(bright music) >> Welcome back everyone. theCube's live coverage here. Day two, of two sets, three days of theCube coverage here at VMware Explore. This is our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference, formerly called VM World. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. We'd love seeing the progress and we've got great security comes Tom Gill, senior vices, president general manager, networking and advanced security business group at VMware. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. for having me. >> Yeah, really happy we could have you on. >> I think this is my sixth edition on the theCube. Do I get frequent flyer points or anything? >> Yeah. >> You first get the VIP badge. We'll make that happen. You can start getting credits. >> Okay, there we go. >> We won't interrupt you. Seriously, you got a great story in security here. The security story is kind of embedded everywhere, so it's not called out and blown up and talked specifically about on stage. It's kind of in all the narratives in the VM World for this year. But you guys have an amazing security story. So let's just step back and to set context. Tell us the security story for what's going on here at VMware and what that means to this supercloud, multi-cloud and ongoing innovation with VMware. >> Yeah, sure thing. So probably the first thing I'll point out is that security's not just built in at VMware. It's built differently. So, we're not just taking existing security controls and cut and pasting them into our software. But we can do things because of our platform, because of the virtualization layer that you really can't do with other security tools. And where we're very, very focused is what we call lateral security or East-West movement of an attacker. 'Cause frankly, that's the name of the game these days. Attackers, you've got to assume that they're already in your network. Already assume that they're there. Then how do we make it hard for them to get to the stuff that you really want? Which is the data that they're going after. And that's where we really should. >> All right. So we've been talking a lot, coming into VMware Explore, and here, the event. About two things. Security, as a state. >> Yeah. >> I'm secure right now. >> Yeah. >> Or I think I'm secure right now, even though someone might be in my network or in my environment. To the notion of being defensible. >> Yeah. >> Meaning I have to defend and be ready at a moment's notice to attack, fight, push back, red team, blue team. Whatever you're going to call it. But something's happening. I got to be able to defend. >> Yeah. So what you're talking about is the principle of Zero Trust. When I first started doing security, the model was we have a perimeter. And everything on one side of the perimeter is dirty, ugly, old internet. And everything on this side, known good, trusted. What could possibly go wrong. And I think we've seen that no matter how good you make that perimeter, bad guys find a way in. So Zero Trust says, you know what? Let's just assume they're already in. Let's assume they're there. How do we make it hard for them to move around within the infrastructure and get to the really valuable assets? 'Cause for example, if they bust into your laptop, you click on a link and they get code running on your machine. They might find some interesting things on your machine. But they're not going to find 250 million credit cards. >> Right. >> Or the script of a new movie or the super secret aircraft plans. That lives in a database somewhere. And so it's that movement from your laptop to that database. That's where the damage is done and that's where VMware shines. >> So if they don't have the right to get to that database, they're not in. >> And it's not even just the right. So they're so clever and so sneaky that they'll steal a credential off your machine, go to another machine, steal a credential off of that. So, it's like they have the key to unlock each one of these doors. And we've gotten good enough where we can look at that lateral movement, even though it has a credential and a key, we're like wait a minute. That's not a real CIS Admin making a change. That's ransomware. And that's where you. >> You have to earn your way in. >> That's right. That's right. Yeah. >> And we're all kinds of configuration errors. But also some user problems. I've heard one story where there's so many passwords and username and passwords and systems that the bad guys scour, the dark web for passwords that have been exposed. >> Correct. >> And go test them against different accounts. Oh one hit over here. >> Correct. >> And people don't change their passwords all the time. >> Correct. >> That's a known vector. >> Just the idea that users are going to be perfect and never make a mistake. How long have we been doing this? Humans are the weakest link. So people are going to make mistakes. Attackers are going to be in. Here's another way of thinking about it. Remember log4j? Remember that whole fiasco? Remember that was at Christmas time. That was nine months ago. And whoever came up with that vulnerability, they basically had a skeleton key that could access every network on the planet. I don't know if a single customer that said, "Oh yeah, I wasn't impacted by log4j." So here's some organized entity had access to every network on the planet. What was the big breach? What was that movie script that got stolen? So there wasn't one, right? We haven't heard anything. So the point is, the goal of attackers is to get in and stay in. Imagine someone breaks into your house, steals your laptop and runs. That's a breach. Imagine someone breaks into your house and stays for nine months. It's untenable, in the real world, right? >> Right. >> We don't know in there, hiding in the closet. >> They're still in. >> They're watching everything. >> Hiding in your closet, exactly. >> Moving around, nibbling on your cookies. >> Drinking your beer. >> Yeah. >> So let's talk about how this translates into the new reality of cloud-native. Because now you hear about automated pentesting is a new hot thing right now. You got antivirus on data is hot within APIs, for instance. >> Yeah. >> API security. So all kinds of new hot areas. Cloud-native is very iterative. You know, you can't do a pentest every week. >> Right. >> You got to do it every second. >> So this is where it's going. It's not so much simulation. It's actually real testing. >> Right. Right. >> How do you view that? How does that fit into this? 'cause that seems like a good direction to me. >> Yeah. If it's right in, and you were talking to my buddy, Ahjay, earlier about what VMware can do to help our customers build cloud native applications with Tanzu. My team is focused on how do we secure those applications? So where VMware wants to be the best in the world is securing these applications from within. Looking at the individual piece parts and how they talk to each other and figuring out, wait a minute, that should never happen. By almost having an x-ray machine on the innards of the application. So we do it for both for VMs and for container based applications. So traditional apps are VM based. Modern apps are container based. And we have a slightly different insertion mechanism. It's the same idea. So for VMs, we do it with a hypervisor with NSX. We see all the inner workings. In a container world we have this thing called a service mesh that lets us look at each little snippet of code and how they talk to each other. And once you can see that stuff, then you can actually apply. It's almost like common sense logic of like, wait a minute. This API is giving back credit card numbers and it gives five an hour. All of a sudden, it's now asking for 20,000 or a million credit cards. That doesn't make any sense. The anomalies stick out like a sore thumb. If you can see them. At VMware, our unique focus in the infrastructure is that we can see each one of these little transactions and understand the conversation. That's what makes us so good at that East-West or lateral security. >> You don't belong in this room, get out or that that's some weird call from an in memory database, something over here. >> Exactly. Where other security solutions won't even see that. It's not like there algorithms aren't as good as ours or better or worse. It's the access to the data. We see the inner plumbing of the app and therefore we can protect the app from. >> And there's another dimension that I want to get in the table here. 'Cause to my knowledge only AWS, Google, I believe Microsoft and Alibaba and VMware have this. >> Correct >> It's Nitro. The equivalent of a Nitro. >> Yes. >> Project Monterey. >> Yeah. >> That's unique. It's the future of computing architectures. Everybody needs a Nitro. I've written about this. >> Yeah. >> Right. So explain your version. >> Yeah. >> It's now real. >> Yeah. >> It's now in the market, right? >> Yeah. >> Or soon will be. >> Here's our mission. >> Salient aspects. >> Yeah. Here's our mission of VMware. Is that we want to make every one of our enterprise customers. We want their private cloud to be as nimble, as agile, as efficient as the public cloud. >> And secure. >> And secure. In fact, I'll argue, we can make it actually more secure because we're thinking about putting security everywhere in this infrastructure. Not just on the edges of it. Okay. How do we go on that journey? As you pointed out, the public cloud providers realized five years ago that the right way to build computers was not just a CPU and a graphics process unit, GPU. But there's this third thing that the industry's calling a DPU, data processing unit. And so there's kind of three pieces of a computer. And the DPU is sometimes called a Smartnic. It's the network interface card. It does all that network handling and analytics and it takes it off the CPU. So they've been building and deploying those systems themselves. That's what Nitro is. And so we have been working with the major Silicon vendors to bring that architecture to everybody. So with vSphere 8, we have the ability to take the network processing, that East-West inspection I talked about, take it off of the CPU and put it into this dedicated processing element called the DPU and free up the CPU to run the applications that Ahjay and team are building. >> So no performance degradation at all? >> Correct. To CPU offload. >> So even the opposite, right? I mean you're running it basically Bare Metal speeds. >> Yes, yes and yes. >> And you're also isolating the storage from the security, the management, and. >> There's an isolation angle to this, which is that firewall, that we're putting everywhere. Not just that the perimeter, but we put it in each little piece of the server is running when it runs on one of these DPUs it's a different memory space. So even if an attacker gets to root in the OS, they it's very, very, never say never, but it's very difficult. >> So who has access to that resource? >> Pretty much just the infrastructure layer, the cloud provider. So it's Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the enterprise. >> Application can't get in. >> Can't get in there. Cause you would've to literally bridge from one memory space to another. Never say never, but it would be very. >> But it hasn't earned the trust to get. >> It's more than barbwire. It's multiple walls. >> Yes. And it's like an air gap. It puts an air gap in the server itself so that if the server is compromised, it's not going to get into the network. Really powerful. >> What's the big thing that you're seeing with this supercloud transition. We're seeing multi-cloud and this new, not just SaaS hosted on the cloud. >> Yeah. >> You're seeing a much different dynamic of, combination of large scale CapEx, cloud-native, and then now cloud-native drills on premises and edge. Kind of changing what a cloud looks like if the cloud's on a cloud. >> Yeah. >> So we're the customer, I'm building on a cloud and I have on premise stuff. So, I'm getting scale CapEx relief from the hyperscalers. >> I think there's an important nuance on what you're talking about. Which is in the early days of the cloud customers. Remember those first skepticism? Oh, it'll never work. Oh, that's consumer grade. Oh, that's not really going to work. Oh some people realize. >> It's not secure. >> Yeah. It's not secure. >> That one's like, no, no, no it's secure. It works. And it's good. So then there was this sort of over rush. Let's put everything on the cloud. And I had a lot of customers that took VM based applications said, I'm going to move those onto the cloud. You got to take them all apart, put them on the cloud and put them all back together again. And little tiny details like changing an IP address. It's actually much harder than it looks. So my argument is, for existing workloads for VM based workloads, we are VMware. We're so good at running VM based workloads. And now we run them on anybody's cloud. So whether it's your east coast data center, your west coast data center, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, IBM keep going. We pretty much every. >> And the benefit of the customer is what. >> You can literally VMotion and just pick it up and move it from private to public, public to private, private to public, Back and forth. >> Remember when we called Vmotion BS, years ago? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> VMotion is powerful. >> We were very skeptical. We're like, that'll never happen. I mean we were. This supposed to be pat ourselves on the back. >> Well because alchemy. It seems like what you can't possibly do that. And now we do it across clouds. So it's not quite VMotion, but it's the same idea. You can just move these things over. I have one customer that had a production data center in the Ukraine. Things got super tense, super fast and they had to go from their private cloud data center in the Ukraine, to a public cloud data center out of harm's way. They did it over a weekend. 48 hours. If you've ever migrated a data center, that's usually six months. Right. And a lot of heartburn and a lot of angst. Boop. They just drag and dropped and moved it on over. That's the power of what we call the cloud operating model. And you can only do this when all your infrastructures defined in software. If you're relying on hardware, load balancers, hardware, firewalls, you can't move those. They're like a boat anchor. You're stuck with them. And by the way, they're really, really expensive. And by the way, they eat a lot of power. So that was an architecture from the 90's. In the cloud operating model your data center. And this comes back to what you were talking about is just racks and racks of X86 with these magic DPUs, or smart nics, to make any individual node go blisteringly fast and do all the functions that you used to do in network appliances. >> We just had Ahjay taking us to school, and everyone else to school on applications, middleware, abstraction layer. And Kit Culbert was also talking about this across cloud. We're talking supercloud, super pass. If this continues to happen, which we would think it will happen. What does the security posture look like? It feels to me, and again, this is your wheelhouse. If supercloud happens with this kind of past layer where there's vMotioning going on. All kinds of spanning applications and data across environments. >> Yeah. Assume there's an operating system working on behind the scenes. >> Right. >> What's the security posture in all this? >> Yeah. So remember my narrative about the bad guys are getting in and they're moving around and they're so sneaky that they're using legitimate pathways. The only way to stop that stuff, is you've got to understand it at what we call Layer 7. At the application layer. Trying to do security to the infrastructure layer. It was interesting 20 years ago, kind of less interesting 10 years ago. And now it's becoming irrelevant because the infrastructure is oftentimes not even visible. It's buried in some cloud provider. So Layer 7 understanding, application awareness, understanding the APIs and reading the content. That's the name of the game in security. That's what we've been focused on. Nothing to do with the infrastructure. >> And where's the progress bar on that paradigm. One to ten. Ten being everyone's doing it. >> Right now. Well, okay. So we as a vendor can do this today. All the stuff I talked about, reading APIs, understanding the individual services looking at, Hey, wait a minute this credit card anomalies, that's all shipping production code. Where is it in customer adoption life cycle? Early days 10%. So there's a whole lot of headroom for people to understand, Hey, I can put these controls in place. They're software based. They don't require appliances. It's Layer 7, so it has contextual awareness and it's works on every single cloud. >> We talked about the pandemic being an accelerator. It really was a catalyst to really rethink. Remember we used to talk about Pat as a security do over. He's like, yes, if it's the last thing I do, I'm going to fix security. Well, he decided to go try to fix Intel instead. >> He's getting some help from the government. >> But it seems like CISOs have totally rethought their security strategy. And at least in part, as a function of the pandemic. >> When I started at VMware four years ago, Pat sat me down in his office and he said to me what he said to you, which is like, "Tom," he said, "I feel like we have fundamentally changed servers. We fundamentally change storage. We fundamentally change networking. The last piece of the puzzle of security. I want you to go fundamentally change it." And I'll argue that the work that we're doing with this horizontal security, understanding the lateral movement. East- West inspection. It fundamentally changes how security works. It's got nothing to do with firewalls. It's got nothing to do with Endpoint. It's a unique capability that VMware is uniquely suited to deliver on. And so Pat, thanks for the mission. We delivered it and it's available now. >> Those WET web applications firewall for instance are around, I mean. But to your point, the perimeter's gone. >> Exactly. >> And so you got to get, there's no perimeter. so it's a surface area problem. >> Correct. And access. And entry. >> Correct. >> They're entering here easy from some manual error, or misconfiguration or bad password that shouldn't be there. They're in. >> Think about it this way. You put the front door of your house, you put a big strong door and a big lock. That's a firewall. Bad guys come in the window. >> And then the windows open. With a ladder. >> Oh my God. Cause it's hot, bad user behavior trumps good security every time. >> And then they move around room to room. We're the room to room people. We see each little piece of the thing. Wait, that shouldn't happen. Right. >> I want to get you a question that we've been seeing and maybe we're early on this or it might be just a false data point. A lot of CSOs and we're talking to are, and people in industry in the customer environment are looking at CISOs and CSOs, two roles. Chief information security officer, and then chief security officer. Amazon, actually Steven Schmidt is now CSO at Reinforce. They actually called that out. And the interesting point that he made, we had some other situations that verified this, is that physical security is now tied to online, to your point about the service area. If I get a password, I still got the keys to the physical goods too. >> Right. So physical security, whether it's warehouse for them or store or retail. Digital is coming in there. >> Yeah. So is there a CISO anymore? Is it just CSO? What's the role? Or are there two roles you see that evolving? Or is that just circumstance. >> I think it's just one. And I think that the stakes are incredibly high in security. Just look at the impact that these security attacks are having on. Companies get taken down. Equifax market cap was cut 80% with a security breach. So security's gone from being sort of a nuisance to being something that can impact your whole kind of business operation. And then there's a whole nother domain where politics get involved. It determines the fate of nations. I know that sounds grand, but it's true. And so companies care so much about it they're looking for one leader, one throat to choke. One person that's going to lead security in the virtual domain, in the physical domain, in the cyber domain, in the actual. >> I mean, you mention that, but I mean, you look at Ukraine. I mean that cyber is a component of that war. I mean, it's very clear. I mean, that's new. We've never seen. this. >> And in my opinion, the stuff that we see happening in the Ukraine is small potatoes compared to what could happen. >> Yeah. >> So the US, we have a policy of strategic deterrence. Where we develop some of the most sophisticated cyber weapons in the world. We don't use them. And we hope never to use them. Because our adversaries, who could do stuff like, I don't know, wipe out every bank account in North America. Or turn off the lights in New York City. They know that if they were to do something like that, we could do something back. >> This is the red line conversation I want to go there. So, I had this discussion with Robert Gates in 2016 and he said, "We have a lot more to lose." Which is really your point. >> So this brand. >> I agree that there's to have freedom and liberty, you got to strike back with divorce. And that's been our way to balance things out. But with cyber, the red line, people are already in banks. So they're are operating below the red line line. Red line meaning before we know you're in there. So do we move the red line down because, hey, Sony got hacked. The movie. Because they don't have their own militia. >> Yeah. >> If their were physical troops on the shores of LA breaking into the file cabinets. The government would've intervened. >> I agree with you that it creates tension for us in the US because our adversaries don't have the clear delineation between public and private sector. Here you're very, very clear if you're working for the government. Or you work for an private entity. There's no ambiguity on that. >> Collaboration, Tom, and the vendor community. I mean, we've seen efforts to try to. >> That's a good question. >> Monetize private data and private reports. >> So at VMware, I'm very proud of the security capabilities we've built. But we also partner with people that I think of as direct competitors. We've got firewall vendors and Endpoint vendors that we work with and integrate. And so coopetition is something that exists. It's hard. Because when you have these kind of competing. So, could we do more? Of course we probably could. But I do think we've done a fair amount of cooperation, data sharing, product integration, et cetera. And as the threats get worse, you'll probably see us continue to do more. >> And the government is going to trying to force that too. >> And the government also drives standards. So let's talk about crypto. Okay. So there's a new form of encryption coming out called processing quantum. >> Quantum. Quantum computers have the potential to crack any crypto cipher we have today. That's bad. Okay. That's not good at all because our whole system is built around these private communications. So the industry is having conversations about crypto agility. How can we put in place the ability to rapidly iterate the ciphers in encryption. So, when the day quantum becomes available, we can change them and stay ahead of these quantum people. >> Well, didn't NIST just put out a quantum proof algo that's being tested right now by the community? >> There's a lot of work around that. Correct. And NIST is taking the lead on this, but Google's working on it. VMware's working on it. We're very, very active in how do we keep ahead of the attackers and the bad guys? Because this quantum thing is a, it's an x-ray machine. It's like a dilithium crystal that can power a whole ship. It's a really, really, really powerful tool. >> Bad things will happen. >> Bad things could happen. >> Well, Tom, great to have you on the theCube. Thanks for coming on. Take the last minute to just give a plug for what's going on for you here at VMWorld this year, just VMware Explore this year. >> Yeah. We announced a bunch of exciting things. We announced enhancements to our NSX family, with our advanced load balancer. With our edge firewall. And they're all in service of one thing, which is helping our customers make their private cloud like the public cloud. So I like to say 0, 0, 0. If you are in the cloud operating model, you have zero proprietary appliances. You have zero tickets to launch a workload. You have zero network taps and Zero Trust built into everything you do. And that's what we're working on. Pushing that further and further. >> Tom Gill, senior vices president, head of the networking at VMware. Thanks for coming on. We do appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Always getting the security data. That's killer data and security of the two ops that get the most conversations around DevOps and Cloud Native. This is The theCube bringing you all the action here in San Francisco for VMware Explore 2022. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. (bright music)