Partner Spotlight: Sumo Logic and Gigamon Transform Complexity into Actionable Insights

Sumo Logic is out to make the world’s digital experiences reliable and secure, and they partnered with Gigamon to help make this vision a reality. The company was founded in April 2010 by two ArcSight veterans, Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen, and is headquartered in Redwood City, California.

We spoke with Drew Horn, senior director of technology alliances, to find out more about how Sumo Logic works with Gigamon to help customers modernize their security operations.

Gigamon: Who is Sumo Logic, and what is the company’s history?

Drew: Our mission at Sumo Logic is to be the leading SaaS analytics platform for reliable and secure cloud-native applications that deliver digital services.

Our customers depend on machine data analytics for the insights they need to build, manage, and secure mission-critical, cloud-native application services. With our platform, we help customers ensure application reliability, protect against modern security threats, and gain insights into cloud infrastructures.

Digital services and modern applications (many of them built by our customers) are creating new experiences in the form of solutions and opportunities for human growth, resiliency, prosperity, equality, and expansion. To realize their full potential, these digital experiences must be reliable and secure. That’s where Sumo comes in.

Our vision is to make the world’s digital experiences reliable and secure, and by doing so, not only are we driving our growth opportunity and helping our customers achieve their visions, we are also doing our part to make an impactful difference in the world.

Gigamon: Describe your company culture. What makes you tick?

Drew: At Sumo Logic, we believe we’re in it with our customers. We all play an essential part in providing a critical service that we and our customers depend on, creating an incredibly aligned relationship.

We seek to provide transparency internally and externally, because information and context produces better decisions and removes uncertainty.

We respect each other, assume good intentions, embrace diverse backgrounds and thinking, and believe time with family and friends is vital to our lives and well-being.

Gigamon: If you had to describe Gigamon with just one word, what would it be?

Drew: Visibility.

Gigamon: How do you see Sumo Logic fitting together with Gigamon to solve your customers’ problems?

Drew: Sumo Logic’s mission is to help organizations build and operate reliable and secure modern applications. The challenge today, however, is that this is no longer a human-scale problem. The rise of microservices, Kubernetes, serverless, and cloud has made this objective a machine-scale problem.

Sumo Logic’s powerful data analytics platform brings together logs, metrics, traces, events, and other machine data telemetry from across the entire enterprise to give teams a complete picture of their application’s reliability and security.

With application-level metadata and real-time threat insights from Gigamon, Sumo Logic can provide deep insights and visibility into application behavior and security posture.

Gigamon: What are some of your market’s specifics, advantages, and challenges when it comes to network security and visibility?

Drew: As a machine data analytics platform, Sumo Logic is truly market agnostic. We serve all markets that run modern applications in the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid.

One important challenge for our customers is properly extracting and correlating the appropriate security and observability telemetry from their applications to ensure reliability and security. This is why our ISV ecosystem and technology partnerships are so critical; we must make it easy for our joint customers to get value from the data made available by partners.

Native, cloud-to-cloud integrations and out-of-the-box content streamline this experience and minimize TTV when implementing Sumo.

Gigamon: Which Gigamon features stand out the most and make the product outstrip its competitors?

Drew: The number of protocols supported by Gigamon Application Metadata Intelligence (AMI) is quite astounding, and IT/operations teams should be confident that they will get the right level of network observability into their critical flows.

In addition, complex observations extracted from Gigamon ThreatINSIGHT™ based on network behavior can be sent to Sumo Logic’s Cloud-Native SIEM for automated correlation, providing a real-time security overlay on top of network observability data. This is critical to the teams responsible for the reliability and security of modern applications.

Gigamon: What is the most memorable moment associated with Gigamon as a partner?

Drew: Bringing our joint messaging to the audiences at Cisco Live 2022 was fantastic. IT operators responsible for both network availability and security were able to see how Sumo Logic is a great tool for helping identify and resolve their cross-cutting concerns quickly.

Gigamon: What are the wow moments associated with Gigamon?

Drew: I like how the team put together a vendor-agnostic podcast series focused on best practices and learning, just to raise awareness and share knowledge with the community.

I enjoyed participating and sharing my thoughts on developer best practices around software delivery performance and the DORA metrics.

Gigamon: What are some of the new challenges you see in the market that the partnership with Gigamon can solve?

Drew: The explosion of the work-from-anywhere mentality is putting additional pressure on IT and security professionals, who are already overburdened with the task of lifting and shifting their enterprise to hybrid and multi-cloud.

Network and security operations teams now must balance this existing organizational priority with ensuring that their distributed workforce remains as productive as they used to be in the branch office.

Gigamon is uniquely positioned to inspect and summarize critical network and security telemetry from across the enterprise and distributed workforce and make that instantly available in Sumo Logic. Our advanced monitoring and analytics help simplify the work and response time for already overburdened IT, NetOps, and SecOps teams.

Gigamon: What are the positive business outcomes as a Gigamon alliance partner?

Drew: As an alliance partner, we aim to raise awareness about existing security challenges teams face today and educate our joint customers and mutual channel partners on how they can get more value from new integrations that Gigamon and Sumo Logic have built together.

Gigamon: What unique capabilities does this partnership bring to our joint business?

Drew: Gigamon extends the reach of Sumo Logic’s machine data analytics platform into network observability and security for NetOps and SecOps teams.

Providing real-time alerting and advanced analytics backed by machine learning algorithms allows these teams to respond to reliability issues and security threats quickly, regardless of the complexity of their infrastructure and distributed workforce.

Sumo Logic brings more context to these operations teams by enriching Gigamon telemetry with data ingested across the entire organization from infrastructure, applications, SaaS apps, and security tools.

Gigamon: Who is the target audience (such as SecOps, NetOps, or DevOps) for our joint solution, and how do they benefit?

Drew: All of the above! For NetOps, Sumo enriches network telemetry collected by Gigamon AMI in real-time, helping these teams identify issues before they impact the organization and reduce time to remediation. Similarly, with SecOps we enrich security alerts from Gigamon ThreatINSIGHT and security-related data from Gigamon AMI to help security operations teams get a better picture of potential threats, with the goal of reducing alert fatigue and mean time to remediation.

As a machine data analytics platform, Sumo helps DevOps teams correlate observability telemetry from production apps and infrastructure with network telemetry from Gigamon to understand where in the stack a potentially customer-impacting issue has occurred. This is especially true for East-West traffic traversing across infrastructure used to host customer-facing apps and services.

In sum, Sumo Logic can be used as a tool to join multiple disparate sets of data spanning many domains to drive collaboration across various operations teams and provide a clearer picture of application reliability and security.

Gigamon: Which verticals/segments are the best target companies, or where we have seen success and why?

Drew: We are vertical agnostic, so the focus is really around organizations moving workloads to hybrid/multi-clouds that are tasked with securely scaling productivity of their growing, distributed workforce.

Gigamon: Thank you, Drew, for making time for us and for being such a wonderful partner.