>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering RSA Conference 2019. Brought to you by Forescout. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at the RSA Conference in downtown San Francisco, it's crazy, 40,000 plus people, we'll get the number later today. We're in the Forescout booth for our first time, we're really excited to be here, and, you know, part of the whole Forescout story is the convergence of IT and OT, operations technology, and those things are coming together, which is such a critical piece of smart things, and smart cities, and smart cars. We're excited to have our next guest, Elisa Costante, on. She is the OT technology and innovation lead at Forescout. Elisa, great to see you. >> Great to see you, thank for having me. >> Absolutely. So you've got a PhD in this space, you picked a field that is pretty hot, so as you think back and look at the convergence of OT and IT, what are some of the top-level things that people are thinking about, but what are some of the top-level things that they're just missing? >> Well, when you speak about OT, typically you refer to critical infrastructure and the technology that operates things. So it's cyber-physical systems, right? And when you think of IT, you think about computer and you think about the web, and you're like, okay, when the two things meet? And then you put in the recipe, you put something like an IoT device, like an IP camera, or a sensor for the number of people in a room. Now these whole things are coming together. And they're coming together because they come with a lot of interesting use cases. You can have all the data and information to configure, for instance, your building, to be as smart as possible, and to have. >> They need smart wheels on that cart, my goodness. >> Of course. And you have a clear picture of how much energy you consume and then you can basically have the energy that is cheaper, because it just arrives in the moment that you need it. Now all of these things are IT and OT convergence. And all of these things make our cities and our world smarter today. >> Right, now one of the interesting things I saw in a talk getting ready for this is, you talked about, there's always been a lot of OT systems, they've been around for a while, >> Yeah. >> But they've always been siloed, you know, they haven't been connected to other OT systems and much less being connected to IT systems. >> Yeah >> So they weren't architected for that from the first point of view. So how does that get implemented? Are they re-architecting 'em? Are you guys overlaying a different kind of control plane? How do you take these siloed applications around, say, elevator operation, and then integrate it in with all these other things? >> So what happens is that those systems are legacy systems. That's why. There are like, 60% of the modern buildings, of the buildings today, they have, they are controlled and managed by system that are 20 years old. So what does it mean? That you make an investment and you don't want to change that investment. You are not going to renew all the backbones of your buildings, or of your manufacturing and operation factories. So what do you do on top of these legacy system that have been developed without security in mind, you put the IT systems, to monitor, to control, to have remote access and remote control. And this is where, like, things can go wrong, because if this is not done properly, and by having in mind, for instance, the threat landscape, that's where you will have the controller for your HVAC exposed to the internet, and can pull down all the air conditioning in a hospital, for instance. And that's why WannaCry can come and heat and put down tons and tons of hospitals. >> Right. It's pretty interesting, you know, I think it's a pretty common concept in security for people that you should only have access, you know, to the information you need around a particular project or particular dataset. But you talked about, in some of your other talks that I saw, about a lot of these devices come out of the box with all kinds of capabilities, right? 'Cause they're built for kind of the Nth degree, the maximum use, but there may be a whole bunch of stuff that's turned on out of the box that you probably need to turn off. >> Yeah, that's actually super interesting. If you look at IP cameras, now IP cameras, they should do one thing, record stuff that they see on the screen. But actually they come with a bunch of protocols indeed, like FTPs, Samba protocols, SSDP, that announce the camera on the network, and reveal a lot of information about those camera on the network that if RPCed by an attacker or by someone with not-good intentions, might actually be leveraged to turn the camera against the owner of the camera itself. >> Right, right. And do weird things that the camera should not. And that's really part of what the Forescout solution is, is making sure that the devices are profiled and acting in the way that they're supposed to act. And not doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. >> Yeah, Forescout is a leader in device visibility. So what we do is we enter into a network, and we give full visibility of all the IP devices that are there, and that's most of the times is a wow effect, like, the asset owner has no ideas that they had a camera that was directly connected to the internet. Or they'd have a thermostat that communicates with the servers. So all of these things, we bring basically light on the dark sides of the network. >> Right. So excited to talk to you 'cause I think the smart cities and smart buildings is such an interesting concept and going to be so important as we get denser populations and smaller areas that connected to transportation. I wonder if you could share some examples that you see out in the field where the ROI on putting these things in, the good part, is way higher than maybe people expect. That because you're combining, you know, a one plus one equals three kind of an opportunity. >> Right, so actually, one example of a very useful and smart use case is, is happening in Amsterdam right now. The Bijlmer Arena, is basically all the walls are made of solar panels, which means it gets the energy and is able to basically self-sustain the arena. The arena is one of the biggest stadiums in the Netherlands. >> Ajax plays there probably? >> Exactly. >> Alright. >> Now what they do if they have collected more energy than they are able to consume, they provide that same energy to the neighbors. Which means that you have basically a small ecosystem that thanks to the collection of data, knowing what neighbor needs how much light and energy in a certain time, you can actually even improve sustainability and going green initiatives. >> I love the innovation that comes out of the Netherlands. We interviewed a company a long time ago, and they were basically doing segmented data centers, where you would have a piece of the data center in your house and they were selling it as free heating. And I'm like, is it free heating, or is it distributed data center? But I mean, the creativity is terrific. So as you look forward, you know, what are you excited about in 2019? What are some of your top initiatives that you're working on? >> So we are working on a lot of IT and OT convergence, and especially on the IoT part. So we are looking at all those tiny devices that you would not expect to be on your network, and what they can do, and how these old systems that have been conceived to be standalone are now starting to communicate, and what kind of threats this communication can bring, and what we can do to actually defend our customers from the threats that can be arised. >> Going to be a good year. Excited to watch the developments unfold. >> Yeah, thanks. >> All right Elisa, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day, I know you said you had early meetings, you're calling Europe, calling all over the world, so thanks for taking a few. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, she's Elisa, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at RSA Conference, RSAC is the hashtag, in the Forescout booth. I'm Jeff Frick, thanks for watching. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)