>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting without leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier, host theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California, and doing a remote interview in our quarantine studio where we're getting the stories out there and sharing the content during the time of crisis when we're sheltering in place, as we get through this and get through the other side of the new normal. It's not necessarily normal, but it'll certainly create some normalcy around some of the new work at home, but also cybersecurity, I want to bring in a special guest who's going to talk with me about the impact of COVID-19 on cybersecurity, work at home, work in general, and also businesses practices. So, welcome Bill Welsh, who's the CEO of IronNet, who has taken over the helm run of the operations with General Keith Alexander, CUBE alumni as well, former NSA and former Cyber Command who's now leading a new innovative company called IronNet, which is deploying something really clever, but also something really realistic around cybersecurity so, Bill, thanks for joining me. >> Hey John, thanks for being with you. >> So, obviously, the COVID-19 crisis has created, essentially, a lot of exposure to the real world and, in general, around what it's like to work at home. Obviously, the economy's are crippled. This is an invisible threat. I've been chirping on Twitter and saying we've been fighting a digital war for a long time. There's been, the Internet has provided nation states the opportunity to attack folks using other mechanisms, open source and others, but if you look at this COVID-19, whether it's a bio weapon or not, it has crippled the country in the United States and caused crippling around the world, but it's just a threat and causing disruption, this is almost like a nuke, if you will, digital nuke. This is changing the game. You guys are in the cyber intelligence, cybersecurity area, what's your take on all of this and what are you hearing? >> Well I agree with you, John, I think that this is the invisible enemy, and as you know, right now with that going on, there's going to be adversaries that are going to take advantage of it. You see right now in some of the nation states where they're looking at opportunities to use this, to go after other countries, maybe just to test and see what their vulnerabilities are. You're seeing some activity overseas with nation states where they're looking at some of the military incursions, they're thinking about possible weaknesses with this invisible enemy. You know, it's affecting us in so many ways, whether it's economic, financial, our healthcare system, our supply chains, whether it's our, the supplies and groceries that we get to our people, so these are all challenging times that the adversaries are not going to just sit back and say oh well, you're in a crisis right now, we'll wait for the crisis to be alieved, we are now going to take advantage of it. >> And certainly the death toll is also the human impact as well, this is real world. This is something that we can have a longer conversation on, the time when we get more data in, and we'll certainly want to track this new, kind of digital warfare kind of paradigm, whether it's bio and or packets in cybersecurity, but the real impact has been this at scale exposure of problems and opportunities. For instance, IT folks were telling me that they underprovisioned their VPN access, now it's 100% everyone's at home. That's a disruption, that's not a hurricane, that's not a flood, this is now a new distraction to their operations. Other folks are seeing more hacks and more surface area, more threats from the old side getting hit. This has certainly impacted the cyber, but also people's anxiety at home. How are you guys looking at this, what are you guys doing, what's going on IronNet right now around cyber and COVID-19. >> Yeah, and what we're seeing right now is that our customers are seeing increasing awareness of their employees to understand what is going on around them and one of the things that we formed the company was the ability to assist enterprises of all sizes to collectively defend against threats that target their industries. We believe that collective defense is our collective responsibility. And it can't be just about technology, it's about some of the IT systems you talked about, being able to leverage them together. When I look at our top energy companies that we partner with, these individuals have great operators, but when you think about it, they have operators just for their company. What we're able to do within our environment, in our Iron Dome, is bring all that in together. We bring the human element and the IT element in order to help them solve positive outcomes for their industries. >> I want to dig into that because I think one of the things that I'm seeing coming out of this trend, post-pandemic is going to be the real emphasis on community. You're seeing people realizing through, whether it's doing Zoomification or Cubification, doing CUBE interviews and zooming and talking, I think you're going to see this element of I could do better, I can contribute either to society or to the collective at whole, and I think this collective idea you guys have with Iron Dome is very relevant because I think people are going to say wow, if I contribute, we might not have this kind of crisis again. This is something that's new, you guys have been on this collective thing with Iron Dome for a long time. I think this is pretty clever and I think it's going to be very relevant. Can you explain the Iron Dome collective, intelligence paradigm in the vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. And just to back up a little bit, what I will tell you is that we observed, as far as the problem statement, was that cyber is an element of national power, and people are using it to achieve their political, economic, and military objectives and now what you're seeing is are there other ways, cause while this COVID-19 may or may not have been anything as far as a bio-weapon, now others will see, well here's a way to bring down a country or an economy or something like that. We're also seeing that the cyber attacks are getting more and more destructive, whether it's WannaCry or NotPetya, we're also seeing the toolkits being more advanced, we're seeing how slow the response is by their cyber tools, so what we've looked at is we said wait, stop defending in isolation. That's what enterprises have been doing, they've been defending in isolation, no sharing, no collective intelligence as I would call it. And what we've been able to do is bring the power of those people to come together to collectively defend when something happens. So instead of having one security operation center defending a company, you can bring five or six or seven to defend the entire energy grid, this is one example. And over in Asia, we have the same thing. We have one of our largest customers over there, they have 450 companies, so if you think about it, 450 companies times the number of stock operators that they have in the security operation centers, you can think about the magnitude that we can bring the bearer of the arms, the warriors, to attack this crisis. >> So you're getting more efficiency, more acute response than before, so you got speed. So what you're saying is the collective intelligence provides what value? Speed, quality-- Yeah, it's at cloud scale, network speed, you get the benefit of all these operators, individuals that have incredible backgrounds in offensive and defensive operator experience including the people that we have, and then our partnership with either national governments or international governments that are allies, to make sure that we're sharing that collective intelligence so they can take action because what we're doing is we're making sure that we analyze the traffic, we're bringing the advanced analytics, we're bringing the expert systems, and we're bringing the experts to there, both at a technology level and also a personnel level. >> You know, General Alexander, one of the architects behind the vision here, who's obviously got a background in the military, NSA, Cyber Command, et cetera, uses the analogy of an airport radar, and I think that's a great metaphor because you need to have real-time communications on anything going on in as telemetry to what's landing or approaching or almost like landing that airplane, so he uses that metaphor and he says if there's no communication but it lags, you don't have it. He was using that example. Do you guys still use that example or can you explain further this metaphor? >> Absolutely, and I think another example that we have seen some of our customers really, in our prospects and partners really embrace is this concept of an immersive visualization, almost gaming environment. You look at what is happening now where people have the opportunity, even at home because of COVID-19, my teenage boys are spending way too much time probably on Call of Duty and Fortnite and that, but apply that same logic to cyber. Apply that logic to where you could have multiple players, multiple individuals, you can invite people in, you can invite others that might have subject matter expertise, you might be able to go and invite some of the IT partners that you have whether it's other companies to come in that are partners of yours, to help solve a problem and make it visualized, immersive, and in a gaming environment, and that is what we're doing in our Iron Dome. >> I think that's compelling and I've always loved the vision of abstracting away gaming to real world problems because it's very efficient, those kids are great, and the new Call of Duty came out so everyone's-- >> And they're also the next generation, they're the next generation of individuals that are going to be taking over security for us. So this is a great in mind... Cause this is something they already know, something they're already practicing, and something they're experts at and if you look at how the military is advancing, they've gone from having these great fighter pilots to putting people in charge of drones. It's the same thing with us is that possibility of having a cyber avatar go and fight that initiative is going to be something that we're doing. >> I think you guys are really rethinking security and this brings up my next topic I want to get your thoughts on is this crisis of COVID-19 has really highlighted old and new, and it's really kind of exposed again, at scale because it's an at scale problem, everyone's been forced to shelter in place and it exposes everything from deliveries to food to all the services and you can see what's important, what's not in life and it exposes kind of the old and new. So you have a lot of old antiquated, outdated systems and you have new emerging ones. How do you see those two sides of the street, old and new, what's emerging, what's your vision on what you think will be important post-pandemic? >> Well, I think the first thing is the individuals that are really the human element. So one, we have to make sure that individuals at home are, have all the things that they require in order to be successful and drive great outcomes, because I believe that the days of going into an office and sitting into a cube is yes, that is the old norm, but the new norm is individuals who either at home or on a plane, on a train, on a bus, or wherever they might be, practicing and being a part of it. So I think that the one thing we have to get our arms around is the ability to invite people into this experience no matter where they are and meet them where they are, so that's number one. Number two is making sure that those networks are available and that they're high speed, right? That we are making sure that they're not being used necessarily for streaming of Netflix, but being able to solve the cyber attacks. So there might be segmentation, there might be, as you said, this collective intelligent sharing that'll go across these entities. >> You know, it's interesting, Bill, you're bringing up something that we've been riffing on and I want to just expose that to you and kind of think out loud here. You're mentioning the convergence of physical, hybrid, 100% virtual as it kind of comes together. And then community and collective intelligence, we just talked about that, certainly relevant, you can see more movement on that side and more innovation. But the other thing that comes out of the woodwork and I want to get your thoughts on this is the old IoT Edge, Internet of things. Because if you think about that convergence of operational technologies and Internet technologies, ID, you now have that world's been going on for awhile, so obviously, you got to have telemetry on physical devices, you got to bring it in IT, so as you guys have this Iron Dome, collective view, hallux of view of things, it's really physical and virtual coming together. The virtualization-- >> It's all the above, it's all the above. The whole concept of IoT and OT and whether it's a device that's sitting in a solar wind panel or whether it's a device that's sitting in your network, it could be the human element, or it could actually be a device, that is where you require that cyber posture, that ability to do analytics on it, the ability to respond. And the ability to collectively see all of it, and that goes to that whole visualization I talked to you about, is being able to see your entire network, you can't protect something if you can't see it, and that's something that we've done across IronDome, and with our customers and prospects and with IronDefense, so it's something that absolutely is part of the things we're seeing in the cyber world. >> I want to get your reaction to some commentary that we've been having, Dave Vellante and myself on the team, and we were talking about how events have been shut down, the physical space, the venues where they have events. Obviously, we go to a lot of events with theCUBE, you know that. So, obviously that's kind of our view, but when you think about Internet of things, you think about collective intelligence with community, whether it's central to gamification or Iron Dome that you're innovating on, as we go through the pandemic, there's going to be a boomerang back, we think, to the importance of the physical space, cause at some point, we're going to get back to the real world, and so, the question is what operational technology, what version of learnings do we get from this shelter in place that gets applied to the physical world? This is the convergence of physical and virtual. We see as a big way, want to get your reaction to that. >> I absolutely agree with you, I think that we're going to learn some incredible lessons in so many different ways whether it's healthcare, financial, but I also, believe that's what you said, is that convergence of physical and virtual will become almost one in the same. We will see individuals that will leverage the physical when they need to and leverage the virtual when they need to. And I think that that's something that we will see more and more of of companies looking at how they actually respond and support their customer base. You know, some might decide to have more individuals in an at-home basis, to support a continuity of operations, some might decide that we're going to have some physical spaces and not others, and then we're going to leverage physical IT and some virtual IT, especially the cloud infrastructures are going to become more and more valuable as we've seen within our IronDome infrastructure. >> You know, we were riffing the other day in the remote interviews, theCUBE is going virtual, and we were joking that Amazon Web Services was really created through the trend of virtualization. I mean, VMware and the whole server virtualization created the opportunity for Amazon to abstract and create value. And we think that this next wave is going to be this pandemic has woken us up to this remote, virtual contribution, and it might create a lot of opportunities, for us, for instance, virtual CUBE, for virtual business. I'm sure you, as the CEO of IronNet, are thinking about how you guys recover post-pandemic, is it going to be a different world, are you going to have a mix of virtual, digital, integrated into your physical, whether it's how you market your products and engage customers to solving technical problems. This is a new management challenge, and it's an opportunity if you get it right, it could be a headwind or a tailwind, depending on how you look at it. So I want to get your thoughts on this virtualization post-pandemic management structure, management philosophy, obviously, dislocation with spacial economics, I get that and I always go to work in the office much but, beyond that, management style, posture, incentives. >> Yes, I think that there's a lot of things unpacked there. I mean, one is it is going to be about a lot of more communication. You know, I will tell you that since we have gone into this quarantine, we're holding weekly all hands, every Friday, all in a virtual environment. I think that the transparency will be even more. You know, one of the things that I'm most encouraged by and inspired by is the productivity. I will tell you, getting access to individuals has gotten easier and easier for us. The ability to get people into this virtual environment. They're not spending hours upon hours on commuting or flying on planes or going different places, and it doesn't mean that that won't be an important element of business, but I think it's going to give time back to individuals to focus on what is the most important priorities for the companies that they're driving. So this is an opportunity, I will tell you, our productivity has increased exponentially. We've seen more and more meetings, where more and more access to very high level individuals, who have said we want to hear what you guys are doing, and they have the time to do it now instead of jumping on a plane and wasting six hours and not being productive. >> It's interesting, it's also a human element too, you can hear babies crying, kids playing, dogs barking, you kind of laugh and chuckle in the old days, but now this is a humanization piece of it, and that should foster real communities, so I think... Obviously, we're going to be watching this virtualization of communities, collective intelligence and congratulations, I think Iron Dome, and iron offense, obviously which is core product, I think your Iron Dome is a paradigm that is super relevant, you guys are visionaries on this and I think it's turning out to be quite the product, so I want to congratulate you on that. Thanks for-- >> Thank you, John. Thanks for your time today and stay safe. >> Bill, thanks for joining us and thanks for your great insights on cyber COVID-19, and we'll follow up more on this trend of bio weaponry and kind of the trajectory of how cyber and scale cloud is going to shape how we defend and take offense in the future on how to defend our country and to make the world a safer place. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE here and our remote interviews in our quarantine studio in Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (lively music)