(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got two sets on the show floor, it's a virtual event, we've got the hybrid stream going, check out all the content we're here for wall-to-wall coverage. It's all been about data cloud transformation, culture change, and making things happen. I got a great segment here with Accenture, Chris Copeland, CTO of Accenture's Federal Services, and Mark Kim, the CEO of Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, also known as the MSRB. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John, it's a pleasure to be here. >> Thanks for coming, first of all, explain what the Municipal Rulemaking Board does, so people know what it is and we'll jump in. >> Sure, thank you, John, for the opportunity to have this conversation, the MSRB serves as the principal regulator of the $4 trillion Municipal Securities market. So Municipal Securities or muni-Bonds as there're most commonly known, finance the majority of this nation's infrastructure from the public schools that educate our kids to the hospitals that care for our sick. Muni-bonds even finance the airport that we flew into to get to this conference. But in addition to writing the rules that regulate this market, the MSRB also provides the technology infrastructure that supports this market. So, in addition to being a financial regulator, the MSRB is also a technology company and we saw the future of technology and cloud computing and that was our decision to embrace that future and to move the MSRB to the cloud. >> Correct, and obviously, Chris, this is critical infrastructure, you're talking about, legacy, has a lot of legacy as well. A lot of data, money's involved. I mean all the wrappings of transformation stories there. >> Yeah, and it's great. I mean, the MSRB and Mark in particular really had the right mindset of understanding that, we all talk about migrating to the cloud. That's really just the beginning. Like it's really about once you're in the cloud, the aperture that opens up the art of the possible and what you can really do. And the MSRB is like right on all of it, right? It's all about data. It's all about transformation, but I think the key for that transformational success that we've seen, is understanding that the organization needs to change too. And that we need to enable that organization to really be productive and deliver on that mission in a cloud first world. >> Well, Mark, I want to get into this 'cause this has been a big part of my reporting this past year during the pandemic and maybe the year earlier. I saw the public sector in particular really forced it to change. >> Yeah. >> Cultural shift instantly, they had no choice. It was a forcing function and there was the haves and have nots, the ones who have done the work, put their toe in the water, invested in some technology, knew about cloud and then ones that weren't, and they were thrown in the water. They had to figure out how to swim very quickly. So take us through the importance of that because we heard today and even in the keynote with Swami on stage from Amazon saying governance could be an enabler, not an inhibitor. So you're in this world of obviously muni-bonds, I'm sure there's a lot of compliance involved. So, take us through the journey, how you guys changed the culture? What was the outcome? Take us a quick highlight on the whole process. >> Absolutely, so, for the MSRB, the cloud migration was always about way more than just moving our applications from our servers to AWS's servers. This was an opportunity for the organization to put in place a cultural transformation. And that's the power of this opportunity for the MSRB. We were able to make a commitment to our people, which we did right at the outset, that we were going to bring all of our people with us on this journey to the cloud. This was a major investment in re-skilling and retraining our staff. We didn't have staff who had experienced migrating applications to the cloud. We didn't have software engineers who had prior experience working in cloud native environments. We trained them and we made that commitment to do that and to bring all of our people along. And that has enabled the MSRB to create a culture of innovation, of teamwork. It also allowed us to break down some silos within our organization. Not only within the IT organization, but between IT and business, it was a transformational opportunity. >> I mean, effecting change is hard, what was the learnings? When did you realize it's working? (John laughs) >> So having completed the migration itself, one of my fears was we've just literally spent millions of dollars investing in our staff, re-skilling and retraining them. We've just gone through a very technical, highly complex migration. These are people who are in high demand. Not to mention that AWS decided to put HQ2 right outside of Washington DC, announced plans to hire 10,000 people over the next 10 years. So I was worried on the other side of the migration that we would have a talent drain, and the best proof that I have that we've got our cultural transformation underway and going in the right direction is we didn't see that brain drain. We have staff that want to stay at the MSRB, that are excited about being able to continue to learn about new technologies, staff that are excited to be kind of on the cutting edge of financial regulation and being a part of building the future of the MSRB. >> Okay, there's a purpose there, I mean, I think this is, this highlights this whole conference here at re:Invent. I was just talking to someone off camera during lunch and like, it's an Amazon learning Conference as they say that their humble is learning, but it's also a thought leadership conference because they're introducing new stuff that's actually like, it gets the juices flowing and you're like, wait a minute, I can do more things. So, it's got that kind of conference, ted kind of vibe to it, plus it's real. >> I think that's one of the best benefits that we saw as part of this program that, and we talk a lot about how to infuse innovation into the fabric of your DNA and organization, and I don't think that personified itself anywhere that I've seen as well as at the MSRB. Mark was talking about people wanting to stay and work there. I'll even, I think he's understating it. People were excited about the process-- >> Yeah, they want to come to work everyday. >> There was competitions going on, on who was going to get certified. There was challenges about who's going to learn the most cloud and that desire to really continuously improve and bring those new innovations was unparalleled that I've seen. What Mark and the MSRB don't have the luxury of just keeping pace with those that they regulate. They've got to stay ahead. >> Yeah. >> And if you're going to stay ahead, you've got to have that innovative culture and you've got to take change as something that isn't this big mountain to climb, but something that's actually exciting to do every day. And I think it really, really came out in the program here. >> That's one of the things I think it's one of the smartest moves you can make and I think you've made it, by getting the people on the right wave of technology is a retention bonus. >> Absolutely. >> It's not just keeping them happy 'cause if you're working on cool stuff, it's fun. >> Right. >> But if you get them on the right way where they're constantly learning, and then they've to be a part of something. >> Yeah. >> This cloud migration, I think that's a real retention thing. Do you agree, you've seen the same thing? >> Yeah, absolutely. Its such a motivator to know that our staff is front and center leading the charge in transforming the MSRB. Not only culturally but also digitally. >> Yeah. >> And bringing us into the future. >> Okay, so I got to put you on the spot because I'm want to put my evil genius hat on for a second. Okay, I want to make money, I'm a FinTech arbitrager, I want to get in and work the muni-bond data angle, obviously worry about, you've got a lot of oversight, governance, regulation. Can you move fast enough to protect the data to make sure things are stable? Take us through that because there's a lot of money involved talking about like a serious part of our economy and a financial system. >> Yeah. >> It's critical infrastructure. >> Yeah. >> So, you got to also have that balance of innovation and compliance and governance without getting in the way. >> Absolutely. >> Take us through how you handle that. >> Absolutely, as a financial regulator that provides the market with its technology infrastructure, failure is not an option nor is falling behind the times. We have to evolve with our evolving market. And the pace of change is moving faster and faster. If you look at today, what's different about the MSRB being in the cloud than route being on-prem in our data centers, for our stakeholders, we don't have customers as a financial regulatory we have stakeholders, the entities that we regulate and the entities that we protect, our stakeholders will see systems that are more available. In the first 12 months of operations in the cloud, we achieved over 99.98% system availability. Performance has improved in our own internal benchmark tests, our systems are running 30% faster than they were and then finally our systems are more secure. This is a hard one to quantify or to explain or to kind of deliver to customers, but I-- >> There's no ROI conversation when you've been hacked. >> Exactly, I am-- >> Its only a disaster. >> But I am confident that our systems are more secure today in the cloud, than they were on-prem in our data centers. >> Yeah, Chris, this is a huge thing. I'm not going to rant a little bit, I'll do a side rant, but everyone who watches theCUBE knows I'm kind of a digital hawk. I truly believe that the red line needs to be changed because we are being attacked at a cyber level and almost like the, I get to see people being excited to work there because it's almost like the military, you got to protect. There's so much downsized, not so much justification of ROI. This is critical infrastructure, financial systems and databases. And there's no malice, there's no government forces to protect you. >> I mean, Mark said it well, failure isn't an option, right? And I think what we're seeing and why everyone is really rapidly moving to the cloud is you cannot get that level of cybersecurity, you cannot get that real time information access, and then run your models to look for trends of where the threats are maybe coming from, and proactively address those threats. You can't do that in a legacy infrastructure model on-prem, you've got to embrace the power of the cloud and the services that the AWS cloud provides to be able to truly try to stay ahead. I mean, you have to bring that innovation every day in your lunch bag and say, how are we going to use these tools that only the cloud affords us to bring security to the forefront? >> And John, can I add on that point? 'Cause I think it's an important one around security. In the legacy environment, in our data centers, the MSRB was handling security by ourselves, and I think one of the biggest lessons learned for us is pick your partners carefully. >> Yes. >> We chose AWS and we chose Accenture Federal Services and we've now tripled our investments in security, both what Amazon is investing in their infrastructure, we've also have AFS providing managed security services for the MSRB in addition to our own security team. So we've literally tripled our security. >> It's interesting and I think that's one of the reasons why you mentioned the retention thing and why people are happy is, it attracts a certain kind of individual to work there. It's the elite tech athlete, we call them, because they like, want the action, the young kids there, they want the tech, they don't want to be boring. So, what better wave to ride when you know there's a lot to protect, again, back to the cyber, this is huge cultural shift in the new generation coming in versus the old IT. The old IT was okay, we're operational, keep the lights on, add some servers, now it's like a lot more is at stake. >> Yeah. >> Okay, great, I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I do want to get the data question. I have to ask you-- >> Sure. >> You're a data company as well, you got to watch the data, what's the vision and data? How are you looking at the data with your team? >> So data is the future of the MSRB and we will remain a financial regulator and write the rules that regulate this market, that's our core mission and we will always do that. We will also always be a technology firm that provides the technology infrastructure for this market. But in the future what the cloud has enabled us to do is to become a data company. We serve as the central repository of market data for this $4 trillion market. And we now, thanks to almost infinite scalable computing power storage, we now have the ability to leverage cloud tools like artificial intelligence, machine learning, to actually get at an unlock insight from the vast amounts of market data that we have and deliver that to the industry that we regulate and serve. >> And you guys have so much headroom because Chris, with Graviton3-- >> Yep. >> And the Stack, you can actually write the apps built for the performance, for your needs. >> That's right. >> Yes. >> For the data needs, 'cause that's your advantage. >> That's right. >> Yeah, it's just incredible. I just find it like, I haven't seen anything like this since the shift from client server to inter networking back in the 90s where you saw a sea change of capabilities just completely change over, it's been pretty incredible. >> Yeah. >> Okay, final word. Just re:Invent, what do you guys think? >> This is my first business trip since the pandemic started and it's fantastic to be with people, to see people to do this in person instead of virtually, so thank you for this opportunity. >> I know, I felt so amazed. Chris, what about you, what's your take? >> It's wonderful to be here, it's great being back, back out in the world I guess. >> Yep >> Getting to meet with Mark, where we're not looking at a screen at each other, meeting with peers, but also just the collaboration and innovation you're going to get in an environment like this and the energy that it brings, you just can't match that. So it's been a great show so far and I'm looking forward to the rest of it. >> The phrase I hear a lot on theCUBE, also I say it a lot, a kid in the candy store 'cause there's so much coming out, just the capabilities, you're starting to see more ease of use, more infrastructure as code now, data as code, a lot of great stuff, all part of the cloud transformation. So great for coming on and sharing the story, Mark, I appreciate it. >> Thank you John. >> It's good to hear about your awesome program, Chris, thanks for coming on too. >> Yep, thanks for having us. >> Appreciate it, okay, Cube Coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Washington, DC. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The District everybody. We're here covering the AWS Public Sector Summit, #AWSPSSummit. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host Stuart Miniman. Gus Hunt is here, he's the Managing Director of Accenture. Great to see you. >> Great, thanks. Dave, Stu, appreciate being here. >> Thanks for coming on. Last night we were at the Accenture Event, it was hosted by Teresa Carlson and Accenture, a jam packed high-level audience. It was really, really fabulous. You couldn't make it, cause you got stuck in-- >> Weather-wise, got trapped in Atlanta. >> Unfortunately, Gus, you missed a lot, it was very good. But bring us up to speed on just sort of the state of where we're at with Accenture. You guys are heavily involved with the CIA implementation. We can talk about that a little bit. But start with Accenture, what you guys got going on in the Government. >> So Accenture Federal Services, which is the part I'm within, supports all of our federal agencies across the board. And we do enormous amount of work in the Cloud Services. In fact, Accenture itself is the largest partner of AWS in the world, right, providing cloud services directly engaged with Amazon. We have our Accenture Amazon Business Group, for example, that we leverage across the board. So we are really heavily steep, both in what it takes to help companies and our federal clients move to the cloud, but also how to take real advantage of it, how to gain the efficiencies that they need, and how to do this very securely. Because so much of I think the concerns that get expressed by people are a misunderstanding about whether or not the cloud is secure, versus how to do it securely in the cloud, if you understand the nuance difference there. >> Right, right. So, well, explain that. Let's double-click on that nuance there. A lot of people so early on it was concerns about the cloud, and then it kind of flipped and said, well, obviously the cloud's going to be more secure than what I could do as an organization. We heard what the CIA said today. They said, "On the worst day in the public cloud, "security's far better than in it is "in my client service systems." So help us unpack that a little. >> So, I'll take you back a few years. I spent 20 years in Federal Government working for CIA. I retired from there as their Chief Technology Officer. And I led basically the C2S deal that we put together in order to bring cloud services into the agency. And we did that fundamentally for four reasons. One was velocity. We had to get our speed of abilities, delivery capabilities up to match that what was happening in the private sector, in the cloud. The second was efficiencies. We had to find a way to really tap into the extraordinary efficiencies being driven by the cloud world and the cloud environment, with this continuous drop in price and storage, and computing, and things like that. How do we leverage that to our advantage and enable us now instead of to keep pace in the world when we knew that data was doing like this, and that the ability to exploit data is what the business is all about, right? >> And that was going like that at the time. >> With the cost, what we didn't want was the cost to do this, right? This is where the cloud was going to play a critical role to enable us to really keep pace with the explosion of data big data, and yet through storage and compute in the cloud, be able to do this at a fairly level cost curve, that was the objective. The third was to drive innovation, right? So we had to be able to innovate as fast as the private sector was able to innovate, to deliver new capabilities continuously all the time, and do those things. And the final reason really was about security, right? To your point, we're getting back to, the question that was originally asked was that the cloud, when we investigated the cloud, it turned out that the cloud was much more secure as a basic platform than almost anything that anybody could deliver inside their own data center across the board. And if you leverage the cloud in a particular way, security, it becomes a much more secure environment for people to operate in and do work in, then you could possibly achieve inside of your own data centers, your own data center environments. >> Gus, I'm hearing things like speed, innovation and security. I'm thinking, can you tell us a little bit about developers inside the agency? Do they have a DevOps initiative, as part of achieving those goals? >> Absolutely. So we actually got started doing Agile Development back in 2005. And what happened was, curiously enough with Agile development using scrum techniques is what we applied. We were able to build software capabilities much faster than we could actually get them hosted. So we had an impedance mismatch, a velocity mismatch, between the ability to build capabilities with Agile Development and to go. Now, when we got started in the cloud world here, DevOps was a relatively new term, but now of course DevOps just permeates everything that gets done. Accenture Federal Services, we teach DevOps for the intelligence community across the board, we teach Agile Development, we're heavily engaged. But our big move now is into DevSecOps, right? So the new impedance mismatch is the fact that I can deliver and build software very quickly. I can host it very quickly in the cloud, but my problem is that my security people who have to credit and approve the ability to run these things, are not working in sync very well with what happens in the space there. It's not that they're not great people, it's just that the methodologies that have been applied, now are causing a delay. So this is where DevSecOps comes into play and this is our big push in Accenture Federal Services. all of our clients in the cloud is to adopt DevSecOps so that we can have security tied directly into the entire development cycle all the way through, so that there are no surprises, right? We know exactly what the status is all along, and if you know anything about cyber security, in particular, both things, security on at the end is the worst possible thing you can do. And fixing cyber security holes at the end is 30 times more expensive than having just done it up front in the beginning across the board. So we are heavily invested in driving both Agile Development and DevSecOps now, in support of our cloud customers. >> Can you talk, Gus, about just as an observer, you're obviously deep into federal, but just the delta between commercial and federal? Certainly within federal you see pockets of highly advanced, whether it's security or analytics, et cetera, but across the board the Federal Government systems are obviously a lot of money is spent on maintenance, a lot of time and effort. Is Federal still learning, the public sector still learning from the commercial sector? Is it flipping? What's your take on that? >> So it's interesting. So when I retired and went out to work, from the public sector into the private sector, there's this really interesting point of view that's out there. When I was in the Federal Government, we really thought that the private sector was way ahead of us. And so we spent lot of time working with the financial service people who were brilliant, and working with Amazon and all of the people and all of the things that they were doing, because they were brilliant. So it was a really interesting engagement. But when I got to the other side, it's looked at the other way, right? They want to know what's going on because, particularly from a cyber-security optic, from a security optic, the Federal Government is viewed in many ways and particularly the intelligence community itself, is viewed as being far ahead of what goes on in the rest of the world. And in terms of analytics and things, the federal government has terrific capabilities, and has built terrific systems to do these things. So it's an interesting optic. Each one looking at the other from the outside in, is observing things and the reality is, is that like anything in life, you have this distribution. There are those that are terrific on one end of the spectrum and those that are nascent on the other end of the spectrum. This is true in the public sector, it's true in the private sector across the board. And it's just getting people together. I think the most important thing is to find a way to get us together so we share information really effectively, so that we understand what's going on, we can educate and we can all elevate ourselves up the chain, to deliver better capabilities, both for our clients and our customers, and to the citizens of our country. >> Yeah, and that public private partnership really isn't formalized. Frankly, it's companies like Accenture that are the glue there, don't you think? >> Yes, exactly. I think that that's a key point. It's companies like Accenture, companies like Amazon, who have engagements across the spectrum and on a global basis, that are able to see and experience things that most companies can't do 'cause they don't have that global perspective. One of the biggest issues we see is that most companies view the world through their narrow optic of their local sets of problems and issues, and this is what catches up with them, particularly in the cyber realm, for example. Which is they're looking at the world through the their own little narrow soda straw. And the global view of an AWS and the global view of an Accenture can be brought to bear to help us with our federal clients, for example, to see the issues more broadly and engage more effectively in a public private sector discourse. >> So there are threats everywhere, obviously. Increasingly people are talking about the weaponization of social media. Obviously, there's critical infrastructure, which we've talked about for years. Where do you see the priorities going? Where is the focus, the spending? Is it on response? Is it on keeping the bad guys out? What do you sense? >> I would say that most of the spending today is focused on trying to keep bad guys out. And that model, while critically important, has got to change, right? Because as you notice while important to do and absolutely essential, it has been wholly insufficient in actually dealing with the problem. We have to move ourselves into a completely different posture in the world today. We have to adopt very much proactive capabilities, hunt for things, do critical reviews and pen testing, discover your vulnerabilities before the adversary does. Adopt cloud services because they can change the security game. If we write cloud native code and distribute it in multiple availability zones and fully leverage elasticity and software to find networking, we can turn it into a shell game where the adversary has to find me, not the other way around. We can become what I call the polymorphic attack surface, as opposed to us having to do with polymorphic viruses, and things like that, that we have to find that are constantly trying to hide themselves from us. And so, it's adopting those things that then drive us to a state of resilience, which have to get to. Resilience is the ability to have an event and keep on operating. As opposed to what happens today, where you have an event and everything gets shut down, and all hands on deck and panic ensues. >> So, Gus, we've talked a little bit about some of the constraints and why some people might be concerned. Wondering if we could talk about some of the opportunities. What kind of innovation are you seeing from partners and customers that you're working with, that they're driving when they do adopt cloud? >> Innovation just across the board, or? >> Yeah, any cool things they're doing, there's edge technologies, you got IOT. >> I would say that the big drivers of innovation, of course, are the ones that everybody else talks about. Which is really what's happening in the machine learning and AI space. And that is really critical because those are the things that will enable us to both deal and act with issues, particularly in my realm, the cyber realm at machine speed across the board, and stop things before they can actually become problematic. But it's also going to be the mechanism by which we can enable the human population across the board to better themselves. So you take that and you combine it with the Internet of Things, which is growing explosively across the board, to begin to automate and drive efficiencies and enable remote health care and all those things like that. We're really at the cusp, I believe, of a true renaissance, if you will, of enabling society in ways that we can't possibly begin to imagine, just looking at it from where we are today. >> A lot of talk, you know, about machine intelligence. I didn't say AI, so I don't have to do a shot. Where do you see that fitting in, generally, and then maybe specifically in cyber? And the second part of that question is you're seeing this DevOps and SecOps worlds coming together? >> Yeah, right. So we talked previously about DevSecOps. Just to go back to that real quickly. That's an absolute essential. We have to get the business, the beauty of Agile Development and DevOps was it got the business and the infrastructure people who had to run things successfully all the time, and the developers who needed to do things very quickly, all at the table to engage and ensuring that they could do that. The gap in there was the security people. So with DevSecOps, you've got the security people brought in right up front across the board there. That move into DevSecOps is more than just essential, it's a must-do, I believe, for all organizations here as they move themselves into the future, and to find a way to adopt it. How did you phrase it? You didn't use the word AI, you said? >> Machine intelligence. >> Machine intelligence directive. I think that those capabilities are maturing very, very rapidly, and I think that what you're going to see is a rapid shift in two ways. One is that while machine intelligence is great, the machine is only as smart as the data and the information that are fed to it, right? If you feed a machine a bunch of information that's highly biased, you're going to get highly biased information out. So there's two things you have to have. One, the intelligence is going to grow inside the machines, but two, there's going to be and must be a parallel thread where you have to have some form of social consciousness and social awareness that ensures that the machines themselves don't develop unconscious biases that are then leveraged, and used to the disadvantage of citizens in society, or other people and things like that. And so machine intelligence is going to grow, but that same ability is emerging, and in fact it's something we talk about at Accenture and have written papers on, about the fact that we have to have this social conscience or social awareness around Artificial Intelligence, the machine learning, to ensure that it is most effectively used to the benefit of the citizens of the country. >> Right, well, in this notion of polymorphic attack surface, presumably it just can't be humans moving stuff around. >> No, that's where machinery and automation come into play, they have to act at machine speed. It's the only thing that can act at machine speed. Humans will always be involved. Okay, you're never going to get away from the human factor. What these things do is they do the heavy lifting, and then enable humans to focus on what their brains are really, really good at, which is making hard decisions about what's actually going on, and what they actually need to do in many cases. We can automate some things, but a lot of it is still going to require really smart people to engage. >> So when you look back at your original four objectives with respect to the cloud velocity, efficiencies, trying to keep the costs where they are or lower them, driving innovation and security, how would you grade, maybe the agency, the industry, whatever you feel comfortable attaching? >> Great question. I'm going to avoid giving you a specific answer like this. >> Fair enough. >> Again there's a spectrum of engagement, across the board. Some agencies are doing really well and have been leaders in the space, and I would argue that my old agency is one of those, really. There are others that are also leaders in the space and are engaging and adopting cloud services, they're pushing very heavily down these pathways we talked about. They're embracing these technologies because they realize what they can do. And then there are others that are lagging behind, but they are lagging behind for any number of several reasons that are out there. So first and foremost is the fact that there's a massive legacy set of workloads and capabilities out there, and it's very hard to figure out what are those that I want to engage in to move to the cloud and do things. So IT modernization dollars were put into play by the federal government in order to help federal agencies do this, modernize their IT with the goal of moving themselves to the cloud, so that they could drive the efficiencies and adopt the things that are going to be there. There's also the concerns we mentioned about security. There's too much fear, uncertainty and doubt, and I think misunderstanding about the cloud, and that was great. I missed the talk today from my old agency, but I'm glad to hear them talk about the fact that I've said this for the longest time, the basic cloud is much more secure than almost everything new. And if I apply and build and develop cloud native capabilities, I can actually leverage the cloud to my advantage to dramatically change the game and deliver cyber resilience into my customers set. So this is the messaging that we want to be able to do. The only way that people are going to do this in the end, because of this big backlog of capabilities, is they have to remember that they got into where their current state is one application, one system at a time. And the only way they're going to get out of it is one application, one system at a time. They just have to begin to think about what are the ones that matter and how they want to go about that. >> No quick fixes there, but a lot of hard work and thoughtfulness. Gus, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really great to have you, appreciate you sharing your insight and your knowledge. >> Delighted, Dave. >> Pleasure. >> Stu, thanks so much. >> Okay, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back, John Furrier is here as well with our next guest. We're live at the AWS Public Sector Summit. You're watching theCUBE. >> Thanks, guys.

>>Welcome back here on the Cube. I'm John Walls. We are in Las Vegas at the Venetian, and this is Reinvent 22 in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. Glad to have you with us here as we continue our conversations. I'm joined by Paul Puckett, who's the former director of the Enterprise Cloud Management Services at the US Army. Paul, good to see you sir. Hey, you as well, John. Thank you. And Justin, she who is managing director and cloud go to market lead at Accenture Federal Services. Justin, good morning to you. Good morning, John. Yeah, glad to have you both here on the cube. First time too, I believe, right? Yes sir. Well, welcome. I wish we had some kind of baptism or indoctrination, but I'll see what I can come up with in the next 10 minutes for you. Let's talk about the Army, Paul. So enterprise cloud management, US Army. You know, I can't imagine the scale we're talking about here. I can't imagine the solutions we're talking about. I can't imagine the users we're talking about. Just for our folks at home, paint the picture a little bit of what kind of landscape it is that you have to cover with that kind of title. >>Sure. The United States Army, about 1.4 million people. Obviously a global organization responsible for protecting and defending the United States as part of our sister services in the Department of Defense. And scale often comes up a lot, right? And we talk about any capability to your solution for the United States Army scale is the, the number one thing, but oftentimes people overlook quality first. And actually when you think of the partnership between the Army and Accenture Federal, we thought a lot when it came to establishing the enterprise Cloud management agency that we wanted to deliver quality first when it came to adopting cloud computing and then scale that quality and not so much be afraid of the, the scale of the army and the size that forces us to make bad decisions. Cuz we wanted to make sure that we proved that there was opportunity and value in the cloud first, and then we wanted to truly scale that. And so no doubt, an immense challenge. The organization's been around for now three years, but I think that we've established irreversible momentum when it comes to modernization, leveraging cloud computing >>For the army. So let's back up. You kind of threw it in there, the ecma. So this agency was, was your a collaboration, right? To create from the ground up and it's in three years in existence. So let's just talk about that. What went into that thinking? What went into the planning and then how did you actually get it up and run into the extent that it is today? >>Sure. Well, it was once the enterprise cloud management office. It was a directorate within the, the CIO G six of the United States Army. So at the headquarters, the army, the chief information Officer, and the G six, which is essentially the military arm for all IT capability were once a joint's organization and the ECMO was created to catalyze the adoption of cloud computing. The army had actually been on a, a cloud adoption journey for many years, but there wasn't a lot of value that was actually derived. And so they created the ecma, well, the ECMO at the time brought me in as the director. And so we were responsible for establishing the new strategy for the adoption of cloud. One of the components of that strategy was essentially we needed an opportunity to be able to buy cloud services at scale. And this was part of our buy secure and build model that we had in place. And so part of the buy piece, we put an acquisition strategy together around how we wanted to buy cloud at scale. We called it the cloud account management optimization. OTA >>Just rolls right off the >>Tongue, it just rolls right off the tongue. And for those that love acronyms, camo, >>Which I liked it when I was say cama, I loved that. That was, that was, >>You always have to have like a tundra, a little >>Piece of that. Very good. It was good. >>But at the time it was novetta, no, Nevada's been bought up by afs, but Novea won that agreement. And so we've had this partnership in place now for just about a year and a half for buying cloud computing net scale. >>So let's talk about, about what you deal with on, on the federal services side here, Justin, in terms of the army. So obviously governance, a major issue, compliance, a major issue, security, you know, paramount importance and all that STEM leads up to quality that Paul was talking about. So when you were looking at this and keeping all those factors in, in your mind, right? I mean, how many, like, oh my God, what kind of days did you have? Oh, well, because this was a handful. >>Well, it was, but you could see when we were responding to the acquisition that it was really, you know, forward thinking and forward leaning in terms of how they thought about cloud acquisition and cloud governance and cloud management. And it's really kind of a sleepy area like cloud account acquisition. Everyone's like, oh, it's easy to get in the cloud, you know, run your credit card on Amazon and you're in, in 30 seconds or less. That's really not the case inside the federal government, whether it's the army, the Air Force or whoever, right? Those, those are, they're real challenges in procuring and acquiring cloud. And so it was clear from, you know, Paul's office that they understood those challenges and we were excited to really meet them with them. >>And, and how, I guess from an institutional perspective, before this was right, I I assume very protective, very tight cloistered, right? You, you, in terms of being open to or, or a more open environment, there might have been some pushback was they're not. Right? So dealing with that, what did you find that to be the case? Well, so >>There's kind of a few pieces to unpacking that. There's a lot of fear in trepidation around something you don't understand, right? And so part of it is the teaching and training and the, and the capability and the opportunity in the cloud and the ability to be exceptionally secure when it comes to no doubt, the sensitivity of the information of the Department of Defense, but also from an action acquisition strategy perspective, more from a financial perspective, the DOD is accustomed to buying hardware. We make these big bets of these big things to, to live in today's centers. And so when we talk about consuming cloud as a utility, there's a lot of fear there as well, because they don't really understand how to kind of pay for something by the drink, if you will, because it incentivizes them to be more efficient with their utilization of resources. >>But when you look at the budgeting process of the d od, there really is not that much of incentive for efficiency. The p PPE process, the planning program, budgeting, execution, they care about execution, which is spending money and you can spend a lot of money in the cloud, right? But how are you actually utilizing that? And so what we wanted to do is create that feedback loop and so the utilization is actually fed into our financial systems that help us then estimate into the future. And that's the capability that we partnered with AFS on is establishing the closing of that feedback loop. So now we can actually optimize our utilization of the cloud. And that's actually driving better incentives in the PPE >>Process. You know, when you think about these keywords here, modernized, digitized, data driven, so on, so forth, I, I don't think a lot of people might connect that to the US government in general just because of, you know, it's a large intentionally slow moving bureaucratic machine, right? Is that fair to characterize it that way? It >>Is, but not in this case. Right? So what we done, >>You you totally juxtapose that. Yeah. >>Yeah. So what we've done is we've really enabled data driven decision making as it relates to cloud accounts and cloud governance. And so we have a, a tool called Cloud Tracker. We deployed for the army at a number of different classifications, and you get a full 360 view of all of your cloud utilization and cloud spend, you know, really up to date within 24 hours of it occurring, right? And there a lot of folks, you know, they didn't never went into the console, they never looked at what they were spending in cloud previously. And so now you just go to a simple web portal and see the entire entirety of the army cloud spend right there at your fingertips. So that really enables like better decision making in terms of like purchasing savings plans and reserved instances and other sorts of AWS specific tools to help you save money. >>So Paul, tell me about Cloud Tracker then. Yeah, I mean from the client side then, can you just say this dashboard lays it out for you right? In great detail about what kind of usage, what kind of efficiencies I assume Yeah. What's working, what's not? >>Absolutely. Well, and, and I think a few things to unpack that's really important here is listen, any cloud service provider has a concept. You can see what you're actually spending. But when it comes to money in the United States government, there are different colors of money. There's regulations when it comes to how money is identified for different capabilities or incentives. And you've gotta be very explicit in how you track and how you spend that money from an auditability perspective. Beyond that, there is a move when it comes to the technology business management, which is the actual labeling of what we actually spend money on for different services or labor or software. And what Cloud Tracker allows us to do is speak the language of the different colors of money. It allows us to also get very fine grain in the actual analysis of, from a TBM perspective, what we're spending on. >>But then also it has real time hooks into our financial systems for execution. And so what that really does for us is it allows us to complete the picture, not just be able to see our spend in the cloud, but also be able to able to see that spending context of all things in the P P P E process as well as the execution process that then really empowers the government to make better investments. And all we're seeing is either cost avoidance or cost savings simply because we're able to close that loop, like I said. Yep. And then we're able to redirect those funds, retag them, remove them through our actual financial office within the headquarters of the army, and be able to repurpose that to other modernization efforts that Congress is essentially asking us to invest >>In. Right. So you know how much money you have, basically. Exactly. Right. You know how much you've already spent, you know how you're spending it, and now you how much you have left, >>You can provide a reliable forecast for your spend. >>Right. You know, hey, we're, we're halfway through this quarter, we're halfway through the, the fiscal year, whatever the case might be. >>Exactly. And the focus on expenditures, you know, the government rates you on, you know, how much have you spent, right? So you have a clear total transparency into what you're going to spend through the rest of the fiscal. Sure. >>All right. Let's just talk about the relationship quickly then about going forward then in terms of federal services and then what on, on the, the US Army side. I mean, what now you've laid this great groundwork, right? You have a really solid foundation where now what next? >>We wanna be all things cloud to the army. I mean, we think there's tremendous opportunity to really aid the modernization efforts and governance across the holistic part of the army. So, you know, we just, we want to, we wanna do it all with the Army as much as we can. It's, it's, it's a fantastic >>Opportunity. Yeah. AFS is, is in a very kind of a strategic role. So as part of the ecma, we own the greater strategy and execution for adoption of cloud on behalf of the entire army. Now, when it comes to delivery of individual capabilities for mission here and there, that's all specific to system owners and different organizations. AFS plays a different role in this instance where they're able to more facilitate the greater strategy on the financial side of the house. And what we've done is we've proven the ability to adopt cloud as a utility rather than this fixed thing, kind of predict the future, spend a whole bunch of money and never use the resource. We're seeing the efficiency for the actual utilization of cloud as a utility. This actually came out as one of the previous NDAs. And so how we actually address nda, I believe it was 2018 in the adoption of cloud as a utility, really is now cornerstone of modernization across all of the do d and really feeds into the Jo Warfighting cloud capability, major acquisition on behalf of all of the D O D to establish buying cloud as just a common service for everyone. >>And so we've been fortunate to inform that team of some of our lessons learned, but when it comes to the partnership, we just see camo moving into production. We've been live for now a year and a half. And so there's another two and a half years of runway there. And then AFS also plays a strategic role at part of our cloud enablement division, which is essentially back to that teaching part, helping the Army understand the opportunity of cloud computing, align the architectures to actually leverage those resources and then deliver capabilities that save soldier's >>Lives. Well, you know, we've, we've always known that the Army does its best work on the ground, and you've done all this groundwork for the military, so I'm not surprised, right? It's, it's a winning formula. Thanks to both of you for being with us here in the executive summit. Great conversation. Awesome. Thanks for having us. A good deal. All right. Thank you. All right. You are watching the executive summit sponsored by Accenture here at Reinvent 22, and you're catching it all on the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.