so fast, we will make mistakes. The motto ‘move fast and break things’, attributed to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is not what most organisations want to do.

By using DDDM – data driven decision-making, organisations need to be using observability tools and extracting meaning, going from data to information to knowledge to wisdom.

Historically, most of the data we used was descriptive and gave us information in hindsight, which is helpful because it tells you what went wrong. But we also want insight to understand why it went wrong, as well as foresight, which allows us to predict what might go wrong in future. We need to move from historical to current and on to predictive, preventative and prescriptive.

When organisations effectively deploy DDDM to drive strategy, they can allocate resources to the innovations that will add value, and they can do so quickly.

One of the tech giants – with a market value in excess of $150 billion – is a good example of this: Having experienced massive growth in just a matter of weeks, the company used vast amounts of real, hard data to make sense of what its users want and what they prioritise, and even what users don’t yet know they want.

But speed should not always be a company’s first priority. A key question is: What does speed mean? Speed is a relative thing. Three months might be fast for one product and slow to market with another. Organisations need to meet customer expectations of speed, be fast enough to outpace competitors and also be cognisant of how fast criminals are working to compromise this. In some respects, it is an arms race.

Organisations that can innovate rapidly enough to exceed customer expectations, beat competitors and stay ahead of criminals are winning. They don’t necessarily have to be any faster than that; indeed companies like Apple are known for stating that you don’t always have to be bleeding edge, instead, you must be leading edge and get it right.

On top of the trade-offs between doing it fast and doing it well, there is also the challenge of doing it securely. In some cases, 100% security will be sacrificed for customer convenience. Our ability to collect data from customers is completely overwhelming our ability to protect that same data. The problem is that it has become so easy to collect data, put cookies down, track people and analyse their phone apps, that we have created a tsunami of data. The challenge is how we protect it and use it responsibly, while not impacting user experience and convenience. Centralised data-driven security, using analytics and automation, is necessary to help balance innovation and user experience with security, so companies do not have to make trade-offs that could put them at risk.

Prof Herman Singh will address the first event with an in-depth look at the Zoom success story.

For further information and to register, click here.

Brief bio:

Professor Herman Singh is the CEO of Future Advisory, an international firm specialising in digital transformation projects in corporates and start-up acceleration. He graduated from Wits at the age of 19 with a four-year engineering degree. He obtained two post-graduate qualifications in the next few years and ascended to a managing director role at a Barlows factory at 28. Singh also served as a managing director of Siemens’ Industry Division. He then joined Standard Bank as the director of e-commerce and online services, before becoming director of IT planning and CEO of the bank's innovation hub, Beyond Payments. In 2013, he moved into telecommunications as managing executive of m-Commerce and, until recently, he was the CDO at MTN.

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