Continuous intelligence - definition & overview

Continuous intelligence (CI) is real-time analytics and insights delivered from a single, cloud-native platform across multiple use cases to speed decision-making and drive world-class customer experiences.

Business leaders are under increasing pressure to know exactly what is happening inside their business the moment it happens. As a result, employees across organizations are increasingly accountable for the overall health and security of their businesses at all times. They can no longer credibly hide behind intelligence gaps caused by the plethora of function-based, outdated analytics tools that deliver siloed, piecemeal and lagging insights. Organizations that cannot close these gaps in intelligence will not only get left behind but they will also get lapped.

As companies rely on speed and agility for success, a business imperative is emerging to unlock the intelligence layer hidden inside their functions, teams, leaders and employees so it can act as a unified source of faster innovation, higher creativity, real-time responsiveness and execution success. Access to this layer must be real-time, continuous and supported by a single source of truth that brings siloed data together in a common, seamless and always-on experience.

To close intelligence gaps, companies are unlocking their intelligence layer with a new category of software called, continuous intelligence.

Continuous intelligence represents the analytics model for the next chapter of business: real-time businesses that rely on software to drive new customer experiences and new revenue models. As more companies become software-driven by delivering more business services through modern applications, automating workflows, and leveraging data from digital signals, five pillars are emerging as requirements for their digital business success:

• Modern application architectures to build and deploy software faster and flexibly
• Multi-cloud adoption, so distributed application workloads can run across multiple cloud infrastructures to increase scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness
• Continuous security, which thwarts modern threats across an ever-expanding digital surface using artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies
• Continuous collaboration, which gives teams a unified, data-centric perspective of their operations breaking down the silos between developers, security, operations and customer support
• Data-driven intelligence, extracting real-time insights and business value from massive volumes of machine data generated in the form of logs, metrics, events, metadata, traces and other telemetry

Each of the aforementioned requirements faces enormous challenges.

• Modern application architectures break workloads down into small components and distribute them across cloud environments. This creates complexity, introducing more components, systems and signals to manage, capture and analyze. Continuous innovation requires continuous intelligence to speed quality improvements and better manage these complex systems and services.
• Multi-cloud adoption drives digital sprawl due to siloed architectures and management tools that provide only partial views, do not operate in real-time, and are not scalable for cloud environments. Multi-cloud agility requires continuous intelligence to enable a single pane of visibility across the entire heterogeneous architecture environment in real-time, and across multiple use cases.
• Security complexity arises as the surface area of attack expands across a perimeter-less digital footprint, and organizations often lack the skilled analysts and cloud-native tools needed to secure this new world. Today’s increasingly sophisticated threats require continuous intelligence to automate and speed threat detection and response, and to filter the real threats from the noise.
• Collaboration becomes more important as teams struggle with antiquated, siloed systems that only present a partial view of data and lack real-time context around what is happening broadly across their organization. Continuous collaboration requires continuous intelligence to enable all functions to operate with contextual insights from a single source of truth – their modern application – to speed decision-making and eliminate time wasted debating which data from which tool source is relevant.
• Overwhelming volume of data growth continues to grow unabated and while companies must store and secure it, they are ill-equipped to extract value from it. Continuous data requires continuous intelligence to transform a burden into real-time value that can contribute to business success and competitive advantage, addressing a variety of intelligence needs across innovation, operations, security and customer experience use cases.

Continuous intelligence is real-time insights delivered as a service from a single, cloud-native platform across multiple use cases. Sumo Logic is the pioneer of continuous intelligence, enabling organizations to accelerate their shift to cloud computing and modern application architectures. With Sumo Logic, developers, operators and security analytics, or DevSecOps, are improving the way they build, manage and secure their digital services so their on-demand customer experiences remain available, engaging and secure.

Sumo Logic provides continuous intelligence as a multi-tenant cloud service, Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Platform™, that allows organizations to rapidly deliver reliable applications and digital services, protect against modern security threats and consistently optimize their business processes in real-time. This empowers employees across all lines of business, development, IT, and security teams with the data and insights needed to address the technology and collaboration challenges required for modern business.