At its own .conf23 event in Las Vegas, Splunk has announced a new OT product. The Splunk Edge Hub can streamline data gathering from sensors, IoT devices and industrial tools. A striking move, given that other security players don’t choose to invest in hardware.
Splunk originally specialized in collecting mountains of data. However, due to the data explosion that this century has seen, it is increasingly difficult to keep a grip on all available data streams, let alone extract meaningful information from them.
To address this, Splunk says it is important to deploy edge computing. This includes not wanting to entrust everything to the cloud, no matter how popular and capable it is. After all, it is not practical to send everything toward cloud services, which the Edge Hub should help with. The device, according to SVP Products & Technology Tom Casey, is about the size of an Apple TV.
No silos
What exactly can the Edge Hub do? First of all, it is capable of monitoring all kinds of environmental conditions, such as temperature, humidity and the presence of certain atmospheric gases. Thus, it can track any indications of maintenance problems. Based on the data collected, it can also make predictive analytics calculations, ideally recognizing areas of concern before they become a major concern..
As one might expect, Edge Hub produces data that integrates directly within the Splunk platform. In doing so, the company argues that OT and IT can be secured in a cohesive way.
Edge computing can potentially provide a more reliable monitoring infrastructure than cloud services. For sites that do not have ideal or consistent connectivity, this is a big advantage. It also ensures that proprietary data stays within the on-prem IT infrastructure, resulting in fewer opportunities to be robbed of data or to fall afoul of compliance rules. However, Splunk notes that with edge computing, it’s easy for data to end up in silos. An undesirable situation if you want to maintain a coherent umbrella system of sensors on it. The integration into Splunk itself should avoid this problem.
Initially, the Edge Hub is available in the United States as of now. Splunk itself says it has plans to bring the product to the EMEA and APAC regions as well.
Also read: Splunk updates Security and Observability Cloud for better resilience
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