Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly
At Data Summit Connect 2020, Bruno Kurtig, founding vice president of Sumo Logic, discussed the role of real-time operational, security and BI in real-world business decisions making to enable continuous intelligence.
This data is a variety of types, he noted, and it is not the data that you might find in a data warehouse or in a database stable. "It's not just a record of something, a customer record, or a catalog record in a database. It's all kinds of data and it's generated from your IT infrastructure that runs your applications from your edge infrastructure, like the content delivery network. It's coming from your cloud deployments, from your containers, from your Kubernetes, from your software development pipeline—your CI/CD pipeline—that's used to create these applications and push them into production, and from your custom code, all of this data, and it comes in different forms. It's going to be a bunch of key performance indicators, key risk indicators, service level indicators. It's going to be things like events, events—things like somebody logged in, somebody logged out, somebody failed a login, or an exception was generated in the code and there is an error now in the application—that's also an event."
'Continuous intelligence is we believe is business intelligence redefined.' —Bruno Kurtig
And then there are also transactions, said Kurtig. "And when we talk about transactions, it's not just transactions like a financial transaction or a payment transaction. Everything is a transaction in digital software. If you're using your favorite picture site and submitting a photo to Google Photos or somewhere else, that is a transaction. You click a button on a website, you upload something, it gets indexed, it gets persisted. Those are all transactions and you need to manage and understand how your transactions are happening if you're a digital business in order to measure and improve customer experience."
And then, said Kurtig, metadata is also important to describe the data: "Things that tell you context about all of these bits of data, so that you can apply those, those bits of data in some kind of a context, depending on what you're using it for—for example, operational intelligence. A lot of this data is used by DevOps/SRE (software reliablility engineering) teams in order to ensure that the applications and digital services are healthy, that they are, available and performant, that the customers are getting a good experience, that they're not waiting for pages to open too long and things like that."
This is a concern for a digital business officer or CIO, said Kurtig. "It's used oftentimes for security intelligence by the security operation center teams or DevSecOps teams. And that is a concern, you know, data breaches, DDoSs attacks, all of that is a concern of the C-suite through the CSO and the CIO as well." And then finally there are all kinds of telemetry about products that product managers and marketing people can use that helps improve the products and how you serve your customers. "And that's a concern of a variety of executives in a company like the chief product officer or chief marketing officer, chief financial officer." Ultimately, again, said Kurtig, this all rolls up into, into the CEO and C-suite.
"Fundamentally, continuous intelligence is we believe is business intelligence redefined," said Kurtig. "All of this is incredibly important to manage in real time, as you build a digital business because, at any point in time, this information can help you avoid issues, improve how you serve your customers and move forward."
Videos of full presentations from Data Summit Connect Fall 2020, a 3-day series of data management and analytics webinars presented by DBTA and Big Data Quarterly, are available for on-demand viewing on the DBTA YouTube channel.
We will resume Data Summit, our annual in-person conference, in 2021—May 24–26—at the Hyatt Regency Boston.