In today’s complex digital landscape, security teams face increasing pressure to protect sprawling data across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments. The volume of data is growing rapidly, and so is the sophistication of threats. Traditional security tools which are designed for siloed data environments, often fall short, which is slowing down investigations and inflating costs due to redundant data movement.
The solution is Splunk Federated Analytics: a transformative approach that brings your security analytics to where your data lives, without the need to copy or rehydrate it. Whether your data resides in Splunk, Amazon Security Lake (ASL), or a data lake on S3, Federated Analytics empowers teams to operate smarter, faster, and more cost-effectively.
What is Federated Analytics?
Federated Analytics is a capability within the Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk Enterprise Security Cloud that allows users to query and analyze data across distributed systems, from local indexes to cloud-based data lakes like S3 and Amazon Security Lake in cost-effective ways. It combines Federated Search with dynamic data movement to deliver a seamless and flexible threat detection and investigation workflow.
Why It Matters: Tackling Real-World Security Challenges
Security analysts, CISOs and Security engineers often struggle with these common issues:
- Data silos that limit visibility
- Expensive storage costs
- Visibility into data stored remotely
- Incomplete analysis due to selective or partial data ingestion
- Tool fragmentation across the data pipeline
Federated Analytics tackles each of these pain points head-on by making it possible to search across all your data, where it already resides, while preserving cost-efficiency, speed, and context.
The Reality of Hybrid Environments
Security teams today aren’t working in a single data environment. Instead they’re navigating a complex mix of cloud, hybrid, and on-premises infrastructures. According to the Splunk State of Observability Report 2024,
This fragmented landscape makes it increasingly difficult to maintain visibility, streamline investigations, and manage costs. That’s exactly where Splunk Federated Analytics excels — by enabling analytics across all your data, no matter where it resides, without forcing you to move or duplicate it.
Key Use Cases of Federated Analytics
- Search Data in External Lakes
Query S3-based logs via AWS Athena and view results in Splunk, no ingestion needed. - Investigate Historical Data:
Run ad-hoc searches on years of logs without costly rehydration, improving time-to-detection. - Analyze Trends Over Time:
Perform statistical analysis on archived data directly in-place, no exports or extra tools required. - Stream Selective Data to be ingested:
Use filters to ingest only high-value data into cost-effective “Data Lake indexes” for real-time detection. - Replay historical data for advanced analytics
Ingest historical data specified by data source and data timestamps to support advanced analytics through Splunk Data Manager.
- Enrich Splunk Events:
Automatically add context from S3 lookups to speed up investigations. - Explore Before You Ingest:
Evaluate new datasets in ASL before deciding what to pull into Splunk, optimize visibility and cost. - Combine remote data with local data for advanced correlation and investigation:
Correlate remote data with local data to support advanced security use cases through Splunk ES.
The Bigger Picture: Operational Efficiency and Agility
Federated Analytics doesn’t just modernize your threat detection pipeline, it transforms your entire security data lifecycle. It enables:
- Optimize Costs - Avoid unnecessary data rehydration, reduce storage and ingress/egress costs.
- Improved time-to-detection - Fast, focused access to historical data
- End-to-end visibility - Across Splunk and non-Splunk data sources
- Streamlined compliance reporting - Without inflating infrastructure costs
By unifying data access and analysis across environments, Federated Analytics bridges the gap between cloud-native storage and real-time analytics, which turns static archives into actionable intelligence.
Ready to Modernize Your Security Operations?
Splunk Federated Analytics enables organizations to detect threats faster, respond more effectively, and gain a deeper understanding of their environments. without tradeoffs.
Federated Analytics is now generally available as a premium add-on feature for Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk Enterprise Security (cloud). To learn more about Federated Analytics, Speak with your sales representative.
