>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel AWS and our community partners. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeffrey here with the Cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with our continuing coverage of aws reinvent 2020 the virtual event. We're excited to be back. We've been coming to reinvent for years and years and years, I think since 2013 1st years virtual But that's the way it is. And we're gonna jump into Cloud and government and D o d. And we're really excited to have our next guest. You know a lot about the topic. We have Robert Grote. He is the VP of technology and strategy from spark Tronics coming to us from Virginia. Great to see you, Robert. >>Great. Thank you. >>And joining him is Anthony Voltaggio, the CTO of Smartronix. Anthony. Good to see you as well. Thank you. Great. So let's jump into it. I think Rob, we had you on a couple of years ago. I I looked it up. It was early October 18 and you guys were getting a lot of success with cloud in government and I think it was before the Jedi and all that other stuff was going down. Two years is forever in cloud time. I wonder if you could just share a little bit about how the market has changed since I think it was February or March of 2018 to now late November 2020 in terms of cloud and government and Department of Defense. And you're highly regulated customers. >>Sure, I think one of the things that's changed is that security certainly used to be a headwind on bond. Now we're actually seeing it more of a tailwind where our customers, especially are heavily regulated, compliance driven customers in the public sector and the D. O. D are really looking at new ways of embracing the value of the cloud. So one of the things that has changed is that maybe two years ago, we were looking at How do we move digital estate from on premise into the cloud environment? We're now we're looking at. How do we actually achieve value in the cloud? How do we allow our customers to optimize their portfolio? How do they modernize their application footprint in a in a secure way and some of the things that we focused on, particularly smartronix, is how do we remove that friction that exists when a new kind of legacy customer really wants to transform the way that they deliver services. So we built, uh, capabilities that really allow them to more rapidly migrate their services into the cloud environment. We created and have an 80 0, now for a cloud assured manage services, which means that our customers who want to meet the rigorous security mandates now have that ability to utilize our services when they're deploying these services. And it really enables them to focus on the development of the modernization, you know, versus having to do the cumbersome components of security compliance and operation on def. You if you look at what we're trying to build and trying Thio intersect with where our customers we're going, they really want to get to that pace of innovation that the cloud provides. Um, you know, I think I've said this before to the Cube that the slope of disruption is correlated to the pace of innovation. And if you continue to build technical debt like our customers may have done in the past, they're gonna fall behind and it might be okay, um, for, you know, Blockbuster to fall behind the Netflix or for uber disrupted industry. But for our customers, there's national security consequences when they fall behind. So we've got to create a platform and a capability that enables them to innovate on, deliver very agile services rapidly. >>And then I wanna go. I wanna go to you because I think Robin, in your last interview, talked about your customers very secure, highly regulated, compliance driven environments. Right? And? And to be clear, you guys sell a lot to Department of Defense and all the various branches of the U. S. Military etcetera. You know, Anthony, a lot of talk of digital transformation on the commercial side and and people going right And then, of course, all the jokes and memes about Covic, you know, being the accelerator to that for >>your >>customers. The accelerators thio at modernization in the digital transformation are very different. It's not about necessarily the competitors down the street, but it's about some nasty competitors that want to cause this real harm. How how have they adopted? You know, kind of this this digital transformation and what's different in terms of accelerating it in your customer base. >>We're looking our defense customers and national security customers. Absolutely. The velocity and scale of cloud is becoming an enabler again. Looking at those information work was that they have looking at the nation state adversaries that we're facing right now. Information is information warfare. So if we're not ready to scale, innovate at much higher velocity than we have in the past, we're gonna become victim to those attacks. Methodologies that score matters of using so that the scale and power of the cloud as well is that tailwind of all these authorized services that are offered by Amazon that are already at the federal federal high and D o D. Impact. Those for higher, up to impact level six really, really enable them to go ahead and meet that mission. But mad and speed and agility. They need toe mash that for necessary, >>right? Well lets you just talked about impact level, and I want to dig into that for a little bit because in doing research on you guys and a lot of the solutions that customers you talk about, there's there's constant conversation about these impact levels Impact level for impact level five Impact Level six Again. It's highly regulated industry. You guys have a very, very high bar that you have to hit in your solutions. What does impact level mean and why is it important? And how are you basically working your way up the chart, which I assume is a much more impactful? Not not no pun intended, but much more significant solution delivery. >>So impact levels really have to do with information risk. So what is the level of information that that system is processing? So as you move up the impact levels, that information becomes more more critical to national security. So on impact Level four system may have to do with standard mission operations and Ministry of Task, etcetera, where when you go up the staff to impeccable five and even to impact level six or higher, you're really dealing with, let's say, in the d. O d, uh, perspective, the horror fighter eso. Now you're dealing with where that war fighters deployed the capabilities of the water fighter that they're leveraging To fight that battle against the adversary eso you have to put more and more rigorous controls around that information to ensure the adversaries can gain the tactical advantage over our war fighters. >>It's really interesting. You know how all these systems are really designed? Uh, toe work together. And as you said, kind of for that, that warfighter, if you you know, you you watch anything on defense, it's kind of the point into the stick, but there's a whole lot of support behind that behind that person at the very end to help them get the information to be successful in their job and support them. Um, etcetera. But I'm curious. Have you seen a change in attitude in terms of not only the data and the information in the systems as a support for the war fighter, but in fact, that data itself being a significant asset as well as a significant target, probably bigger and more valuable than an aircraft carrier or any other kind of traditional defense assets? >>Yeah, I would say we've definitely seen that change. Our our our customers air really looking at data and aggregate and when you're when you're building a cloud profile when you're building a portfolio systems, um, and it's all in a single type environment or an enclave where you can unlock the value of that data, the aggregate of all of those applications. The aggregate of that data has increased value, and that allows you to do a lot more things with it. Allows you to innovate a lot. Mawr toe. Learn more about that data on We're seeing our customers really looking at. How can they unlock that value? Whether it's looking at improving the supply chain, looking at data feeds that they're able to aggregate from commercial sources as well as sources that they're getting in a distributed fashion or whether it's just, you know, looking at, how can they improve the efficiency of of delivering services to the to the warfighter? Um, it really is about unlocking that value of data. So that's why it's also important that we have capabilities that protect that data. And then we provide more capabilities that allow our customers to be able to leverage as the C. S. P s as AWS innovates. Allow them to leverage these new capabilities much more rapidly than they could in the past, >>right? Well, and you talk about technical debt and you know there's kind of technical dead and There's application dead, and there's kind of application portfolio stuff that that you have right that may or may not work well, that's probably running and has been running for years. That doesn't necessarily all have to be modernized. You said Sometimes you know it's it's best to leave. Leave it as it lies. How are you helping people figure out? You know what, what to modernize, what to leave it as as it is. And then you know, or you know how much effort should really be spent on new on new applications and new development. You know, taking taking advantage of the latest because that's kind of a tricky portfolio strategy. And as you said, there's a whole lot of legacy stuff that's still running in those old data centers. >>You mentioned the key word there and that strategy. Our our customers are looking to us to help them evaluate their portfolio, determine what things that they should be doing next, the sequencing events and how they can unlock some of those values in the cloud. So, you know, one of the things that we talk about is that ability to even if you're taking stuff from a legacy environment and moving that estate into the cloud. There's certain things that you can do to opportunistically re factor and get value out of the cloud. You don't have to rewrite the application every time there's things that you can do to just re factor. Um, and one of those components is that when you look at cloud and you look at the a p I nature of the cloud, um, transparency is the gift of the cloud. And automation is how you get value out of that gift. And when when you look at how automation and transparency you're kind of tied together for our customers and you look at the fact that again everything's in a P I based, you know, with, you know, full non repudiation who made that call when they made that call? You've got an ability to create this autonomic response system, and this is This is a key part of application modernization, giving that customer the ability to rapidly respond to an event, create automation, create run books, use you know, advanced technologies like machine learning for anomaly detection, create, you know, security orchestration, all of those components when you could build that framework. Then your customers can even take some of their legacy assets and be able to utilize, you know, the high value of the cloud and respond to events much faster and in, um, or automated an autonomic manner. >>I love that transparency in automation. And I want to go back to you. Anthony, you've been doing this for a long time. Um, you didn't have these tools at your disposal before, and you didn't have necessarily the automation that you have before. And I think more importantly, you know, interesting thing that Rob you touched on on on your earlier interview a couple of years back, you know, kind of this scale learning something identified by by Bill Chamorro's I once in terms of calling it out where you learn something in one place and you can apply that learning, you know, across many, many places. And then the other piece. I want you to comment on its automation because, as we know, a lot of errors happen from silly things, fat fingers, bad copy paste, putting in a wrong config code. This that and the other. So, by adding mawr and Mawr automation and continuing to kind of remove potential little slip ups that can cause big big problems. It's a really different world that you've got in the tools that you have in your portfolio to offer these solutions up to your clients >>absolutely again, as we've learned MAWR Maura about these repeatable patterns that have happened across our different customers. That allows us to create that run book automation library that then allows our team and our capabilities scale across multiple workloads and kind of like Robert identified earlier. There's a lot of these cognitive services, and I'll take Amazon a specific example. Guard duty. It is a very innovative capability with M. L. A. I behind it that allow you to look at these access patterns and communication patterns of these application workloads and quickly identify threats. But the automation and road book and orchestration that you can build behind this then allows you to leverage that library to immediately respond to these events. When you see a threat and you see that pattern, your your ability to rapidly respond to that and mitigate that threat, Israel allows your business and information systems continue providing no the primary business use case and again in our GOP customer. National security system. Customers dividing to the warfighter complete their mission. >>Yeah, well, what a good and let you give. Give a plug for some of your processes and techniques. You have something that you call fast, um, to help people, you know, go through this decision process. And I think, as you said, Rob, you know, you gotta have some strategy before you start making some decisions. And also, this thing that we're seeing out there called the shift left. Um, what does that mean to you? What does it mean to your customers? Why is that important? Why should people know about it? Start with you, Rob. >>So what? We notice we've been doing cloud services, you know, since 2009, Really? One of the first eight of us public sector partners delivering the first capabilities to that market. And what we noticed is that ah, lot of organizations found it easy to move one or two workloads into the cloud. But they struggled in making a cloud, a true enterprise asset. So we took a step back and we created something that we call foundational agile strategic transformation. And that's fast. It's a It's a program that we developed that allows complex organizations. Security minded organizations understand What are all the foundational things that need to be in place to really treat cloud as an enterprise asset? And it covers much more than just the technical components. It covers the organizational components. It covers all the stakeholders around security. But one of the key things that we've changed in the past couple of years is how do we not only look at, you know, leveraging the cloud is an enterprise asset, But how do we allow them to accelerate how they can get the value out of the cloud, modernize their applications, create thes capabilities? And the shift left component of fast is providing as much capability all the way down to where the developer is, where you have maybe dead set cops when it used to be a developer on one side and operations on the other. Security is kind of a binding function. Now we're talking about how can we create more capability, right at the point of development? How can we shift that capability? And I think the role of the managed service provider is to enable that in an organization provide capability, provide operations capability but also help them in a You know, we use the term SRE quite a bit. Site reliability, engineering. How can we really help them continuously optimize their portfolio and build a set of capabilities and services? So when they're building new applications, they're not adding to their technical debt. >>That's great and so and so, so important. And it's just been so interesting. Toe watch again. A security specifically for Public Cloud in AWS has become from you know, what was potentially a concern and a headwind to now being a tailwind. And all you have to do is go to go to some of the the architectural keynotes my some of my favorites and see the scale in massive investments that they can put into infrastructure. And they can put into security that no single company, unless you have the biggest, biggest ones you know, can possibly invested to be able to leverage that opportunity. And obviously, Teresa Carlson and the Public Sector team have done a really good job and giving you guys the solutions that satisfy the very tight requirements that you're very important customers have. So it's really a great story and really enjoy learning mawr and continued success to you guys And, uh, and your teams and your importance, your customers and all the important stuff that they protect for us. Uh, eso thank you very much. All right. Thank you. All right, well, signing off. That's Robert and Anthony. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Ongoing coverage of aws reinvent 2020. Thanks for watching. See you next time. Thank you.