The improvement is in terms of helping those users who get locked out because we have that happen quite often. Daily, we have users getting locked out, and using Splunk makes it so much easier to help them. Rather than trying to go to the server and find those logs, we can just go to Splunk and then the dashboard for that particular user and find out exactly which machine is causing the lockout.
It helps us to easily find out which machine is causing the lockout. A lot of people know that customers can exaggerate. We can bring that back into perspective. They might say that they get locked out every day, whereas it might be once a week. We can see that. We do have a dashboard that tells us who is locked out right now. We do use that, and it helps us a lot because even before the user realizes it, we can go back and help. That helps us because they almost do not even know that it is happening. We can see it in real time, and we can fix it and unlock it. If it is something that is reoccurring, we can say, "You have been getting locked out multiple times in the same place for the last couple of hours. Go check this." We can also see why they were locked out. If somebody is putting in the wrong password, we can ignore that and unlock it. We, of course, are going to see where it is coming from. If we see some weird IP address or some weird computer that looks like it belongs to us, we will address that, but it helps us to help the user quickly. We are told what is happening as opposed to having to ask what is happening. We have definitely seen time to value. Instead of having to research, we are told it is there.
The Splunk Cloud Platform has reduced our mean time to resolve. It has easily saved 20 to 30 minutes every time someone gets locked out. We get 10 or 15 instances per day where people get locked out. It definitely saves a few hours per day.
Splunk Cloud Platform definitely frees us up to handle true problems and do true troubleshooting as opposed to handling lock-out issues. It is, of course, big for the user, but it is minute for us because it is answering a question that does not really matter to us. It matters to the user, but for us, we can just unlock their account, and we can figure out why at another time, whereas now, we can unlock their account and figure out why immediately. For example, if it was a machine that they logged into but they do not remember, or they have a cell phone that they logged into but they have not changed their password on, we can figure that out a lot quicker. That helps them quicker. It keeps us from having to go back to that user, and we can knock that out right then and there.
We have not gone into its ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real time because we use it more after the fact. We do have an MSP, and they handle more of the security side. Their software does real-time monitoring, and they get alerts. We use the Splunk Cloud Platform to see what has already happened.