Thomas Hazel, ChaosSearch & Jeremy Foran, BAI Communications | AWS Startup Showcase
(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, I'm John Furrier with The Cube, we're here in Palo Alto, California for a remote interview and session for The Cube presents AWS startup showcase, the next big thing in AI security in life sciences. I'm John Furrier. We're here with a great segment on cloud. Next big thing in Cloud with Chaos Search, Thomas Hazel, Chief Technology and Science Officer of Chaos Search joined by Jeremy Foran, the head of data analytics, the bad boy of data analyst as they say, but BAI communications, Jeremy Thomas, great to have you on. >> Great to be here. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So we're going to be talking about applying large scale log analytics to building the future of the transit industry. Obviously Telco's a big part of that, smart cities, you name the use case self-driving trucks, cars, you name it, everything's now edge. That the edge is super valuable, it's a new kind of last mile if you will, it's moving fast, it's mobile. This is a huge deal. Let's get into it, Thomas. What's this big story around this, this session? >> Well, we provide unique ability to take all that edge data and drive it into a data lake offering that we provide data analytics, both in logs, BI and coming out with ML there this year into next. So our unique play is transforming customers' cloud outer storage into an analytical platform. And really, I think with BIA is a log analytics specifically where, you know there's a lot of data streams from all those devices going into a lake that we transform their lake into analytics for driving, I guess, operational analysis. >> You know, Jeremy, I remember back in the day, I'm old enough to remember when the edge was the remote switch or campus hub or something. And then even on the Telco side, there was no wifi back in 2000 and you know, someone was driving in a car and you got any signal, you're lucky. Now you got, you know, no perimeter you have unlimited connectivity everywhere. This has opened up more of an Omni channel data problem. How do you see that world? Because you still got more devices pushing out at this edge and it's getting super local, right? Even on the body, even on people in the car. So certainly a lot of change on the infrastructure side. What does that pose for data challenge? >> Yeah, I, I would say that, you know users always want more, more bandwidth, more performance and that requires us to create more systems that require more complexity to deliver that user experience that we're, we're very proud of. And with that complexity means, you know exponentially more data. And so one of the wifi networks we offer in the Toronto subway system, T-connect, you know we see a 100-200,000 unique users a day and you can imagine just the amount of infrastructure to support that so that everyone has a seamless experience and can get their news and emails and even stream media while they're waiting for the subway. >> So you guys provide state of the art infrastructure for cell, wifi, broadcast, radio, IP networks, basically I mean, I call it the smart city kind of go-to. But that's basically anything involving kind of that edge piece. This is a huge thing. So as smart cities are on the table, which and you seeing 5G being called more of an enterprise app where there's feeding large dense areas of people this is now a new modern version of what I would call the, the smart city blueprint. What's changed in your mind on this whole modernization of this smart city infrastructure concept? What's new? What's cutting edge? >> Yeah. I would say that, you know there was an explosion of data and a lot of our insights aren't coming from one system anymore. It's coming from collecting data from all of the different pieces, the different infrastructure whether that's your fiber infrastructure or your wireless infrastructure, and then to solve problems you need to correlate data across those systems. So we're seeing more and more technologies that allow you to do that correlation. And that's really where we're finding tons of value, right? >> Thomas, take us through what you guys do as a, as a, as a product, a value proposition, the secret sauce, and and why I'm here with Jeremy? Why is this conversation important for the folks watching? What's the connection between Chaos Search and BAI communication? >> Well, it's data, right? And lots of it. So our unique platform allows people like Jeremy to stream all this data, right? In you know, today's world terabytes go to petabytes really easily, billions go to trillion really easily, and so providing the analysis of that data for their operations is challenging particularly based on technology and architectures that have been around for a long time. So what we do here at Chaos Search is the ability for BIA to stream all these devices, all these services into one centralized data lake on their cloud outer storage, where we connect to that cloud outer storage and transform it into an analytical database to do, in this case log analytics and do it seamlessly, easily where a new workload a new stream just streams into that lake. And we, as a service take over, we discover we index it and publish well-known open API and visualization so that they can focus on their business, not all the operational data pipeline, database and data engineering type work that again, at these types of scales is is frankly a nightmare. >> You know, one of the things that we've always observed on The Cube when you see new things come out that are really cool groundbreaking products like you guys are doing it's always a challenge to manage the cost and complexity of bringing in the new. So Jeremy, take us through this tech stack here because you know, it's, sometimes it might be unwieldy just in from a tech stack perspective, nevermind the business logic or the business processes that got to be either unwound or changed. Can you take us through the IT stack that's critical to support your, your area? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with all the various different equipment you know, to provide our public wifi and and our desks, carrier agnostic, LT and 5G networks, you know, we need to be able to adhere to PCI compliance and ISO 27,000, so that, you know, requires us to keep a tremendous amount of our data. And the challenge we were facing is how do we do that cost effectively, and not have to make any sort of compromises on how we do that? A lot of times you'll find you don't know the value of your data today until tomorrow. An example would be COVID. You know, we, when we were storing data two years ago we weren't planning for a pandemic, but now that we were able to retain that data and look back we can see a tremendous amount of value with trying to forecast how our systems will recover when things get back to normal. And so when I met Thomas and we were sort of talking about how we were going to solve some of these data retention problems, he started explaining to me their compression in some of the performance metrics of their profession. And, you know, I said, oh, middle out compression. And it was a bit, it's been a bit of a running joke between me and him and I'm sure others, but it's incredibly impressive the amount of data we're able to store at the kind of cost, right? >> What, what problem does, did he solve for you? Because I mean, these guys, honestly, you know the startups have a lot and the Cloud's enabling more value now, we're seeing this, but when you look at this what was your, what was your core problem that you had? >> Yeah, so we, when you we want to be able to, I mean, primarily this is for our CIS log server. And CIS long servers today aren't what they were 10, 15 years ago where you just sort of had a machine and if something broke you went and looked, right? Now, they're very complex, that data is feeding to various systems and third-party software. So, you know, we're actively looking for changes in patterns and we have our, you know security teams auditing these from, for penetration testing and such. And then the getting that data to S3 so that we could have it in case, you know, for two, three years of storage. Well, the problem we were facing is all of that all of these different systems we needed to feed and retain data, we couldn't do that on site. We wanted to do use S3 but when we were doing some projections, it's like, we, we don't really have the budget for all of these places. Meeting Thomas and, and working with Chaos Search, you know, using their compression brought those costs down drastically. And then as we've been working with them the really exciting thing is they we're bringing more and more features to that surface or offering. So, you know, first it was just storing that data away. And now we're starting to build solutions off of that sitting in storage. So that's where it gets really exciting because you know, there, it's nothing to start getting anomaly detection off those logs, which, you know originally it was just, we need to store them in case somebody needs them two, three years from now. >> So Thomas Thomas, if I get this right then what I'm hearing is obviously I've put aside the complexity and the governing side the regulations for a minute just generally. Data retention as, as a key value proposition and having data available when you need it and then to do that and doing it in a very cost-effective simple way. It sounds like what you guys are offering. Is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, one key aspect of our solution is retention, right? Those are a lot of the challenges, but at the same time we provide real time notification like a classic log analytic type platform, alerting, monitoring. The key thing is to bringing both those worlds together and solving that problem. And so this, you know, middle in middle out, well, to be frank, we created a new technology called what we call Chaos Index that is a database index that is wonderfully small as as we're indicating, but also provides all the features that makes Cloud object storage, high performance. And so the idea is that use this lake offering to store all your data in a cost effective way but our service allows you to analyze it both in a long retention perspective as well as real-time perspective and bringing those two worlds together is so key because typically you have Silo Solutions and whether it's real-time at scale or retention scale the cost complexity and time to build out those solutions I know Jeremy knows also, well, a lot of folks come to us to solve those problems because you know when you're dealing with, you know terabytes and up, you know these things get complicated and to be frank, fall over quite often. >> Yeah. Let me, let me just ask you the question that's probably on everyone's mind who's watching and you guys probably have both heard this many times, because a lot of people just throw the data lake solution around like it's, you know why they whitewash their kind of old legacy solutions with data lake, store it on data lake. It's been called a data swamp. So people are fearful that, okay. I love this idea of a data lake, who doesn't like throwing data into a repository, having it available at will with notifications, all this secret magic beans that just magically create value. But I doubt that, I don't want to turn into a data swamp. So Thomas and Jeremy, talk about that, that concern. How do you mitigate that? How do you talk to that? Because if done properly, there's huge value in having a control plane or some sort of data system that is going to be tied in with signals and just storage retention. So I see the value. How do you manage the concern that people might say, Hey, I don't want to date a swamp? >> Yeah, I'll jump into that. So, you know, let's just be frank, Hadoop was a great tool for a very narrow scenario. I think that data swamp came out because people were using the tooling in an incorrect way. I've always had the belief that data lakes are the future. You just have the right to have the right service the right philosophy to leverage it. So what we do here at Chaos Search is we allow you to organize it, discover it, automatically index that data so that swamp doesn't get swampy. You know, when you stream data into your lake how do you organize it, such that it's has a nice stream? How do you transform that data into a value? So with our service we actually start where the storage begins, not a end point, not an archive. So we have tooling and services that keep your lake from being swampy to be, to be clear. And, but the key value is the benefits of the lake, the cost effectiveness, the reliability, security, the scale, those are all the benefits. The problem was that no one really made cloud offer storage a first-class citizen and we've done that. We've dressed the swamp nature but provided all the value of analysis. And that cost metrics, that scale. No one can touch cloud outer storage, it just, you can't. But what we've done is cracked the code of how you make it analytical. >> Jeremy, I want to get your thoughts on this too, on your side I mean, as a practitioner and customer of, of of these solutions, you know, the concern is am I missing anything? And I've been a big proponent of data retention for many, many years. You know, Dave Alondra in our Cube knows all know that I bang on the table all the time, store your data, be a data hoarder, because it's going to come back and be valuable. Costs are going down so I'm a big fan of data retention. But the fear might be on, what am I missing? Because machine learning starts to come in down the road you got AI, the more data you have that's accessible in real time, the more machine learning is effective. Do you, do you worry about missing anything or do you just store everything? >> We, we store everything. Sometimes it's, it's interesting where the value and insights come from your data. Something that see, might seem trivial today down the road offers tremendous, tremendous value. So one of the things we do is provide because we have wifi in the subway infrastructure, you know taking that wifi data, we can start to understand the flow of people in and out of the subway network. And we can take that and provide insights to the rail operators, which get them from A to B quicker. You know, when we built the wifi it wasn't with the intention of getting Torontonians across the city faster. But that was one of the values that we were able to get from the data in terms of, you know, Thomas's solution, I think one of the reasons we we engaged him in the first place is because I didn't believe his compression. It sounded a little too good to be true. And so when it was time to try them out, you know all we had to do was ship data to an S3 bucket. You know, there's tons of, of solutions to do that. And, and data shippers right out of the box. It took a few, you know, a few minutes and then to start exploring the data was in Cabana, which is or their dashboard, which is, you know, an interface that's easy to use. So we were, you know, within a two days getting the value out of that data that we were looking for which is, you know, phenomenal. We've been very happy. >> Thomas, sounds like you've got a great, great testimonial here and it's not like an easy problem that he's living in there. I mean, I think, you know, I was mentioning this earlier and we're going to get into it now. There's regulations and there's certain compliance issues. First of all, everyone has this now problem now, it's not just within that space. But just the technical complexities of packets moving around I got on my wifi and the stop here, I'm jumping over here, and there's a ton of data it's all over the place, it's totally unstructured. So it's a tough, tough test for you guys, Chaos Search. So yeah, it's almost like the Mount Everest of customer testimonials. You've got to, it's a big, it's a big use case here. How does this translate to other clients? And talk about this governance and security controls because I know this highly regulated and you got there's penalties involved on his side of the world and Telco, the providers that have these edge devices there's actually penalties and, and whatnot so, not just commercial, it's maybe a, you know risk management, but here there's actually penalties. >> Absolutely. So, you know centralizing your data has a real benefit of of not getting in trouble, right? So you have one place, you store one place that's a good thing, but what we've done and this was a key aspect to our offering is we as Chaos, Chaos Search folks, we don't own the customer's data. We don't own BIA's data. They own the data. They give us access rights, very standard way with Cloud App storage roll on policies from Amazon, read only access rights to their data. And so not owning a customer's data is a big selling point not only for them, but for us for compliance regulatory perspective. So, you know, unlike a lot of solutions where you move the data into them and now they are responsible, actually BIA owns everything. We, they provide access so that we could provide an analysis that they could turn off at any point in time. We're also SOC 2 type 1 and type 2 compliant you got to do it, you know, in this, this world, you know when we were young we ran at this because of all of these compliance scenarios that we will be in, but, you know, the long as short of it is, we're transient service. The storage, cloud storage is the source of truth where all data resides and, you know, think about it, it's architecturally smart, it's cost effective, it's secure, it's reliable, it's durable. But from a security perspective, having the customer own their own data is a big differentiation in the market, a big differentiation. >> Jeremy, talk about on your end the security controls surrounding the log management environments that span across countries with different regulations. Now you've got all kinds of policy dimensions and technical dimensions and topology dimensions. >> Yeah, absolutely. So how we approach it is we look at where we have offerings across the globe and we figure out what the sort of highest watermark level of adherence we need to hit. And then we standardize across that. And by shipping to S3, it allows us to enforce that governance really easily and right to Tom's point you know, we manage the data, which is very important to us and we don't have to be worried about a third party or if we want to change providers years down the road. Although I don't think anyone's coming out with 81% compression anytime soon (laughs). But yeah, so that's, for us, it's about meeting those high standards and having the technologies that enable us to do it. And Chaos Search is a very big part of that right now. >> All right let me ask you a question, for the folks watching that are like really interested in this topic, what would you say to them when evaluating Chaos Search obviously, your use case is complex, but so are others as enterprises start to have an edge, obviously the security posture shifts, everything shifts. There's no more perimeter and the data problem becomes acute to them. So the enterprises are going to start seeing what you've been living for in your world. What's your advice to people watching? >> My advice would be to give them a try. You know, it's it's has been really quite impressive. The customer service has been hands-on and we've been getting, you know, they've been under-promising and over-delivering, which when you have the kind of requirements to manage solutions in these very complex environment, cloud local, you know various data centers and such, you know that kind of customer service is very important, right? It enables us to continue to deliver those high quality solutions. >> So Thomas give us the, the overview of the secret sauce. You've got a great testimonial here. You got people watching, what's different now in the world that you're going after, what wave are you on? Talk to the people who are watching this and saying, okay why Chaos Search? Why are you relevant? Obviously there's some cool things you're doing. I love that. What's cool, and what's relevant and why what's in it for them if they work with you? >> Yeah. So you know, that that whole Silicon Valley reference actually got that from my patent attorney when we were talking. But yeah, no, we, we, you know, focus on if we can crack this code of making data, one a face small, store small, moves small, process small. But then make it multimodal access make it virtual transformation. If we could do that, and we could transform cloud outer storage into a high-performance medical database all these heavy, heavy problems, all that complexity that scaffolding that you build to do these type of scales would be solved. Now what we had to focus on and this has been my, I guess you say life passion is working on a new data representation. And that's our secret sauce that enables a new architecture a new service that where the customer folks on their tooling, their APIs, their visualizations that they know and love, what we focus is on taking that data lake, and again, to transform it into an analytical database, both for log analytics think of like elastic search replacement, as well as a BI replacement for your SQL warehousing database. And coming out later this year into 2022, ML support on one representation. You don't have the silo your information you don't have to re index your data, both. So elastic search CQL and actually ML TensorFlow actions on the exact same representation. So think about the data retention, doing some post analysis on all those logs of data, months, years, and then maybe set up some triggers if you see some anomaly that's happening within your service. So you think about it, the hunt with BI reporting, with predictive analysis on one platform. Again, it sounds a little unicorn, I agree with Jeremy, maybe it didn't sound true but it's been a life's work. So it didn't happen overnight. And you know, it's eight years, at least in the in the making, but I guess the life journey in the end. >> Well, you know, the timing is great. You know, all the database geeks out there who have been following the data industry know that, you know there's a good point for structured data but when you start getting into mechanisms and they become a bottleneck or a blocker to innovation, you know you starting to see this idea of a data lake being let the data kind of form, let it be. You know, I hate the word control plane but more of a, a connective tissue between systems is become an interesting thing. So now you can store everything so you know, no worries there, no blind spots and then let the magic of machine learning in the future, come around. So Jeremy, with that, I got to ask you since you're the bad boy of data analytics at BAI communications head of data analytics, what does that, what do you look for in the future as you start to set this up because I can almost imagine and connecting the dots here in the interview, you got the data lake you're storing everything, which is good. Now you have to create more insights and get ahead of the curve and provide some prescriptive and automated ways to do things better. What's your vision? >> First I would just like to say that, you know when astrophysicists talk about, you know, dark dark energy, dark matter, I'm convinced that's where Thomas is hiding the ones and zeros to get that compression, right? I don't don't know that to be fact but I know it to be true. And then in terms of machine learning and these sort of future technologies, which are becoming available you know, starting from scratch and trying to build out you know, models that have value, you know that takes a fair amount of work. And that landscape keeps changing, right? Being able to push our data into an S3 bucket and then you know, retain that data and then get anomaly detection on top of it. That's, I mean, that's something special and that unlocks a lot of ability for you know, our teams to very easily deliver anomaly detection, machine learning to our customers, without having to take on a lot of work to understand the latest and greatest in machine learning. So, I mean, it's really empowering to our team, right? And, and a tool that we're going to. >> Yeah, I love and I love the name, Chaos Search, Thomas. I got to say, you know it brings up the inside baseball around chaos monkey which everyone knows was a DevOps tool to create kind of day two simulate day two operations and disruptions in DevOps. But what you're really getting at is your whole new architecture that's beyond DevOps movement, it's like next gen architecture. Talk about that to the people watching who have a lot of legacy and want to transform over to a more enabling platform that's going to give them some headroom for their data. What, what do you say to them? How do they get started? What, how should they, how what's their mindset? What they, what are some first principles you can share? >> Well, you know, I always start with first principles but you know, I like to say we're the next next gen. The key thing with the Chaos Search offering is you can start today with B, without even Chaos Search. Stream your data to S3. We're going to make hip and cool data lakes again. And actually it's a, Google it now, data lakes are hip and cool. So start streaming now, start managing your data in a well-formed centralized viewpoint with security governance and cost effectiveness. Then call Chaos Search shop, and we'll make access to it easily, simply to ultimately solve your problems. The bug whether your security issue, the bug, whether it's more performance issues at scale, right? And so when workloads can be added instantaneously in your data lake it's, it's game changing it's mind changing. So from the DevOps folks where, you know, you're up all night trying to say, how am I going to scale from terabyte, you know one today to 50 terabytes, don't. Stream it to S3. We'll take over, we'll worry about that scale pain. You worry about your job of security, performance, operations, integrity. >> That really highlights the cloud scale the value proposition as, as apps start to be using data as an input, not just as a a part of a repo repo, so great stuff. Thomas, thanks for sharing your life's work and your technology magic. Jeremy, thanks for coming on and sharing your use cases with us and how you are making it all work. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. >> Okay. This is The Cubes, coverage and presenting AWS this time showcase the next big thing here with Chaos Search. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)
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great to have you on. it's a new kind of last mile if you will, specifically where, you know and you know, someone was driving and you can imagine just the amount and you seeing 5G being called that allow you to do that correlation. and so providing the analysis and complexity of bringing in the new. And the challenge we were and we have our, you know and having data available when you need it And so this, you know, of data system that is going to be tied in is we allow you to organize it, of these solutions, you So we were, you know, within and you got there's penalties of solutions where you the security controls surrounding the log and having the technologies and the data problem you know, they've been after, what wave are you on? that scaffolding that you in the interview, you got the data lake like to say that, you know I got to say, you know but you know, I like to say with us and how you the next big thing here with Chaos Search.
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Stefan Voss, Dell EMC | CUBEConversation, February 2019
>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everbody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this special Cube conversation on a very important topic, cyber security and cyber resiliency. With me today is Stefan Voss who's the Senior Director of Product Management for Data Protection Software and Cyber Security and Compliance at Dell EMC. Stefan, thanks for coming on and helping us understand this very important topic ahead of RSA World. >> My pleasure, thanks Dave for having me. >> You're welcome, so let's talk about the environment today. We have, for years, seen back-up evolve into data protection, obviously disaster recovery is there, certainly long term retention. But increasingly, cyber resilience is part of the conversation. What are you seeing from customers? >> Yeah, definitely, we're seeing that evolution as well. It's definitely a changing market and what a perfect fit. We have to worry about right of breach, What happens when I get attacked? How can I recover? And the technologies we have, that we have for business resiliency back-up, they all apply, they all apply more than ever. But sometimes they have to be architected in a different way. So folks are very sensitive to that and they realize that they have great technologies. >> I'm glad you mentioned the focus on recovery because we have a lot of conversations on theCUBE about the CIO and how he, or she, should be communicating to the board, or the CSO, how they should be communicating to the board. That conversation has changed quite dramatically over the last 10 years. Cyber is a board-level issue. When you talk to, certainly large companies, every quarter they're talking about cyber. And not just in terms of what they're doing to keep the bad guys out but really what the processes are to respond, what the right regime is - you know, cyber security is obviously a team sport, it's not just the responsibility of the CSO or the SECOPS team, or the IT team, everybody has to be involved and be aware of it. Are you seeing that awareness at board levels within your customer base, and maybe even at smaller companies? >> 100%, I think the company size almost doesn't matter. Everybody can lose their business fairly quickly and there's one thing that NotPetya, that very bad, sort of, attack told us is that it can be very devastating. And so if we don't have a process and if we don't treat it as a team sport, we'll be uncoordinated. So, first of all, we learned that recovery is real and we need to have a recovery strategy. Doesn't mean we don't do detection, so the NIS continuum applies, but the CSOs are much more interested in the actual data recovery than they ever were before which is very interesting. And then, you know, you learn that the process is as important as the technology. So, in other words, Bob Bender - a fabulous quote from Founders Federal - you know, the notion of sweating before the game, being prepared, having a notion of a cyber recovery run book. Because the nature of the disasters are changing so, therefore, we have to think about using the same technologies in a different way. >> And I said at the open that things are shifting from just a pure back-up and recovery spectrum to much broader. The ROI is changing, people are trying to get more out of their data protection infrastructure than just insurance and, certainly, risk management and cyber resiliency and response is part of that. How is the ROI equation changing? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a very valid question. You know, we do have, people are asking for the ROI. We have to take a risk-based approach, we are mitigating risk. It's never fun to have any data protection or business resilience topology, 'cause it's incremental cost, but we do that for a reason. We need to be able to have an operational recovery strategy, a recovery strategy from a geographic disaster and, of course, now more so than ever a recovery strategy from a cyber attack. And so, therefore, we have to think about, you know, not so much the ROI but what is my risk reduction, right? By having, sort of, that process in place but also the confidence that I can get to the data that I need to recover. >> Now we're gonna get into that a little bit later when we talk about the business impact analysis. But I wanna talk about data isolation. Obviously ransomware is a hot topic today and this notion of creating an air gap. What is data isolation from your perspective? What are customers doing there? >> Yeah, I mean, I think almost every customer has a variant of data isolation. It's clear that it works, we've seen this from the NotPetya attack again that where we were, large logistics company, right, found data the domain controller on a system that underwent maintenance in Nigeria. So a system that was offline, but we don't wanna operate that way. So we wanna get the principles of isolation because we know it kind of reduces the attack surface, right, from the internal actor, from ransomware variants, you name it. All of these are, when you have stuff on the network it's theoretically fair game for the attacker. >> So that Nigeria example was basically by luck there was a system offline under maintenance that happened to be isolated? And so they were able to recover from that system? >> Absolutely. And another example was, of course, critical data that domain controller, 'cause that's what this attack happened to go after, was on tape. And so, you know, this just shows and proves that isolation works. The challenge we were running into with every customer we work with was the recovery time. Especially when you have to do selective recovery more often, you know, we wanna be able to get the benefits of online media. But also get, sort of, the benefits of isolation. >> Yeah, I mean, you don't wanna recover from tape. Tape is there as a last resort and hopefully you never have to go to it. How are customers, sort of, adopting this data isolation strategy and policy? Who's involved, what are some of the pre-requisites that they need to think about? >> Yeah, so the good thing - first thing's first, right. We have technology we know and love, so our data protection appliances where we started architecting this workflow, that we can use. So, in other words, you don't have to learn a new technology, buy something else. There's an incremental investment, yes. And then we have to think about who's involved. So that earlier point, the security folks are almost always involved, and they should be involved. Sometimes they fund the project, sometimes it comes out of IT. Right, so, this is the collaborative effort and then to the extent it's necessary, of course, you wanna have GRC - so the risk people - involved to make sure that we really focus on the most important critical assets. >> Now ahead of RSA, let's talk a little bit about what's going on in that world. There are security frameworks, Nist in particular is one, that's relatively new, I mean it's 2014 it came out, it's been revised really focusing on prevent, detect and, very importantly, respond. Something we've talked about a lot. Are people using that framework? Are they doing the self-assessments that Nist prescribes? What's your take? >> Yeah, I think they are. So, first of all, they are realizing that leaning too much left of breach, in other words hoping that we can always catch everything, sort of the eggshell perimeter, everybody understands that that's not enough. So we have to go in-depth and we also have to have a recovery strategy. And so the way I always like to break it down pragmatically is - one, what do I prioritize on? So we can always spend money on everything, but doing a business impact analysis and then maybe governing that in a tool like RSA Archer can help me be a little bit more strategic. And then, on the other end, if I can do a better job co-ordinating the data recovery along with the incident response, that will go a long way. You know and, of course, that doesn't forego any investment in the detection but it is widely adopted. >> One of the key parts about the NIS framework is understanding exposure in the supply chain where you may not have total control over one of your suppliers' policies, but yet they're embedded into your workflow. How are people handling that? Is there a high degree of awareness there? What are you seeing? >> It is absolutely, that's why product security is such an important element, and it's the number one priority for Dell Security, even above and beyond the internal security of our data center, as crazy as it sounds. Because, you know, we can do a lot of damage right in the market. So, certainly, supply chain, making sure we have robust products all along the way is something that every customer asks about all the time and it's very important. >> Let's go back to business impact analysis, we've mentioned it a couple of times now. What is a business impact analysis and how do you guys go about helping your customers conduct one? >> Yeah, I mean, let's maybe keep it to that example, let's say I go through this analysis and I find that I'm a little bit fuzzy on the recovery and that's an area I wanna invest. You know, and then I buy off on the concept that I have an isolated or cyber recovery vault on an isolated enclave onto which I can then copy data and make sure that I can get to it when I have to recover. The question then becomes, well what does business critical mean? And that's where the business impact analysis will help to say what is your business critical process - number one, number two - what are the associated applications, assets? 'Cause when you have that dependency map it makes it a lot easier to start prioritizing what applications do I put in the vault, in other words. In this specific example. And then how can I put it into financial terms to justify the investment? >> Well we were talking about ROI before, I mean really we've done actually quite a few studies looking at Global 2000 and the cost of downtime. I mean, these are real tangible metrics that, if you can reduce the amount of downtime or you can reduce the security threat, you're talking about putting money back in your pocket. Because Global 2000 organizations are losing millions and millions of dollars every year, so it is actually hard ROI. Even though some people might look at it as softer. I wanna talk about isolated data vault, you know, this notion of air gaps. What are you guys specifically doing there? Do you have solutions in that area? >> Yeah, we do. So we are using, luckily, so the concepts that we know from resiliency disaster recovery. Right, so our data protection storage which is very robust, it's very secure, it has very secure replication. So we have the mechanisms to get data into the vault, we have the mechanisms to create a read-only copy, so an immutable copy, that I can then go back into. So all of this is there, right, but the problem is how do I automate that workflow? So that's a software that we wrote that goes along with the data protection appliance sale. And what it does, it's all about ingesting that business critical data that I talked about into the secure enclave, and then rendering it into an immutable copy that I can get to when I have nowhere else to go. >> Okay, so you've got that gap, that air gap. Now, the bad guys will say 'Hey, I can get through an air gap, I can dress somebody up as a worker and put a stick in'. And so, how much awareness is there of that exposure? And I know it's maybe, you know, we're hitting the tip of the pyramid here, but still important. Can you guys help address that through, whether it's processes or product or experience? >> 100% so we have, of course, our consulting services that will then work with you on elements of physical security, or how do I lock down that remaining replication link? It's just about raising the bar for the attacker to make it more likely we'll catch them before they can get to, really, the prized assets. We're just raising the bar but, yes, those are things we do. So consulting, physical security, how do I do secure reporting out? How do I secure management going in? How do I secure that replication or synchronization link into the vault? All of these are topics that we then discuss, if they kind of deviate from the best practices and we have very good answers through our many customer arrangements. >> Stefan, let's talk about some of the specific offerings. RSA is a portfolio company in the Dell Technologies Group, it's a sister company of Dell EMC. What are you guys doing with RSA? Are you integrating with any of their specific products? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, I think, so when you think about recovery and incident response being so important, there's an obvious, right? So what RSA has found - I thought this was very interesting is that there's a lack of coordination between, typically, the security teams and the data professionals, data restoration professionals. So the more we can bridge that gap through technology, reporting, the better it is, right? So, there's a logical affinity between an incident response retainer, activity, and the data recovery solutions that we provide. That's one example, right? So every day counts, that example that I talked about NotPetya, the specific customer was losing 25 Euros every day. If I can shave off one day, it's money in the bank. Or money not out of the bank. The other area is, how do I make sure that I'm strategic about what data I protect in this way? That's the BIA Archer. And then there's some integrations we are looking at from an analytics perspective. >> Archer being the sort of governance risk and compliance, workflow, that's sort of one of the flagship products of RSA. So you integrate to that framework. And what about analytics, things like IOC, RSA NetWitness, are those products that you're integrating to or with, or leveraging in any way? >> Yeah, first off, analytics in general it's an interesting concept now we have data inside our secure enclave, right? So what if we could actually go in and give more confidence to the actual copies that we're storing there. So we have an ecosystem from an analytics perspective. We work with one specific company, we have Arrest API-based integration where we then, essentially, use them to do a vote of confidence on the copy, of the raw back up. Is it good? Are there signs that it was corrupted by malware? and so forth. So what that helps us do is be more proactive around our recovery because, I think you're about to say something - but if I knew there's something, you know, suspicious then I can start my analytics activity that much sooner. >> Well the lightbulb went off in my head. Because if I have an air gap, and I was saying before, it's necessary but insufficient. If I can run analytics on the corpus of the back up data and I can identify anomalies, I might be able to end run somebody trying to get through that air gap that I just mentioned before. Maybe it's a physical, you know, security breach. And the analytics might inform me. Is that a reasonable scenario? >> It is a reasonable scenario, though we do something slightly different. So, first of all, detection mechanisms, left of breach stuff, is what it is, we love it, we sell it, you know, we use it. But, you know, when it comes to back up they're not off-the-shelf tools we can just use and say 'Hey, why don't you scan this back up?' It doesn't typically work. So what we do is, in the vault, we have time, we have a workbench so it's almost like sending a specimen to the lab. And then we take a look at it. Are there any signs that there was data corruption that was indicative of a ransomware attack? And when there is such a scenario we say, 'You might wanna take a look at it, and do some further investigation'. That's when we then look at NetWitness or working with the security teams. But we can now be of service and say 'You might wanna look at this copy over here'. It's suspicious, there's an indicative compromise. And then take the next steps other than hoping for the best. >> You mentioned the ecosystem, you mentioned the ecosystem before. I wanna double-click on that. So, talk about the ecosystem. We've said here it's a team sport, you can't just do it alone. From a platform perspective is it open, is it API based? Maybe you can give some examples of how you're working with the ecosystem and how they're leveraging the platform. >> Yeah 100%. So, like I said, so we have, you know, our data protection appliances and that's sort of our plumbing, right, to get the data to where I want. We have the orchestration software. This is the part we're talking about. The orchestration software has Arrest API, everything's documented in Swagger. And the reason we did that is that we can do these orchestrations with third party analytics vendors, that's one use case right? So, I'm here, I have a copy here, please scan, tell me what you find and then give me an alert if you find something. The other example would be, maybe, doing a level of resiliency orchestration. Where you'd automate the recovery workflow beyond what we would have to offer. There are many examples but that is how we are enabling the ecosystem, essentially. >> You mentioned Founders Federal earlier. Is that a customer, is that a reference customer? What can you tell me about them? >> Yeah it's a reference customer and they very much saw the need for this type of protection. And, you know, we've been working with them. There's a Dell World, last year, session that we did with them. And very much the same sort of, like the quote said, focus on the process not only the product and the set of technologies, right? And, so that's how we've been partnering with them. >> The quote being 'Sweat before the game'? Founders Federal, that's a great quote. Alright, we've talked a lot about just, sort of, general terms about cyber recovery. What can you tell us, tell the audience, what makes Dell EMC cyber recovery different in the marketplace and, you know, relative to your competition? Pitch me. >> Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very unique capability. Because, one, you need a large install base and, sort of, a proven platform to even built it on, right? So when you look at the data domain technology we have a lot to work with. We have a lot of customers using it. So that's very hard to mimic. We have the orchestration software where we, I believe, are ahead of the game, right? So the orchestration software that I talked about that gets the data into the vault securely. And then our ecosystem, right? So those are really the three things. And then, of course, we have the consulting services which is also hard to mimic. To really, you know, design the process around this whole thing. But I think the ecosystem, sort of, approach is also very powerful. >> You have a big portfolio, you've got your sister company that's, sort of, well known obviously in this business. Do you also have solutions? I mean, for instance, is there an appliance as part of the portfolio that fits in here? And what is that? >> Yeah, so, you can think of this as, if I wanted to really blow it down, the two things I would buy is a data domain - it could be the smallest one - and a VxRail appliance that runs the software. And then I stick that in the vault. And then there's, sort of, that product. So you can think of it as an appliance that happens to go with the software that I talked about that does the orchestration. >> Okay, so, RSA the premier conference on cyber coming up in a couple of weeks. What have you guys got going there? Give us a little tease. >> Yeah, absolutely. So it's gonna be an awesome show and we will have a booth, and so we look forward to a lot of customer conversations. And we do have a panel. It's gonna be with Mastercard and RSA and myself. And we're really gonna take it from left of breach all the way to right of breach. >> Awesome, do you know when that panel is yet? >> It is, I think, on the 5th, I may have to check. >> Which is which day? >> I wanna say it's Wednesday. >> So it starts on the Monday, right? So that'll be day three. So check the conference schedule, I mean things change at the last minute. But that's great. Mastercard is an awesome reference customer. We've worked with them in the past and so, that's great. Stefan, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE and sharing some of your perspectives and what's coming up at RSA. It's good to have you. >> Thanks so much, Dave, I appreciate it. >> Okay, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from our East Cost headquarters. You're watching theCUBE.
SUMMARY :
From the SiliconANGLE media office and Compliance at Dell EMC. is part of the conversation. And the technologies we have, that we have or the IT team, everybody has to be involved And so if we don't have a process And I said at the open that things are shifting And so, therefore, we have to think about, you know, What is data isolation from your perspective? So a system that was offline, but we don't wanna And so, you know, this just shows and proves pre-requisites that they need to think about? So that earlier point, the security folks Now ahead of RSA, let's talk a little bit And so the way I always like to break it down One of the key parts about the NIS framework is something that every customer asks about all the time and how do you guys go about and I find that I'm a little bit fuzzy on the recovery and the cost of downtime. So we have the mechanisms to get data into the vault, And I know it's maybe, you know, we're that will then work with you on elements of RSA is a portfolio company in the Dell Technologies Group, and the data recovery solutions that we provide. of the flagship products of RSA. of the raw back up. And the analytics might inform me. we love it, we sell it, you know, we use it. So, talk about the ecosystem. And the reason we did that is that we can What can you tell me about them? and the set of technologies, right? different in the marketplace and, you know, that gets the data into the vault securely. as part of the portfolio that fits in here? and a VxRail appliance that runs the software. Okay, so, RSA the premier conference And we do have a panel. So it starts on the Monday, right? This is Dave Vellante from our East Cost headquarters.
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