Key Challenges
Meggitt wanted to modernize its operations, improve security and enhance operational efficiency to promote growth and stay ahead of competition.
Key Results
With Splunk Cloud, Meggitt can easily scale for growth, manage security risks and make better use of IT resources to bolster productivity and support remote working.
And Meggitt, an engineering company specializing in creating high-performance industrial components, has been a world leader in aerospace, defense and energy for over 70 years. The team knew it needed to embrace the cloud and big data to reap the benefits of manufacturing 4.0, make smarter decisions, maximize operational efficiency and manage growth to stay ahead of competitors.
Because it handles sensitive information for customers in the defense, aerospace and energy sectors, tight security was also a mission-critical requirement.
Meggitt needed a platform to prepare for the challenges of the future — something that would strengthen its security posture and improve the company’s ability to scale so it could meet growing demand and make decisions based on data, rather than instinct and emotion. So Meggitt turned to Splunk.
Using the Splunk platform, Meggitt’s IT team can easily scale to meet growing demand while maintaining high levels of security and compliance across an organization with nearly 40 sites and 9,000+ employees. These are high priorities for a business that serves defense and aerospace customers.
Compared to its previous on-premises infrastructure, Splunk Cloud allows the company to easily take advantage of the latest tools by eliminating the need for manual updates. Thanks to the greater agility that the cloud provides, the Meggitt team keeps operations running smoothly by easily scaling IT resources to accommodate increases in customer orders or production output.
Relying on Splunk Cloud has also reduced time spent maintaining on-site infrastructure, so the team can focus on essential tasks such as enhancing security and responding to business needs.
“Splunk Cloud gives us flexibility and the agility to act,” says James Steel, Meggitt’s detection and response team manager. “Software as a service is now one of the primary models for our whole company.”
For security, the Splunk platform provides instant visibility into network infrastructure and the posture of staff workstations. This means the core IT security team can focus on the most urgent issues.
Analytics and automation from Splunk, for instance, show the team which of the thousands of potential threats detected across the network and user endpoints require immediate attention and human intervention.
“The Splunk platform reveals where our security has potential to improve and, when there are issues, helps us figure out what went wrong so we can prevent it from happening again,” says Steel. “Now we also can put quantitative metrics against compliance so we can highlight which areas need the most attention and crucially track those metrics over time to see how we’re doing against our goals. It’s been an absolute game changer for us.”
Splunk reveals where our security has potential to improve and, when there are issues, helps us figure out what went wrong so we can prevent it from happening again. It's been an absolute game changer for us.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Splunk made it possible for Meggitt to quickly shift to remote work. The company faced shutting down sites or suspending operations if it couldn’t comply with strict regulations for the security of sensitive data on staff workstations.
Within a single day, the IT team created Splunk dashboards that gave business leaders confidence that the network and workstations were sufficiently secured for staff to work from home. Without Splunk, the team estimates it would have taken weeks or months to figure out which systems could securely leave the building.
“The ability to pivot to remote work was a turning point for us,” says Kashaf Rashid, Meggitt’s global director of security operations and information. “The business now understands the power of data in enabling operational flexibility.”
Once staff members were working remotely, Splunk helped the IT team troubleshoot VPN issues to ensure employees experienced speedy network performance and were always able to connect to key corporate resources and effectively carry out their duties from home.
The senior leadership team now uses Splunk dashboards to decide where to invest IT resources and make a case to the board for changes and improvements.
Using Splunk for security has demonstrated the business value of data-driven decision making. It’s exciting to see the senior leadership team asking for on-demand data at their fingertips.
Having proven its usefulness in security and scalability, the Splunk platform is now used across the organization, including to improve the operational efficiency at some key manufacturing sites.
Now that Meggitt can proactively identify when servers are experiencing issues, the IT team can easily adjust resources and prevent network outages that could halt production in manufacturing facilities.
The next steps for Meggitt are to use Splunk to achieve the full promise of modern manufacturing by analyzing data from factory equipment to improve processes on the shop floor — and to provide C-suite executives with access to Splunk technology on their mobile phones.
“Using Splunk has demonstrated the business value of data-driven decision making,” says Rashid. “It’s exciting to see the senior leadership team asking for on-demand data at their fingertips.”
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