Case Study: Fairfax County, Virginia protects citizen data and gains real-time security visibility with Splunk Enterprise Security (Splunk Cloud)

Fairfax County Protects Citizen Data Using Splunk Enterprise Security in the Cloud

Fairfax County, Virginia — a government serving more than 1.1 million citizens with 12,000 employees across 50+ agencies — faced growing cybersecurity and IT challenges: disparate systems producing event logs, a legacy SIEM that couldn’t handle the county’s 3.9 petabytes of data, and manual security reporting that took up to two weeks. These constraints increased risk and consumed staff time and data center resources.

The county implemented Splunk Enterprise Security on Splunk Cloud after a successful proof of concept, partnering with Splunk professional services. The move delivered real-time security reporting, proactive protection for 50+ agencies (including phishing and endpoint threat monitoring and SCADA defense), a smaller data center footprint, cost savings, and the ability to repurpose staff toward higher‑value work.

Fairfax County Virginia

Mike Dent

Chief Information Security Officer