Security is an essential part of any modern IT foundation, whether in smaller shops or at enterprise-scale. It used to be sufficient to implement rules-based software to defend against malicious actors, but those malicious actors are not standing still. Just as every aspect of IT has become more sophisticated, attackers have continued to innovate as well. Building more and more rules-based software to detect security events means you are always one step behind in an unsustainable fight.

According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the money lost by businesses to fraudsters amounts to over $3.5 trillion each year. The ACFE's 2016 Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse states that proactive data monitoring and analysis is among the most effective anti-fraud controls.

Here at Splunk we’re passionate about helping our customers get as much value from their data as possible. Recently Lila Fridley has written about how to select the best workflow for applying machine learning and Vinay Sridhar has provided an example of anomaly detection in SMLE.

I have seen many junior data scientists and machine learning engineers start a new job or a consulting engagement for a telecom company coming from different industries and thinking that it’s yet another project like many others. What they usually don’t know is that “It’s a trap!”. I spent several years forging telecom data into valuable insights, and looking back, there are a couple of things I would have loved to know at the beginning of my journey.

The data center is a remarkably complex structure. However, they are crucial to the everyday running of even the smallest businesses and enterprises. Whether in-house, cloud, or hybrid, the average data center management requires specialist knowledge and meticulous oversight for max efficiency. That is one reason, at least, why machine learning is emerging as an ideal partner for centers of the future.

Some of you may have seen recently that we are trying to commoditize machine learning through our MLTK smart workflows. Here I’d like to outline another example of an MLTK smart workflow, designed to help improve the usability of the predictive capabilities in ITSI.

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.

Measuring your machine learning model will help you understand how well your model is doing, how useful it is, and whether your model can perform better with more data. This is what Algorithmia Insights — a feature of Algorithmia Enterprise MLOps platform — does. Algorithmia platform accelerates your time to value for ML by delivering more models quickly and securely, as it is estimated that 85% of machine learning models never make it to production.

Modern IT & DevOps teams face increasingly complex environments — making it harder to quickly detect and resolve critical issues in real-time. To overcome this challenge, Splunk users can take advantage of ML-powered IT monitoring and DevOps solutions available in a scalable platform with state-of-the-art data analytics and AI/ML capabilities. In this blog, we deploy Splunk’s built-in Streaming ML algorithms to detect anomalous patterns in error logs in real-time.