>>live from San Francisco. It's the queue covering our essay conference 2020 San Francisco Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >>Hey, welcome back here. Ready? Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in our 2020 the biggest security conference in the country, if not the world. I guess there's got to be 50,000 people. We'll get the official word tomorrow. It's our sixth year here and we're excited to be back. I'm not sure why. It's 2020. We're supposed to know everything at this point in time with the benefit on inside. We got two people that do. You know a lot. We're excited to have him. My left is Chris Bets is the SVP and chief security officer for Centurylink. Chris, Great to see you. And to his left is Chris Smith, VP Global security Services for Centurylink. Welcome. >>Thank you for having me. >>Absolutely. You guys just flew into town >>just for the conference's great To be here is always a really exciting space with just a ton of new technology coming out. >>So let's just jump into it. What I think is the most interesting and challenging part of this particular show we go to a lot of shows you 100 shows a year. I don't know that there's one that's got kind of the breadth and depth of vendors from the really, really big the really, really small that you have here. And, you know, with the expansion of Moscone, either even packing more women underneath Howard Street, what advice do you give to people who are coming here for the first time? Especially on more than the buyer side as to how do you navigate this place >>when I when I come here and see So I'm always looking at what the new technologies are. But honestly, having a new technology is not good enough. Attackers are coming up with new attacks all the time. The big trick for me is understanding how they integrate into my other solutions. So I'm not so I'm not just focused on the technology. I'm focused on how they all fit together. And so the vendors that have solutions that fit together that really makes a difference in my book. So I'm looking for for products that are designed to work with each other, not just separate >>from a practice standpoint. The theme of IRA say this year is the human element, and for us, if you look at this floor, it's overwhelming. And if you're a CSO of an average enterprise, it's hard to figure out what you need to buy and how to build a practice with all of the emerging tools. So for us core to our practice, I think any mature, 30 security practices having a pro services capability and consulting capability that can be solved this all together, that helps you understand what to buy, what things to piece together and how to make it all work >>right. And it's funny, the human element that is the kind of the global theme. And what's funny is for all the technology it sounds like. Still, the easiest way in is through the person, whether it's a phishing attack or there's a myriad of ways that people are getting him to the human. So that's kind of a special challenge or trying to use technology to help people do a better job. At the end of the day, sometimes you're squishy ISS or easier access point is not a piece of technology, but it's actually a person. It's >>often because We asked people to do the wrong things. We're having them. Focus on security steps. Use email. Security is an easy to grasp example way all go through training every year to teach folks how to make sure that they avoid clicking on the wrong emails for us more often than a year. So the downside of that is arresting people to take a step away from their job and try to figure out how to protect themselves. And is this a bad emails that are really focusing on the job? So that's why it's so important to me to make sure that we've got solutions that help make the human better and frankly, even worse in security. We don't have the staff that we need. And so how do we help Make sure that the right tools are there, that they work together. They automate because asking everybody to take those steps, it's just it's a recipe for disaster because people are going to make mistakes >>right? Let's go a little deeper into the email thing. A friend of mines and commercial real estate, and he was describing an email that he got from his banker describing a wire transfer from one of his suppliers that he has a regular, ongoing making relationship with. You know, it's not the bad pronunciation and bad grammar and kind of the things that used to jump out is an obvious. But he said it was super good to the point where thankfully, you know, it was just this time. But, you know, he called the banker like, did you just send me this thing? So you know where this as the sophistication of the bad guys goes up specifically targeting people, how do you try to keep up with how do you give them the tools to know Woe versus being efficient? I'm trying to get my job done. >>Yeah, for me, it starts with technology. That takes a look. We've only got so many security practitioners in the company. Actually. Defend your email example. We've got to defend every user from those kinds of problems. And so how do I find technology solutions that help take the load off security practitioners so they can focus on the niche examples that really, really well crafted emails and help take that load off user? Because users just not gonna be able to handle that right? It's not fair to ask them. And like you said, it was just poorly time that helped attack. So how do we help? Make sure that we're taking that technology load off, identify the threats in advance and protect them. And so I think one of the biggest things that Chris and I talk a lot about is how to our solutions help make it easier for people to secure themselves instead of just providing only technology technology advantage, >>our strategy for the portfolio and it sort of tied to the complexity. CN This floor is simplicity. So from our perspective, our goal is a network service provider is to deliver threat free traffic to our customers even before it gets to the human being. And we've got an announcement that we launched just a week ago in advance of the show called Rapid Threat Defense. And the idea is to take our mature threat Intel practice that Chris has a team of folks focused on that. We branded black Lotus labs and Way built a machine learning practice that takes all the bad things that we see out in the network and protects customers before it gets to their people. >>So that's an interesting take. You have the benefit of seeing a lot of network traffic from a lot of customers and not just the stuff that's coming into my building. So you get a much more aggregated approach, so tell us a little bit more about that. And what is the Black Lotus Labs doing? And I'm also curious from an industry point of view, you know, it's just a collaboration with the industry cause you guys are doing a lot of traffic. There's other big network providers carrying a lot of traffic. How well do you kind of work together when you identify some nasty new things that you're doing the horizon? And where do you draw the line between better together versus still independent environment? >>When we're talking about making the Internet safer, it's not really to me a lot about competitive environment. It's really about better together. That's one of things I love about the security community. I'm sure you see it every year when you're here. You're talking security practitioners how across every industry security folks work together to accomplish something that's meaningful. So as the largest world's largest global I P we get to see a ton of traffic, and it's really, really interesting we'll be able to put together, you know, at any given point in time. We're watching many tens of thousands of probable malware networks. We're protecting our customers from that. But we're also able to ourselves take down nearly 65 now where networks every month just knock them off the Internet. So identify the command and control, and we take it off the Internet. We work with our partners. We go talk to hosting providers, maybe competitors of ours. And we say, Hey, here's a bad, bad actors bad server that's being used to control now where? Going shut it down. And so the result of that is not only protecting our customers, but more importantly, protecting tens of thousands of customers every month. By removing now where networks that were attacking, that really makes a difference. To me, that's the biggest impact we bring. And so it really is a better together. It's a collaboration story and, of course, for said, we get the benefit of that information as we're developing it as we're building it, we can protect our customers right away while we're building the confidence necessary to take something as dramatic and action as shutting down on our network. Right. Unilaterally, >>Citrix. I was gonna ask you kind of the impact of I o t. Right in this in this crazy expansion of the tax services, when you hear about all the time with my favorite example, somebody told the story of attacking a casino through the connected thermometer in the fish tank in the lobby, which may or may not be true, is still a great story. Great story. But I'm curious, you know, looking at the network, feeding versus the devices connecting that's really in an interesting way to attack this proliferation of attack services. You're getting it before it necessarily gets to all these new points of presence doing it based on the source. For >>us, that's the only way to make it scalable. It is true that automation blocking it before it gets to the azure to a device. It is what will create simplicity and value for our customers. >>Right on the other piece of the automation. Of course, that we hear about all the time is there just aren't enough security professionals, period. So if you don't have the automation. You don't have the machine learning, as you said, to filter low hanging fruit and the focus your resource. If they need to be, you're not going to do it. The bad news is the bad guys, similar tools. So as you look at kind of the increase in speed of automation, the increase in automated connectivity between these devices making decisions amongst each other, how do you see that kind of evolving? But you're kind of role and making sure you stay a step ahead of the bad guys. For >>me, it's not about just automation. It's about allowing smart people to put their brains against hard problems, hard impactful problems and so on. So simply automating is not enough. It's making sure that automation is reducing the the load on people so that they're able to focus on those hard, unique problems really solve all those solutions and, yes, Attackers, Attackers build automation as well. And so if we're not building faster and better than we're falling behind, so like every other part of this race, it's about getting better, faster and why it's so important that technology work together because we're constantly throwing out more tools and if they don't work better together, even if we got incremental automation, these place way still miss overall because it's end to end that we need to defend ourselves and our customers >>layered on what he said. For the foreseeable future, you're gonna need smart security people that help protect your practice. Our goal in automation is take the road tasks out of out of the gate. They live so they can focus on the things that provide the most value protecting their enterprise. >>Right when you're looking, you talked about making sure things work together, for you talked about making sure things work together. How do you decide what's kind of on the top of the top of the stack, where everybody wants to own the single pane of glass? Everybody wants to be the control plane. Everybody wants to be that thing that's on your computer all the time, which is how you work your day to day. How do you kind of dictate what are the top level tools while still going out? And, he said, exploring some of these really cutting edge things out around the fringe, which don't necessarily have a full stack solution that you're going to rely on but might have some cool kind of point solutions if you will, or point products to help you plug some new and emerging holes. Yeah, >>yeah. So for us, yeah, we take security capabilities and we build them into the other things that we sell. So it's not a bolt on. So when you buy things from us, whether whether it's bandwidth or whether its SD wan and security comes baked in, so it's not something you have to worry about integrating later. It's an ingredient of the things that we sell in all of the automation that we build is built into our practice, So it's simple for our customers to understand, like, simple and then layered. On top of that, we've got a couple different ways that we bring pro services and consulting to our practice. So we've got a smart group of folks that could lean into staff, augment and sit on site, do just about anything to help customers build a practice from day zero to something more mature. But now we're toying with taking those folks in building them into products and services that we sell for 10 or 20 hours a month as an ingredient. So you get that consulting wrapper on top of the portfolio that we sell as a service provider. >>Get your take on kind of budgets and how people should think about their budgets. And when I think of security, I can't help but think of like insurance because you can't spend all your money on security. But you want to spend the right amount on security. But at the end of the day, you can't be 100% secure, right? So it's kind of kind of working the margins game, and you have to make trade offs in marketing, wants their money and product development, wants their money and sales, wants their money. So what people are trying to assess kind of the risk in their investment trade offs. What are some of the things they should be thinking about to determine what is the proper investment on security? Because it can't just be, you know, locker being 100% it's not realistic, and then all the money they help people frame that. >>Usually when companies come to us in, Centurylink plays in every different segment, all the way down to, you know, five people company all the way to the biggest multinationals on the planet. So that question is, in the budget is a little bit different, depending on the type of customer, the maturity and the lens are looking at it. So, typically, way have a group of folks that we call security account managers those our consultants and we bring them in either in a dedicated or a shared way. Help companies that's us, wear their practices today in what tool sets for use again things that they need to purchase and integrate to get to where they need to be >>really kind of a needs analysis based on gaps as much as anything else. >>That's part of the reason why we try to build prisons earlier, so many of the technologies into our solution so that so that you buy, you know, SD wan from us, and you get a security story is part of it is that that allows you to use the customer to save money and really have one seamless solution that provides that secure experience. We've been building firewalls and doing network based security for going on two decades now, in different places. So at this point, that is a good place that way, understand? Well, we can apply automation against it. We can dump, tail it into existing services and then allow focused on other areas of security. So it helps. From a financial standpoint, it also helps customers understand from where they put their talent. Because, as you talked about, it's all about talents even more so than money. Yes, we need to watch our budgets. But if you buy these tools, how do you know about the talent to deploy them? And easier You could make it to do that simpler. I think the better off right >>typical way had the most success selling security practices when somebody is either under attacker compromised right, then the budget opens right up, and it's not a problem anymore. So we thought about how to solve that commercially, and I'll just use Vitas is an example. We have a big D dos global DDOS practice that's designed to protect customers that have applications out on the Internet that are business critical, and if they go down, whether it's an e commerce or a trading site losing millions of dollars a day, and some companies have the money to buy that up front and just have it as a service. And some companies don't purchase it from us until they're under attack. And the legacy telco way of deploying that service was an order and a quote. You know, some days later, we turned it up. So we've invested with Christine the whole orchestration layer to turn it up in minutes and that months so you can go to our portal. You can enter a few simple commercial terms and turn it on when you need it. >>That's interesting. I was gonna ask you kind of how has cloud kind of changed the whole go to market and the way people think about it. And even then you hear people have stuff that's secure in the cloud, but they mis configured a switch left something open. But you're saying, too it enables you to deploy in a very, very different matter based on you know, kind of business conditions and not have that old, you know, get a requisite get a p o requisition order, install config. Take on another kind of crazy stuff. Okay, so before I let you go, last question. What are your kind of priorities for this show for Centurylink when it's top of mind, Obviously, you have the report and the Black Lotus. What do you guys really prioritizing for this next week? Here for Cisco. >>We're here to help customers. We have a number of customers, a lot of learning about our solutions, and that's always my priority. And I mentioned earlier we just put out a press release for rapid threat defense. So we're here to talk about that, and I think the industry and what we're doing this little bit differently. >>I get to work with Chris Motions Week with customers, which is kind of fun. The other part that I'm really excited about, things we spent a bunch of time with partners and potential partners. We're always looking at how we bring more, better together. So one of the things that we're both focused on is making sure that we're able to provide more solutions. So the trick is finding the right partners who are ready to do a P I level integration. The other things that Chris was talking about that really make this a seamless and experience, and I think we've got a set of them that are really, really interested in that. And so those conversations this week will be exceptionally well, I think that's gonna help build better technology for our customers even six months. >>Alright, great. Well, thanks for kicking off your week with the Cube and have a terrific week. Alright. He's Chris. He's Chris. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Where? The RSA Conference in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. See you next time. >>Yeah, yeah.