Baylor University’s Migration to NET+ Splunk Cloud: Leveraging Assessment and Collaboration 

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

By Nidhi Yadav, Associate Program Manager, NET+ and Nick Lewis, Program Manager, NET+

Is yours among the many campuses looking to transition to Splunk Cloud? The NET+ Splunk Program continues to provide a forum for the higher ed community to discuss its needs and the challenges associated with such transitions. Jon Allen, Associate Vice President CIO and CISO, and Ruben Castillo Director of Cybersecurity Operations from Baylor University, recently shared highlights from the university’s transition from Splunk on-prem to cloud as part of the NET+ Splunk program.

Baylor’s Move to the Cloud

The need for a cloud solution became clear as Baylor’s focus shifted from running operations to having a more robust, up to date service, improved processes, and enhanced security operations. Allen and Castillo wanted to focus on using the data in Splunk to deliver total return on investment across the entire operation versus just concentrating on the tech return on investment.

Splunk Cloud provides a solution to this challenge because Baylor’s migration to Splunk Cloud: 

• Offered an opportunity to reallocate resources and time towards more pressing initiatives as the organization is relieved of the responsibilities of infrastructure management and administration
• Ensured orchestration, automation and response in the Security Operations Center (SOC) tied into the underlying core Splunk modules 
• Better met the needs of users by addressing the need to incorporate new operations into the usage of Splunk Cloud, but without disrupting current troubleshooting procedures 
• Involved installing a migration assessment app to give a summary of what the environment looks like, areas to potentially optimize in the environment, and handle additional issues during migration

Increased Community Collaboration

Jon further emphasized the importance of increased community collaboration as campuses transition to Splunk Cloud. Rather than developing individual applications, campuses should aim to collaborate with each other and Splunk to access essential organizational and specific components readily available in Splunkbase for integration into Splunk Cloud.

“As we start moving to Splunk Cloud, we need to collaborate as a community in a much more significant way. We need to not all be building our own apps constantly, right?” he said. “We need to make sure that we’re working with Splunk to ensure that the core components that we need in our organizations and verticals are available in the Splunk base areas to pull into Splunk Cloud.”

Watch the Recording

We thank Jon Allen and Reuben Castillo for participating in our September 2023 NET+ Splunk Community Call and presenting Baylor’s journey of migrating to Splunk Cloud, the processes involved and challenges faced. In case you missed it (or just thought it was so great you wanted to watch it again), the recording of the event is now available.

Join us for Move Events

There are more Splunk community events to come in the future as part of the NET+ Splunk Program to highlight how Splunk is being leveraged by the research and higher ed community. If you have any additional questions about the program or would like to subscribe to support the program, please reach out to netplus@internet2.edu.