Splunk Cloud & Product Thinking
In part one of this post, we talked about Product Thinking, what it is, and why it’s valuable to organizations. Part two discussed what products Splunk might enable in the observability space. In part three, we talk about Splunk as a product enabler for Security products and services.
Hopefully, you can see that by thinking about the value you can deliver to your organizations, many of those capabilities would be great services to offer internally, and with a little thought, all of these extremely valuable capabilities can be enabled as a packaged product offering, powered by Splunk at the core.
But what about Splunk Cloud? Does this affect how we might deliver and enable these products and services if we are taking a product thinking approach?
How Does Splunk Cloud Affect Splunk and Product Thinking?
Splunk Cloud offers a fully hosted Splunk Enterprise environment operated by Splunk’s expert team. As with any technology, the work of building a product or service takes thoughtful time and attention. Running Splunk on-prem, or even running in your own cloud infrastructure, requires time, effort, and skills. By opting to run Splunk Cloud as the backbone of your Splunk-based product offering, you’ll be freed up to spend more time focusing on the onboarding of information, and the alerting, analytics, and reporting that actually deliver the value to customers. This means less overall wasted cost and time spent running infrastructure and scaling it to meet demand.
One of the tenets of a product thinking approach means we should be thinking about our ability to deliver the services and outcomes our customers need. Sometimes we don’t know if our solution will meet that need, and applying Lean thinking suggests we don’t “build it and they will come”, but that we test to find out. In this sense, Splunk Cloud offers the ability to start small and scale as our customers and their demand grows and becomes better understood. Using Splunk Cloud can represent a lot of cost and complexity savings compared to deploying our own Splunk instances, especially as we’re learning what Splunk can do for us and how.
Another thing to bear in mind, however, is that some customizations of Splunk (such as some aspects of add-ons) are limited in Splunk Cloud. This could restrict your opportunity – in some niche cases – to adapt your product offering to deliver services to some of your customers with unique needs or challenges. It’s worth remembering that in this case, some needs can be addressed with solutions or architecture elsewhere, before Splunk Cloud, and nothing stops an organization from adopting on-premise or custom cloud infrastructure running Splunk and migrating away from Splunk Cloud if some unusual constraint was to become a show stopper.
The ideal thing is to get started offering your product or service leveraging Splunk, and Splunk Cloud makes getting started really easy. The rest is just deciding which customers you want to support, and which outcomes are the most important to your customers – then it’s time to get going and deliver value!
How Can Solsys Help?
Solsys is one of the largest Splunk Professional Services in Canada. Our wide-ranging experience with the platform, combined with our understanding of Product Thinking and Agile approaches to problem-solving, puts us in a unique position to help and support companies looking to run Products and Services using Splunk to deliver business value. We’d love to talk with you about the problems you’re trying to solve, and how our capabilities and experience might be able to help! Please get in touch to chat with us by emailing info@solsys.ca.
About the Authors
John Tobin has been working in software development for around 30 years, and has been working with Agile methods in the role of scrum master and product owner for product development teams for about half of that time. John has worked extensively with teams to deliver products and services in challenging and complex environments, delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars of business value over this time.
Doug Brown joined Solsys Corporation in 2013 as a Managing Consultant. Doug has tenures with large software organizations such as Oracle and Sun Microsystems leading professional services teams across North America. Doug has experience working with customers canvassing requirements, identifying critical solution architecture components. Success looks like great product teams delivering great value for their customers.
