(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCube's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its partners with two live sets on the scene. In addition to two remote studios. And we'll have somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred guests on the program this year at re:Invent. I'm extremely delighted to welcome a very, very special guest. Right now. He served as the director of the NSA under two presidents, and was the first commander of the U.S Cyber Command. He's a Cube alumni, he's founder and co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity. General Keith Alexander. Thanks for joining us today General. >> Thanks, David. It's an honor to be here at re:Invent, you know, with AWS. All that they're doing and all they're making possible for us to defend sector states, companies and nations in cyber. So an honor to be here. >> Well, welcome back to theCube. Let's dive right in. I'd like to know how you would describe the current cyber threat landscape that we face. >> Well, I think it's growing. Well, let's start right out. You know, the good news or the bad news, the bad news is getting worse. We're seeing that. If you think about SolarWinds, you think about the Hafnium attacks on Microsoft. You think about this rapid growth in ransomware. We're seeing criminals and nation states engaging in ways that we've never seen in the past. It's more blatant. They're going after more quickly, they're using cyber as an element of national power. Let's break that down just a little bit. Do you go back to two, July. Xi Jinping, talked about breaking heads in bloodshed when he was referring to the United States and Taiwan. And this has gone hot and cold, that's a red line for him. They will do anything to keep Taiwan from breaking away. And this is a huge existential threat to us into the region. And when this comes up, they're going to use cyber to go after it. Perhaps even more important and closer right now is what's going on with Russia in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. We saw this in 2014, when Russia took over the Crimea. The way they did it, staging troops. They did that in 2008 against Georgia. And now there are, by some reports over a hundred thousand troops on the border of Eastern Ukraine. Some call it an exercise, but that's exactly what they did in Georgia. That's what they did in the Crimea. And in both those cases, they preceded those attacks, those physical attacks with cyber attacks. If you go to 2017, when Russia hit the Ukrainian government with the NotPetya attack that had global repercussions. Russia was responsible for SolarWinds, they have attacked our infrastructure to find out what our government is doing and they continue going. This is getting worse. You know, it's interesting when you think about, so what do you do about something like that? How do we stop that? And the answer is we've got to work together. You know, Its slam commissioner addressed it. The meeting with the president on August 25th. This is a great statement by the CEO and chairman of Southern Company, Tom Fanning. He said this, "the war is being waged on our nation's critical infrastructure in particular, our energy sector, our telecommunications sector and financial sector." The private sector owns and operates 87% of the critical infrastructure in the United States, making collaboration between industry and the federal government imperative too, for these attacks. SO >> General, I want to dig just a little bit on that point that you make for generations, people have understood that the term is 'kinetic war', right? Not everyone has heard that phrase, but for generations we've understood the concept of someone dropping a bomb on a building as being an attack. You've just mentioned that, that a lot of these attacks are directed towards the private sector. The private sector doesn't have an army to respond to those attacks. Number one, that's our government's responsibility. So the question I have is, how seriously are people taking these kinds of threats when compared to the threat of kinetic war? Because my gosh, you can take down the entire electrical grid now. That's not something you can do with a single bomb. What are your, what are your thoughts on that? >> So you're hitting on a key point, a theoretical and an operational point. If you look back, what's the intent of warfare? It's to get the mass of people to give up. The army protects the mass of people in that fight. In cyber, there's no protection. Our critical infrastructure is exposed to our adversaries. That's the problem that we face. And because it's exposed, we have a tremendous vulnerability. So those who wish us harm, imagine the Colonial Pipeline attack an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude bigger. The impact on our country would paralyze much of what we do today. We are not ready for that. That's the issue that Tom Fanning and others have brought up. We don't practice between the public sector and the private sector working together to defend this country. We need to do that. That's the issue that we have to really get our hands around. And when we talk about practice, what do we mean? It means we have to let that federal government, the ones that are going to protect us, see what's going on. There is no radar picture. Now, since we're at re:Invent, the cloud, where AWS and others have done, is create an infrastructure that allows us to build that bridge between the public and private sector and scale it. It's amazing what we can now do. We couldn't do that when I was running Cyber Command. And running Cyber Command, we couldn't see threats on the government. And we couldn't see threats on critical infrastructure. We couldn't see threats on the private sector. And so it all went and all the government did was say, after the fact you've been attacked. That's not helpful. >> So >> It's like they dropped a bomb. We didn't know. >> Yeah, so what does IronNet doing to kind of create this radar capability? >> So, well, thanks. That's a great question because there's four things that you really got to do. First. You've got to be able to detect the SolarWinds type attacks, which we did. You've got to have a hunt platform that can see what it is. You've got to be able to use machine learning and AI to really cut down the number of events. And the most important you need to be able to anonymize and share that into the cloud and see where those attacks are going to create that radar picture. So behavioral analytics, then you use signature based as well, but you need those sets of analytics to really see what's going on. Machine learning, AI, a hunt platform, and cloud. And then analytics in the cloud to see what's going on, creates that air traffic control, picture radar, picture for cyber. That's what we're doing. You see, I think that's the important part. And that's why we really value the partnership with AWS. They've been a partner with us for six years, helping us build through that. You can see what we can do in the cloud. We could never do in hardware alone. Just imagine trying to push out equipment and then do that for hundreds of companies. It's not viable. So SaaS, what we are as a SaaS company, you can now do that at scale, and you can push this out and we can create, we can defend this nation in cyber if we work together. And that's the thing, you know, I really, had a great time in the military. One of the things I learned in the military, you need to train how you're going to fight. They're really good at that. We did that in the eighties, and you can see what happened in 1990 in the Gulf war. We need to now do that between the public and private sector. We have to have those training. We need to continuously uplift our capabilities. And that's where the cloud and all these other things make that possible. That's the future of cybersecurity. You know, it's interesting David, our country developed the internet. We're the ones that pioneered that. We ought to be the first to secure. >> Seems to make sense. And when you talk about collective defense in this private public partnership, that needs to happen, you get examples of some folks in private industry and what they're doing, but, but talk a little bit more about, maybe what isn't happening yet. What do we need to do? I don't want you to necessarily get political and start making budgetary suggestions, but unless you want to, but what, but where do you see, where do we really need to push forward from a public perspective in order to make these connections? And then how is that connection actually happen? This isn't someone from the IronNet security service desk, getting on a red phone and calling the White House, how are the actual connections made? >> So it has to be, the connections have to be just like we do radar. You know, when you think about radars across our nation or radar operator doesn't call up one of the towers and say, you've got an aircraft coming at you at such and such a speed. I hope you can distinguish between those two aircraft and make sure they don't bump into each other. They get a picture and they get a way of tracking it. And multiple people can see that radar picture at a speed. And that's how we do air traffic control safety. We need the same thing in cyber, where the government has a picture. The private sector has a picture and they can see what's going on. The private sector's role is I'm going to do everything I can, you know, and this is where the energy sector, I use that quote from Tom Fanning, because what they're saying is, "it's our job to keep the grid up." And they're putting the resources to do it. So they're actually jumping on that in a great way. And what they're saying is "we'll share that with the government", both the DHS and DOD. Now we have to have that same picture created for DHS and DOD. I think one of the things that we're doing is we're pioneering the building of that picture. So that's what we do. We build the picture to bring people together. So think of that is that's the capability. Everybody's going to own a piece of that, and everybody's going to be operating in it. But if you can share that picture, what you can begin to do is say, I've got an attack coming against company A. Company A now sees what it has to do. It can get fellow companies to help them defend, collective defense, knowledge sharing, crowdsourcing. At the same time, the government can see that attack going on and say, "my job is to stop that." If it's DHS, I could see what I have to do. Within the country, DOD can say, "my job is to shoot the archers." How do we go do what we're authorized to do under rules of engagement? So now you have a way of the government and the private sector working together to create that picture. Then we train them and we train them. We should never have had an event like SolarWinds happen in the future. We got to get out in front. And if we do that, think of the downstream consequences, not only can we detect who's doing it, we can hold them accountable and make them pay a price. Right now. It's pretty free. They get in, pap, that didn't work. They get away free. That didn't work, we get away free. Or we broke in, we got, what? 18,000 companies in 30,000 companies. No consequences. In the future there should be consequences. >> And in addition to the idea of consequences, you know, in the tech sector, we have this concept of a co-op petition, where we're often cooperating and competing. The adversaries from, U.S perspective are also great partners, trading partners. So in a sense, it sounds like what you're doing is also kind of adhering to the old adage that, that good fences make for great neighbors. If we all know that our respective infrastructures are secure, we can sort of get on with the honest business of being partners, because you want to make the cost of cyber war too expensive. Is that, is that a fair statement? >> Yes. And I would take that analogy and bend it slightly to the following. Today every company defends itself. So you take 90 companies with 10 people, each doing everything they can to defend themselves. Imagine in the world we trying to build, those 90 companies work together. You have now 900 people working together for the collective defense. If you're in the C-suite or the board of those companies, which would rather have? 900 help new security or 10? This isn't hard. And so what we say is, yes. That neighborhood watch program for cyber has tremendous value. And beyond neighborhood watch, I can also share collaboration because, I might not have the best people in every area of cyber, but in those 900, there will be, and we can share knowledge crowdsource. So it's actually let's work together. I would call it Americans working together to defend America. That's what we need to do. And the states we going to have a similar thing what they're doing, and that's how we'll work this together. >> Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. General Alexander it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on to theCube as part of our 2021 AWS re:Invent coverage. Are you going to get a chance to spend time during the conference in Las Vegas? So you just flying in, flying out. Any chance? >> Actually yeah. >> It's there, we're still negotiating working that. I've registered, but I just don't know I'm in New York city for two meetings and seeing if I can get to Las Vegas. A lot of friends, you know, Adam Solski >> Yes >> and the entire AWS team. They're amazing. And we really liked this partnership. I'd love to see you there. You're going to be there, David? Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And I look forward to that, so I hope hopefully we get that chance again. Thank you so much, General Alexander, and also thank you to our title sponsor AMD for sponsoring this year's re:Invent. Keep it right here for more action on theCube, you're leader in hybrid tech event coverage, I'm Dave Nicholson for the Cube. Thanks. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering >>space and cybersecurity. Symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly >>Over On Welcome to this Special virtual conference. The Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly with support from the Cube. I'm John for your host and master of ceremonies. Got a great topic today in this session. Really? The intersection of space and cybersecurity. This topic and this conversation is the cybersecurity workforce development through public and private partnerships. And we've got a great lineup. We have Jeff Armstrong's the president of California Polytechnic State University, also known as Cal Poly Jeffrey. Thanks for jumping on and Bang. Go ahead. The second director of C four s R Division. And he's joining us from the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for the acquisition Sustainment Department of Defense, D O D. And, of course, Steve Jake's executive director, founder, National Security Space Association and managing partner at Bello's. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this session. We got an hour conversation. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>So we got a virtual event here. We've got an hour, have a great conversation and love for you guys do? In opening statement on how you see the development through public and private partnerships around cybersecurity in space, Jeff will start with you. >>Well, thanks very much, John. It's great to be on with all of you. Uh, on behalf Cal Poly Welcome, everyone. Educating the workforce of tomorrow is our mission to Cal Poly. Whether that means traditional undergraduates, master students are increasingly mid career professionals looking toe up, skill or re skill. Our signature pedagogy is learn by doing, which means that our graduates arrive at employers ready Day one with practical skills and experience. We have long thought of ourselves is lucky to be on California's beautiful central Coast. But in recent years, as we have developed closer relationships with Vandenberg Air Force Base, hopefully the future permanent headquarters of the United States Space Command with Vandenberg and other regional partners, we have discovered that our location is even more advantages than we thought. We're just 50 miles away from Vandenberg, a little closer than u C. Santa Barbara, and the base represents the southern border of what we have come to think of as the central coast region. Cal Poly and Vandenberg Air force base have partner to support regional economic development to encourage the development of a commercial spaceport toe advocate for the space Command headquarters coming to Vandenberg and other ventures. These partnerships have been possible because because both parties stand to benefit Vandenberg by securing new streams of revenue, workforce and local supply chain and Cal Poly by helping to grow local jobs for graduates, internship opportunities for students, and research and entrepreneurship opportunities for faculty and staff. Crucially, what's good for Vandenberg Air Force Base and for Cal Poly is also good for the Central Coast and the US, creating new head of household jobs, infrastructure and opportunity. Our goal is that these new jobs bring more diversity and sustainability for the region. This regional economic development has taken on a life of its own, spawning a new nonprofit called Reach, which coordinates development efforts from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the South to camp to Camp Roberts in the North. Another factor that is facilitated our relationship with Vandenberg Air Force Base is that we have some of the same friends. For example, Northrop Grumman has has long been an important defense contractor, an important partner to Cal poly funding scholarships and facilities that have allowed us to stay current with technology in it to attract highly qualified students for whom Cal Poly's costs would otherwise be prohibitive. For almost 20 years north of grimness funded scholarships for Cal Poly students this year, their funding 64 scholarships, some directly in our College of Engineering and most through our Cal Poly Scholars program, Cal Poly Scholars, a support both incoming freshman is transfer students. These air especially important because it allows us to provide additional support and opportunities to a group of students who are mostly first generation, low income and underrepresented and who otherwise might not choose to attend Cal Poly. They also allow us to recruit from partner high schools with large populations of underrepresented minority students, including the Fortune High School in Elk Grove, which we developed a deep and lasting connection. We know that the best work is done by balanced teams that include multiple and diverse perspectives. These scholarships help us achieve that goal, and I'm sure you know Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a very large contract to modernized the U. S. I. C B M Armory with some of the work being done at Vandenberg Air Force Base, thus supporting the local economy and protecting protecting our efforts in space requires partnerships in the digital realm. How Polly is partnered with many private companies, such as AWS. Our partnerships with Amazon Web services has enabled us to train our students with next generation cloud engineering skills, in part through our jointly created digital transformation hub. Another partnership example is among Cal Poly's California Cybersecurity Institute, College of Engineering and the California National Guard. This partnership is focused on preparing a cyber ready workforce by providing faculty and students with a hands on research and learning environment, side by side with military, law enforcement professionals and cyber experts. We also have a long standing partnership with PG and E, most recently focused on workforce development and redevelopment. Many of our graduates do indeed go on to careers in aerospace and defense industry as a rough approximation. More than 4500 Cal Poly graduates list aerospace and defense as their employment sector on linked in, and it's not just our engineers and computer sciences. When I was speaking to our fellow Panelists not too long ago, >>are >>speaking to bang, we learned that Rachel sins, one of our liberal arts arts majors, is working in his office. So shout out to you, Rachel. And then finally, of course, some of our graduates sword extraordinary heights such as Commander Victor Glover, who will be heading to the International space station later this year as I close. All of which is to say that we're deeply committed the workforce, development and redevelopment that we understand the value of public private partnerships and that were eager to find new ways in which to benefit everyone from this further cooperation. So we're committed to the region, the state in the nation and our past efforts in space, cybersecurity and links to our partners at as I indicated, aerospace industry and governmental partners provides a unique position for us to move forward in the interface of space and cybersecurity. Thank you so much, John. >>President, I'm sure thank you very much for the comments and congratulations to Cal Poly for being on the forefront of innovation and really taking a unique progressive. You and wanna tip your hat to you guys over there. Thank you very much for those comments. Appreciate it. Bahng. Department of Defense. Exciting you gotta defend the nation spaces Global. Your opening statement. >>Yes, sir. Thanks, John. Appreciate that day. Thank you, everybody. I'm honored to be this panel along with President Armstrong, Cal Poly in my long longtime friend and colleague Steve Jakes of the National Security Space Association, to discuss a very important topic of cybersecurity workforce development, as President Armstrong alluded to, I'll tell you both of these organizations, Cal Poly and the N S. A have done and continue to do an exceptional job at finding talent, recruiting them in training current and future leaders and technical professionals that we vitally need for our nation's growing space programs. A swell Asare collective National security Earlier today, during Session three high, along with my colleague Chris Hansen discussed space, cyber Security and how the space domain is changing the landscape of future conflicts. I discussed the rapid emergence of commercial space with the proliferations of hundreds, if not thousands, of satellites providing a variety of services, including communications allowing for global Internet connectivity. S one example within the O. D. We continue to look at how we can leverage this opportunity. I'll tell you one of the enabling technologies eyes the use of small satellites, which are inherently cheaper and perhaps more flexible than the traditional bigger systems that we have historically used unemployed for the U. D. Certainly not lost on Me is the fact that Cal Poly Pioneer Cube SATs 2020 some years ago, and they set the standard for the use of these systems today. So they saw the valiant benefit gained way ahead of everybody else, it seems, and Cal Poly's focus on training and education is commendable. I especially impressed by the efforts of another of Steve's I colleague, current CEO Mr Bill Britain, with his high energy push to attract the next generation of innovators. Uh, earlier this year, I had planned on participating in this year's Cyber Innovation Challenge. In June works Cal Poly host California Mill and high school students and challenge them with situations to test their cyber knowledge. I tell you, I wish I had that kind of opportunity when I was a kid. Unfortunately, the pandemic change the plan. Why I truly look forward. Thio feature events such as these Thio participating. Now I want to recognize my good friend Steve Jakes, whom I've known for perhaps too long of a time here over two decades or so, who was in acknowledge space expert and personally, I truly applaud him for having the foresight of years back to form the National Security Space Association to help the entire space enterprise navigate through not only technology but Polly policy issues and challenges and paved the way for operational izing space. Space is our newest horrifying domain. That's not a secret anymore. Uh, and while it is a unique area, it shares a lot of common traits with the other domains such as land, air and sea, obviously all of strategically important to the defense of the United States. In conflict they will need to be. They will all be contested and therefore they all need to be defended. One domain alone will not win future conflicts in a joint operation. We must succeed. All to defending space is critical as critical is defending our other operational domains. Funny space is no longer the sanctuary available only to the government. Increasingly, as I discussed in the previous session, commercial space is taking the lead a lot of different areas, including R and D, A so called new space, so cyber security threat is even more demanding and even more challenging. Three US considers and federal access to and freedom to operate in space vital to advancing security, economic prosperity, prosperity and scientific knowledge of the country. That's making cyberspace an inseparable component. America's financial, social government and political life. We stood up US Space force ah, year ago or so as the newest military service is like the other services. Its mission is to organize, train and equip space forces in order to protect us and allied interest in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force. Imagine combining that US space force with the U. S. Cyber Command to unify the direction of space and cyberspace operation strengthened U D capabilities and integrate and bolster d o d cyber experience. Now, of course, to enable all of this requires had trained and professional cadre of cyber security experts, combining a good mix of policy as well as high technical skill set much like we're seeing in stem, we need to attract more people to this growing field. Now the D. O. D. Is recognized the importance of the cybersecurity workforce, and we have implemented policies to encourage his growth Back in 2013 the deputy secretary of defense signed the D. O d cyberspace workforce strategy to create a comprehensive, well equipped cyber security team to respond to national security concerns. Now this strategy also created a program that encourages collaboration between the D. O. D and private sector employees. We call this the Cyber Information Technology Exchange program or site up. It's an exchange programs, which is very interesting, in which a private sector employees can naturally work for the D. O. D. In a cyber security position that spans across multiple mission critical areas are important to the d. O. D. A key responsibility of cybersecurity community is military leaders on the related threats and cyber security actions we need to have to defeat these threats. We talk about rapid that position, agile business processes and practices to speed up innovation. Likewise, cybersecurity must keep up with this challenge to cyber security. Needs to be right there with the challenges and changes, and this requires exceptional personnel. We need to attract talent investing the people now to grow a robust cybersecurity, workforce, streets, future. I look forward to the panel discussion, John. Thank you. >>Thank you so much bomb for those comments and you know, new challenges and new opportunities and new possibilities and free freedom Operating space. Critical. Thank you for those comments. Looking forward. Toa chatting further. Steve Jakes, executive director of N. S. S. A Europe opening statement. >>Thank you, John. And echoing bangs thanks to Cal Poly for pulling these this important event together and frankly, for allowing the National Security Space Association be a part of it. Likewise, we on behalf the association delighted and honored Thio be on this panel with President Armstrong along with my friend and colleague Bonneau Glue Mahad Something for you all to know about Bomb. He spent the 1st 20 years of his career in the Air Force doing space programs. He then went into industry for several years and then came back into government to serve. Very few people do that. So bang on behalf of the space community, we thank you for your long life long devotion to service to our nation. We really appreciate that and I also echo a bang shot out to that guy Bill Britain, who has been a long time co conspirator of ours for a long time and you're doing great work there in the cyber program at Cal Poly Bill, keep it up. But professor arms trying to keep a close eye on him. Uh, I would like to offer a little extra context to the great comments made by by President Armstrong and bahng. Uh, in our view, the timing of this conference really could not be any better. Um, we all recently reflected again on that tragic 9 11 surprise attack on our homeland. And it's an appropriate time, we think, to take pause while the percentage of you in the audience here weren't even born or babies then For the most of us, it still feels like yesterday. And moreover, a tragedy like 9 11 has taught us a lot to include to be more vigilant, always keep our collective eyes and ears open to include those quote eyes and ears from space, making sure nothing like this ever happens again. So this conference is a key aspect. Protecting our nation requires we work in a cybersecurity environment at all times. But, you know, the fascinating thing about space systems is we can't see him. No, sir, We see Space launches man there's nothing more invigorating than that. But after launch, they become invisible. So what are they really doing up there? What are they doing to enable our quality of life in the United States and in the world? Well, to illustrate, I'd like to paraphrase elements of an article in Forbes magazine by Bonds and my good friend Chuck Beans. Chuck. It's a space guy, actually had Bonds job a fuse in the Pentagon. He is now chairman and chief strategy officer at York Space Systems, and in his spare time he's chairman of the small satellites. Chuck speaks in words that everyone can understand. So I'd like to give you some of his words out of his article. Uh, they're afraid somewhat. So these are Chuck's words. Let's talk about average Joe and playing Jane. Before heading to the airport for a business trip to New York City, Joe checks the weather forecast informed by Noah's weather satellites to see what pack for the trip. He then calls an uber that space app. Everybody uses it matches riders with drivers via GPS to take into the airport, So Joe has lunch of the airport. Unbeknownst to him, his organic lunch is made with the help of precision farming made possible through optimized irrigation and fertilization, with remote spectral sensing coming from space and GPS on the plane, the pilot navigates around weather, aided by GPS and nose weather satellites. And Joe makes his meeting on time to join his New York colleagues in a video call with a key customer in Singapore made possible by telecommunication satellites. Around to his next meeting, Joe receives notice changing the location of the meeting to another to the other side of town. So he calmly tells Syria to adjust the destination, and his satellite guided Google maps redirects him to the new location. That evening, Joe watches the news broadcast via satellite. The report details a meeting among world leaders discussing the developing crisis in Syria. As it turns out, various forms of quote remotely sensed. Information collected from satellites indicate that yet another band, chemical weapon, may have been used on its own people. Before going to bed, Joe decides to call his parents and congratulate them for their wedding anniversary as they cruise across the Atlantic, made possible again by communications satellites and Joe's parents can enjoy the call without even wondering how it happened the next morning. Back home, Joe's wife, Jane, is involved in a car accident. Her vehicle skids off the road. She's knocked unconscious, but because of her satellite equipped on star system, the crash is detected immediately and first responders show up on the scene. In time, Joe receives the news books. An early trip home sends flowers to his wife as he orders another uber to the airport. Over that 24 hours, Joe and Jane used space system applications for nearly every part of their day. Imagine the consequences if at any point they were somehow denied these services, whether they be by natural causes or a foreign hostility. And each of these satellite applications used in this case were initially developed for military purposes and continue to be, but also have remarkable application on our way of life. Just many people just don't know that. So, ladies and gentlemen, now you know, thanks to chuck beans, well, the United States has a proud heritage being the world's leading space faring nation, dating back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. Today we have mature and robust systems operating from space, providing overhead reconnaissance to quote, wash and listen, provide missile warning, communications, positioning, navigation and timing from our GPS system. Much of what you heard in Lieutenant General J. T. Thompson earlier speech. These systems are not only integral to our national security, but also our also to our quality of life is Chuck told us. We simply no longer could live without these systems as a nation and for that matter, as a world. But over the years, adversary like adversaries like China, Russia and other countries have come to realize the value of space systems and are aggressively playing ketchup while also pursuing capabilities that will challenge our systems. As many of you know, in 2000 and seven, China demonstrated it's a set system by actually shooting down is one of its own satellites and has been aggressively developing counter space systems to disrupt hours. So in a heavily congested space environment, our systems are now being contested like never before and will continue to bay well as Bond mentioned, the United States has responded to these changing threats. In addition to adding ways to protect our system, the administration and in Congress recently created the United States Space Force and the operational you United States Space Command, the latter of which you heard President Armstrong and other Californians hope is going to be located. Vandenberg Air Force Base Combined with our intelligence community today, we have focused military and civilian leadership now in space. And that's a very, very good thing. Commence, really. On the industry side, we did create the National Security Space Association devoted solely to supporting the national security Space Enterprise. We're based here in the D C area, but we have arms and legs across the country, and we are loaded with extraordinary talent. In scores of Forman, former government executives, So S s a is joined at the hip with our government customers to serve and to support. We're busy with a multitude of activities underway ranging from a number of thought provoking policy. Papers are recurring space time Webcast supporting Congress's Space Power Caucus and other main serious efforts. Check us out at NSS. A space dot org's One of our strategic priorities in central to today's events is to actively promote and nurture the workforce development. Just like cow calling. We will work with our U. S. Government customers, industry leaders and academia to attract and recruit students to join the space world, whether in government or industry and two assistant mentoring and training as their careers. Progress on that point, we're delighted. Be delighted to be working with Cal Poly as we hopefully will undertake a new pilot program with him very soon. So students stay tuned something I can tell you Space is really cool. While our nation's satellite systems are technical and complex, our nation's government and industry work force is highly diverse, with a combination of engineers, physicists, method and mathematicians, but also with a large non technical expertise as well. Think about how government gets things thes systems designed, manufactured, launching into orbit and operating. They do this via contracts with our aerospace industry, requiring talents across the board from cost estimating cost analysis, budgeting, procurement, legal and many other support. Tasker Integral to the mission. Many thousands of people work in the space workforce tens of billions of dollars every year. This is really cool stuff, no matter what your education background, a great career to be part of. When summary as bang had mentioned Aziz, well, there is a great deal of exciting challenges ahead we will see a new renaissance in space in the years ahead, and in some cases it's already begun. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Richard Branson are in the game, stimulating new ideas in business models, other private investors and start up companies. Space companies are now coming in from all angles. The exponential advancement of technology and microelectronics now allows the potential for a plethora of small SAT systems to possibly replace older satellites the size of a Greyhound bus. It's getting better by the day and central to this conference, cybersecurity is paramount to our nation's critical infrastructure in space. So once again, thanks very much, and I look forward to the further conversation. >>Steve, thank you very much. Space is cool. It's relevant. But it's important, as you pointed out, and you're awesome story about how it impacts our life every day. So I really appreciate that great story. I'm glad you took the time Thio share that you forgot the part about the drone coming over in the crime scene and, you know, mapping it out for you. But that would add that to the story later. Great stuff. My first question is let's get into the conversations because I think this is super important. President Armstrong like you to talk about some of the points that was teased out by Bang and Steve. One in particular is the comment around how military research was important in developing all these capabilities, which is impacting all of our lives. Through that story. It was the military research that has enabled a generation and generation of value for consumers. This is kind of this workforce conversation. There are opportunities now with with research and grants, and this is, ah, funding of innovation that it's highly accelerate. It's happening very quickly. Can you comment on how research and the partnerships to get that funding into the universities is critical? >>Yeah, I really appreciate that And appreciate the comments of my colleagues on it really boils down to me to partnerships, public private partnerships. You mentioned Northrop Grumman, but we have partnerships with Lockie Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Space six JPL, also member of organization called Business Higher Education Forum, which brings together university presidents and CEOs of companies. There's been focused on cybersecurity and data science, and I hope that we can spill into cybersecurity in space but those partnerships in the past have really brought a lot forward at Cal Poly Aziz mentioned we've been involved with Cube set. Uh, we've have some secure work and we want to plan to do more of that in the future. Uh, those partnerships are essential not only for getting the r and d done, but also the students, the faculty, whether masters or undergraduate, can be involved with that work. Uh, they get that real life experience, whether it's on campus or virtually now during Covic or at the location with the partner, whether it may be governmental or our industry. Uh, and then they're even better equipped, uh, to hit the ground running. And of course, we'd love to see even more of our students graduate with clearance so that they could do some of that a secure work as well. So these partnerships are absolutely critical, and it's also in the context of trying to bring the best and the brightest and all demographics of California and the US into this field, uh, to really be successful. So these partnerships are essential, and our goal is to grow them just like I know other colleagues and C. S u and the U C are planning to dio, >>you know, just as my age I've seen I grew up in the eighties, in college and during that systems generation and that the generation before me, they really kind of pioneered the space that spawned the computer revolution. I mean, you look at these key inflection points in our lives. They were really funded through these kinds of real deep research. Bond talk about that because, you know, we're living in an age of cloud. And Bezos was mentioned. Elon Musk. Sir Richard Branson. You got new ideas coming in from the outside. You have an accelerated clock now on terms of the innovation cycles, and so you got to react differently. You guys have programs to go outside >>of >>the Defense Department. How important is this? Because the workforce that air in schools and our folks re skilling are out there and you've been on both sides of the table. So share your thoughts. >>No, thanks, John. Thanks for the opportunity responded. And that's what you hit on the notes back in the eighties, R and D in space especially, was dominated by my government funding. Uh, contracts and so on. But things have changed. As Steve pointed out, A lot of these commercial entities funded by billionaires are coming out of the woodwork funding R and D. So they're taking the lead. So what we can do within the deal, the in government is truly take advantage of the work they've done on. Uh, since they're they're, you know, paving the way to new new approaches and new way of doing things. And I think we can We could certainly learn from that. And leverage off of that saves us money from an R and D standpoint while benefiting from from the product that they deliver, you know, within the O D Talking about workforce development Way have prioritized we have policies now to attract and retain talent. We need I I had the folks do some research and and looks like from a cybersecurity workforce standpoint. A recent study done, I think, last year in 2019 found that the cybersecurity workforce gap in the U. S. Is nearing half a million people, even though it is a growing industry. So the pipeline needs to be strengthened off getting people through, you know, starting young and through college, like assess a professor Armstrong indicated, because we're gonna need them to be in place. Uh, you know, in a period of about maybe a decade or so, Uh, on top of that, of course, is the continuing issue we have with the gap with with stamps students, we can't afford not to have expertise in place to support all the things we're doing within the with the not only deal with the but the commercial side as well. Thank you. >>How's the gap? Get? Get filled. I mean, this is the this is again. You got cybersecurity. I mean, with space. It's a whole another kind of surface area, if you will, in early surface area. But it is. It is an I o t. Device if you think about it. But it does have the same challenges. That's kind of current and and progressive with cybersecurity. Where's the gap Get filled, Steve Or President Armstrong? I mean, how do you solve the problem and address this gap in the workforce? What is some solutions and what approaches do we need to put in place? >>Steve, go ahead. I'll follow up. >>Okay. Thanks. I'll let you correct. May, uh, it's a really good question, and it's the way I would. The way I would approach it is to focus on it holistically and to acknowledge it up front. And it comes with our teaching, etcetera across the board and from from an industry perspective, I mean, we see it. We've gotta have secure systems with everything we do and promoting this and getting students at early ages and mentoring them and throwing internships at them. Eyes is so paramount to the whole the whole cycle, and and that's kind of and it really takes focused attention. And we continue to use the word focus from an NSS, a perspective. We know the challenges that are out there. There are such talented people in the workforce on the government side, but not nearly enough of them. And likewise on industry side. We could use Maura's well, but when you get down to it, you know we can connect dots. You know that the the aspect That's a Professor Armstrong talked about earlier toe where you continue to work partnerships as much as you possibly can. We hope to be a part of that. That network at that ecosystem the will of taking common objectives and working together to kind of make these things happen and to bring the power not just of one or two companies, but our our entire membership to help out >>President >>Trump. Yeah, I would. I would also add it again. It's back to partnerships that I talked about earlier. One of our partners is high schools and schools fortune Margaret Fortune, who worked in a couple of, uh, administrations in California across party lines and education. Their fifth graders all visit Cal Poly and visit our learned by doing lab and you, you've got to get students interested in stem at a early age. We also need the partnerships, the scholarships, the financial aid so the students can graduate with minimal to no debt to really hit the ground running. And that's exacerbated and really stress. Now, with this covert induced recession, California supports higher education at a higher rate than most states in the nation. But that is that has dropped this year or reasons. We all understand, uh, due to Kobe, and so our partnerships, our creativity on making sure that we help those that need the most help financially uh, that's really key, because the gaps air huge eyes. My colleagues indicated, you know, half of half a million jobs and you need to look at the the students that are in the pipeline. We've got to enhance that. Uh, it's the in the placement rates are amazing. Once the students get to a place like Cal Poly or some of our other amazing CSU and UC campuses, uh, placement rates are like 94%. >>Many of our >>engineers, they have jobs lined up a year before they graduate. So it's just gonna take key partnerships working together. Uh, and that continued partnership with government, local, of course, our state of CSU on partners like we have here today, both Stephen Bang So partnerships the thing >>e could add, you know, the collaboration with universities one that we, uh, put a lot of emphasis, and it may not be well known fact, but as an example of national security agencies, uh, National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber, the Fast works with over 270 colleges and universities across the United States to educate its 45 future cyber first responders as an example, so that Zatz vibrant and healthy and something that we ought Teoh Teik, banjo >>off. Well, I got the brain trust here on this topic. I want to get your thoughts on this one point. I'd like to define what is a public private partnership because the theme that's coming out of the symposium is the script has been flipped. It's a modern error. Things air accelerated get you got security. So you get all these things kind of happen is a modern approach and you're seeing a digital transformation play out all over the world in business. Andi in the public sector. So >>what is what >>is a modern public private partnership? What does it look like today? Because people are learning differently, Covert has pointed out, which was that we're seeing right now. How people the progressions of knowledge and learning truth. It's all changing. How do you guys view the modern version of public private partnership and some some examples and improve points? Can you can you guys share that? We'll start with the Professor Armstrong. >>Yeah. A zai indicated earlier. We've had on guy could give other examples, but Northup Grumman, uh, they helped us with cyber lab. Many years ago. That is maintained, uh, directly the software, the connection outside its its own unit so that students can learn the hack, they can learn to penetrate defenses, and I know that that has already had some considerations of space. But that's a benefit to both parties. So a good public private partnership has benefits to both entities. Uh, in the common factor for universities with a lot of these partnerships is the is the talent, the talent that is, that is needed, what we've been working on for years of the, you know, that undergraduate or master's or PhD programs. But now it's also spilling into Skilling and re Skilling. As you know, Jobs. Uh, you know, folks were in jobs today that didn't exist two years, three years, five years ago. But it also spills into other aspects that can expand even mawr. We're very fortunate. We have land, there's opportunities. We have one tech part project. We're expanding our tech park. I think we'll see opportunities for that, and it'll it'll be adjusted thio, due to the virtual world that we're all learning more and more about it, which we were in before Cove it. But I also think that that person to person is going to be important. Um, I wanna make sure that I'm driving across the bridge. Or or that that satellites being launched by the engineer that's had at least some in person training, uh, to do that and that experience, especially as a first time freshman coming on a campus, getting that experience expanding and as adult. And we're gonna need those public private partnerships in order to continue to fund those at a level that is at the excellence we need for these stem and engineering fields. >>It's interesting People in technology can work together in these partnerships in a new way. Bank Steve Reaction Thio the modern version of what a public, successful private partnership looks like. >>If I could jump in John, I think, you know, historically, Dodi's has have had, ah, high bar thio, uh, to overcome, if you will, in terms of getting rapid pulling in your company. This is the fault, if you will and not rely heavily in are the usual suspects of vendors and like and I think the deal is done a good job over the last couple of years off trying to reduce the burden on working with us. You know, the Air Force. I think they're pioneering this idea around pitch days where companies come in, do a two hour pitch and immediately notified of a wooden award without having to wait a long time. Thio get feedback on on the quality of the product and so on. So I think we're trying to do our best. Thio strengthen that partnership with companies outside the main group of people that we typically use. >>Steve, any reaction? Comment to add? >>Yeah, I would add a couple of these air. Very excellent thoughts. Uh, it zits about taking a little gamble by coming out of your comfort zone. You know, the world that Bond and Bond lives in and I used to live in in the past has been quite structured. It's really about we know what the threat is. We need to go fix it, will design it says we go make it happen, we'll fly it. Um, life is so much more complicated than that. And so it's it's really to me. I mean, you take you take an example of the pitch days of bond talks about I think I think taking a gamble by attempting to just do a lot of pilot programs, uh, work the trust factor between government folks and the industry folks in academia. Because we are all in this together in a lot of ways, for example. I mean, we just sent the paper to the White House of their requests about, you know, what would we do from a workforce development perspective? And we hope Thio embellish on this over time once the the initiative matures. But we have a piece of it, for example, is the thing we call clear for success getting back Thio Uh, President Armstrong's comments at the collegiate level. You know, high, high, high quality folks are in high demand. So why don't we put together a program they grabbed kids in their their underclass years identifies folks that are interested in doing something like this. Get them scholarships. Um, um, I have a job waiting for them that their contract ID for before they graduate, and when they graduate, they walk with S C I clearance. We believe that could be done so, and that's an example of ways in which the public private partnerships can happen to where you now have a talented kid ready to go on Day one. We think those kind of things can happen. It just gets back down to being focused on specific initiatives, give them giving them a chance and run as many pilot programs as you can like these days. >>That's a great point, E. President. >>I just want to jump in and echo both the bank and Steve's comments. But Steve, that you know your point of, you know, our graduates. We consider them ready Day one. Well, they need to be ready Day one and ready to go secure. We totally support that and and love to follow up offline with you on that. That's that's exciting, uh, and needed very much needed mawr of it. Some of it's happening, but way certainly have been thinking a lot about that and making some plans, >>and that's a great example of good Segway. My next question. This kind of reimagining sees work flows, eyes kind of breaking down the old the old way and bringing in kind of a new way accelerated all kind of new things. There are creative ways to address this workforce issue, and this is the next topic. How can we employ new creative solutions? Because, let's face it, you know, it's not the days of get your engineering degree and and go interview for a job and then get slotted in and get the intern. You know the programs you get you particularly through the system. This is this is multiple disciplines. Cybersecurity points at that. You could be smart and math and have, ah, degree in anthropology and even the best cyber talents on the planet. So this is a new new world. What are some creative approaches that >>you know, we're >>in the workforce >>is quite good, John. One of the things I think that za challenge to us is you know, we got somehow we got me working for with the government, sexy, right? The part of the challenge we have is attracting the right right level of skill sets and personnel. But, you know, we're competing oftentimes with the commercial side, the gaming industry as examples of a big deal. And those are the same talents. We need to support a lot of programs we have in the U. D. So somehow we have to do a better job to Steve's point off, making the work within the U. D within the government something that they would be interested early on. So I tracked him early. I kind of talked about Cal Poly's, uh, challenge program that they were gonna have in June inviting high school kid. We're excited about the whole idea of space and cyber security, and so on those air something. So I think we have to do it. Continue to do what were the course the next several years. >>Awesome. Any other creative approaches that you guys see working or might be on idea, or just a kind of stoked the ideation out their internship. So obviously internships are known, but like there's gotta be new ways. >>I think you can take what Steve was talking about earlier getting students in high school, uh, and aligning them sometimes. Uh, that intern first internship, not just between the freshman sophomore year, but before they inter cal poly per se. And they're they're involved s So I think that's, uh, absolutely key. Getting them involved many other ways. Um, we have an example of of up Skilling a redeveloped work redevelopment here in the Central Coast. PG and e Diablo nuclear plant as going to decommission in around 2020 24. And so we have a ongoing partnership toe work on reposition those employees for for the future. So that's, you know, engineering and beyond. Uh, but think about that just in the manner that you were talking about. So the up skilling and re Skilling uh, on I think that's where you know, we were talking about that Purdue University. Other California universities have been dealing with online programs before cove it and now with co vid uh, so many more faculty or were pushed into that area. There's going to be much more going and talk about workforce development and up Skilling and Re Skilling The amount of training and education of our faculty across the country, uh, in in virtual, uh, and delivery has been huge. So there's always a silver linings in the cloud. >>I want to get your guys thoughts on one final question as we in the in the segment. And we've seen on the commercial side with cloud computing on these highly accelerated environments where you know, SAS business model subscription. That's on the business side. But >>one of The >>things that's clear in this trend is technology, and people work together and technology augments the people components. So I'd love to get your thoughts as we look at the world now we're living in co vid um, Cal Poly. You guys have remote learning Right now. It's a infancy. It's a whole new disruption, if you will, but also an opportunity to enable new ways to collaborate, Right? So if you look at people and technology, can you guys share your view and vision on how communities can be developed? How these digital technologies and people can work together faster to get to the truth or make a discovery higher to build the workforce? These air opportunities? How do you guys view this new digital transformation? >>Well, I think there's there's a huge opportunities and just what we're doing with this symposium. We're filming this on one day, and it's going to stream live, and then the three of us, the four of us, can participate and chat with participants while it's going on. That's amazing. And I appreciate you, John, you bringing that to this this symposium, I think there's more and more that we can do from a Cal poly perspective with our pedagogy. So you know, linked to learn by doing in person will always be important to us. But we see virtual. We see partnerships like this can expand and enhance our ability and minimize the in person time, decrease the time to degree enhanced graduation rate, eliminate opportunity gaps or students that don't have the same advantages. S so I think the technological aspect of this is tremendous. Then on the up Skilling and Re Skilling, where employees air all over, they can be reached virtually then maybe they come to a location or really advanced technology allows them to get hands on virtually, or they come to that location and get it in a hybrid format. Eso I'm I'm very excited about the future and what we can do, and it's gonna be different with every university with every partnership. It's one. Size does not fit all. >>It's so many possibilities. Bond. I could almost imagine a social network that has a verified, you know, secure clearance. I can jump in, have a little cloak of secrecy and collaborate with the d o. D. Possibly in the future. But >>these are the >>kind of kind of crazy ideas that are needed. Are your thoughts on this whole digital transformation cross policy? >>I think technology is gonna be revolutionary here, John. You know, we're focusing lately on what we call digital engineering to quicken the pace off, delivering capability to warfighter. As an example, I think a I machine language all that's gonna have a major play and how we operate in the future. We're embracing five G technologies writing ability Thio zero latency or I o t More automation off the supply chain. That sort of thing, I think, uh, the future ahead of us is is very encouraging. Thing is gonna do a lot for for national defense on certainly the security of the country. >>Steve, your final thoughts. Space systems are systems, and they're connected to other systems that are connected to people. Your thoughts on this digital transformation opportunity >>Such a great question in such a fun, great challenge ahead of us. Um echoing are my colleague's sentiments. I would add to it. You know, a lot of this has I think we should do some focusing on campaigning so that people can feel comfortable to include the Congress to do things a little bit differently. Um, you know, we're not attuned to doing things fast. Uh, but the dramatic You know, the way technology is just going like crazy right now. I think it ties back Thio hoping Thio, convince some of our senior leaders on what I call both sides of the Potomac River that it's worth taking these gamble. We do need to take some of these things very way. And I'm very confident, confident and excited and comfortable. They're just gonna be a great time ahead and all for the better. >>You know, e talk about D. C. Because I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not a political person, but I always say less lawyers, more techies in Congress and Senate. So I was getting job when I say that. Sorry. Presidential. Go ahead. >>Yeah, I know. Just one other point. Uh, and and Steve's alluded to this in bonded as well. I mean, we've got to be less risk averse in these partnerships. That doesn't mean reckless, but we have to be less risk averse. And I would also I have a zoo. You talk about technology. I have to reflect on something that happened in, uh, you both talked a bit about Bill Britton and his impact on Cal Poly and what we're doing. But we were faced a few years ago of replacing a traditional data a data warehouse, data storage data center, and we partner with a W S. And thank goodness we had that in progress on it enhanced our bandwidth on our campus before Cove. It hit on with this partnership with the digital transformation hub. So there is a great example where, uh, we we had that going. That's not something we could have started. Oh, covitz hit. Let's flip that switch. And so we have to be proactive on. We also have thio not be risk averse and do some things differently. Eyes that that is really salvage the experience for for students. Right now, as things are flowing, well, we only have about 12% of our courses in person. Uh, those essential courses, uh, and just grateful for those partnerships that have talked about today. >>Yeah, and it's a shining example of how being agile, continuous operations, these air themes that expand into space and the next workforce needs to be built. Gentlemen, thank you. very much for sharing your insights. I know. Bang, You're gonna go into the defense side of space and your other sessions. Thank you, gentlemen, for your time for great session. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. >>I'm John Furry with the Cube here in Palo Alto, California Covering and hosting with Cal Poly The Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly. >> I want to welcome to theCUBE's coverage, we're here hosting with Cal Poly an amazing event, space and the intersection of cyber security. This session is Defending Satellite and Space Infrastructure from Cyber Threats. We've got two great guests. We've got Major General John Shaw of combined force space component commander, U.S. space command at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Roland Coelho, who's the CEO of Maverick Space Systems. Gentlemen, thank you for spending the time to come on to this session for the Cal Poly Space and Cybersecurity Symposium. Appreciate it. >> Absolutely. >> Guys defending satellites and space infrastructure is the new domain, obviously it's a war-fighting domain. It's also the future of the world. And this is an important topic because we rely on space now for our everyday life and it's becoming more and more critical. Everyone knows how their phones work and GPS, just small examples of all the impacts. I'd like to discuss with this hour, this topic with you guys. So if we can have you guys do an opening statement. General if you can start with your opening statement, we'll take it from there. >> Thanks John and greetings from Vandenberg Air Force Base. We are just down the road from Cal Poly here on the central coast of California, and very proud to be part of this effort and part of the partnership that we have with Cal Poly on a number of fronts. In my job here, I actually have two hats that I wear and it's I think, worth talking briefly about those to set the context for our discussion. You know, we had two major organizational events within our Department of Defense with regard to space last year in 2019. And probably the one that made the most headlines was the standup of the United States Space Force. That happened December 20th, last year, and again momentous, the first new branch in our military since 1947. And it's just over nine months old now, as we're makin' this recording. And already we're seein' a lot of change with regard to how we are approaching organizing, training, and equipping on a service side for space capabilities. And so, with regard to the Space Force, the hat I wear there is Commander of Space Operations Command. That was what was once 14th Air Force, when we were still part of the Air Force here at Vandenberg. And in that role, I'm responsible for the operational capabilities that we bring to the joint warfighter and to the world from a space perspective. Didn't make quite as many headlines, but another major change that happened last year was the reincarnation, I guess I would say, of United States Space Command. And that is a combatant command. It's how our Department of Defense organizes to actually conduct war-fighting operations. Most people are more familiar perhaps with Central Command, CENTCOM or Northern Command, NORTHCOM, or even Strategic Command, STRATCOM. Well, now we have a SPACECOM. We actually had one from 1985 until 2002, and then stood it down in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and a reorganization of Homeland Security. But we've now stood up a separate command again operationally, to conduct joint space operations. And in that organization, I wear a hat as a component commander, and that's the combined force-based component command working with other, all the additional capabilities that other services bring, as well as our allies. The combined in that title means that under certain circumstances, I would lead in an allied effort in space operations. And so it's actually a terrific job to have here on the central coast of California. Both working how we bring space capabilities to the fight on the Space Force side, and then how we actually operate those capabilities in support of joint warfighters around the world and national security interests. So that's the context. Now what also I should mention and you kind of alluded to John at your beginning, we're kind of in a changed situation than we were a number of years ago, in that we now see space as a war-fighting domain. For most of my career, goin' back a little ways, most of my focus in my jobs was making sure I could bring space capabilities to those that needed them. Bringing GPS to that special operations soldier on the ground somewhere in the world, bringing satellite communications for our nuclear command and control, bringing those capabilities for other uses. But I didn't have to worry in most of my career, about actually defending those space capabilities themselves. Well, now we do. We've actually gone to a point where we're are being threatened in space. We now are treating it more like any other domain, normalizing in that regard as a war-fighting domain. And so we're going through some relatively emergent efforts to protect and defend our capabilities in space, to design our capabilities to be defended, and perhaps most of all, to train our people for this new mission set. So it's a very exciting time, and I know we'll get into it, but you can't get very far into talking about all these space capabilities and how we want to protect and defend them and how we're going to continue their ability to deliver to warfighters around the globe, without talking about cyber, because they fit together very closely. So anyway, thanks for the chance to be here today. And I look forward to the discussion. >> General, thank you so much for that opening statement. And I would just say that not only is it historic with the Space Force, it's super exciting because it opens up so much more challenges and opportunities to do more and to do things differently. So I appreciate that statement. Roland in your opening statement. Your job is to put stuff in space, faster, cheaper, smaller, better, your opening statement, please. >> Yes, thank you, John. And yes, to General Shaw's point with the space domain and the need to protect it now is incredibly important. And I hope that we are more of a help than a thorn in your side in terms of building satellites smaller, faster, cheaper. Definitely looking forward to this discussion and figuring out ways where the entire space domain can work together, from industry to U.S. government, even to the academic environment as well. So first, I would like to say, and preface this by saying, I am not a cybersecurity expert. We build satellites and we launch them into orbit, but we are by no means cybersecurity experts. And that's why we like to partner with organizations like the California Cybersecurity Institute because they help us navigate these requirements. So I'm the CEO of Maverick Space Systems. We are a small aerospace business in San Luis Obispo, California. And we provide small satellite hardware and service solutions to a wide range of customers. All the way from the academic environment to the U.S. government and everything in between. We support customers through an entire program life cycle, from mission architecture and formulation, all the way to getting these customer satellites in orbit. And so what we try to do is provide hardware and services that basically make it easier for customers to get their satellites into orbit and to operate. So whether it be reducing mass or volume, creating greater launch opportunities, or providing the infrastructure and the technology to help those innovations mature in orbit, that's what we do. Our team has experience over the last 20 years, working with small satellites. And I'm definitely fortunate to be part of the team that invented the CubeSat standard by Cal Poly and Stanford back in 2000. And so, we are in VandenBerg's backyard. We came from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and our hearts are fond of this area, and working with the local community. A lot of that success that we have had is directly attributable to the experiences that we learned as students, working on satellite programs from our professors and mentors. And that's all thanks to Cal Poly. So just wanted to tell a quick story. So back in 2000, just imagine a small group of undergraduate students, myself included, with the daunting task of launching multiple satellites from five different countries on a Russian launch vehicle. Many of us were only 18 or 19, not even at the legal age to drink yet, but as essentially teenagers we were managing million-dollar budgets. And we were coordinating groups from around the world. And we knew what we needed to accomplish, yet we didn't really know what we were doing when we first started. The university was extremely supportive and that's the Cal Poly learn-by-doing philosophy. I remember the first time we had a meeting with our university chief legal counsel, and we were discussing the need to register with the State Department for ITAR. Nobody really knew what ITAR was back then. And discussing this with the chief legal counsel, she was asking, "What is ITAR?" And we essentially had to explain, this is, launching satellites is part of the U.S. munitions list. And essentially we had a similar situation exporting munitions. We are in similar categories as weapons. And so, after that initial shock, everybody jumped in both feet forward, the university, our head legal counsel, professors, mentors, and the students knew we needed to tackle this problem because the need was there to launch these small satellites. And the reason this is important to capture the entire spectrum of users of the community, is that the technology and the innovation of the small satellite industry occurs at all levels, so we have academia, commercial, national governments. We even have high schools and middle schools getting involved and building satellite hardware. And the thing is the importance of cybersecurity is incredibly important because it touches all of these programs and it touches people at a very young age. And so, we hope to have a conversation today to figure out how do we create an environment where we allow these programs to thrive, but we also protect and keep their data safe as well. >> Thank you very much Roland. Appreciate that a story too as well. Thanks for your opening statement. Gentlemen, I mean I love this topic because defending the assets in space is obvious, if you look at it. But there's a bigger picture going on in our world right now. And general, you kind of pointed out the historic nature of Space Force and how it's changing already, operationally, training, skills, tools, all that stuff is evolving. You know in the tech world that I live in, change the world is a topic they use, gets thrown around a lot, you can change the world. A lot of young people, and we have other panels on this where we're talkin' about how to motivate young people, changing the world is what it's all about technology, for the better. Evolution is just an extension of another domain. In this case, space is just an extension of other domains, similar things are happening, but it's different. There's huge opportunity to change the world, so it's faster. There's an expanded commercial landscape out there. Certainly government space systems are moving and changing. How do we address the importance of cybersecurity in space? General, we'll start with you because this is real, it's exciting. If you're a young person, there's touch points of things to jump into, tech, building hardware, to changing laws, and everything in between is an opportunity, and it's exciting. And it is truly a chance to change the world. How does the commercial government space systems teams, address the importance of cybersecurity? >> So, John, I think it starts with the realization that as I like to say, that cyber and space are BFFs. There's nothing that we do on the cutting edge of space that isn't heavily reliant on the cutting edge of cyber. And frankly, there's probably nothing on the cutting edge of cyber that doesn't have a space application. And when you realize that and you see how closely those are intertwined as we need to move forward at speed, it becomes fundamental to answering your question. Let me give a couple examples. One of the biggest challenges I have on a daily basis is understanding what's going on in the space domain. Those on the surface of the planet talk about tyranny of distance across the oceans or across large land masses. And I talk about the tyranny of volume. And right now, we're looking out as far as the lunar sphere. There's activity that's extending out there. We expect NASA to be conducting perhaps human operations in the lunar environment in the next few years. So it extends out that far. When you do the math that's a huge volume. How do you do that? How do you understand what's happening in real time within that volume? It is a big data problem by the very definition of that kind of effort and that kind of challenge. And to do it successfully in the years ahead, it's going to require many, many sensors and the fusion of data of all kinds, to present a picture and then analytics and predictive analytics that are going to deliver an idea of what's going on in the space arena. And that's just if people are not up to mischief. Once you have threats introduced into that environment, it is even more challenging. So I'd say it's a big data problem that we'll enjoy tackling in the years ahead. Now, a second example is, if we had to take a vote of what were the most amazing robots that have ever been designed by humans, I think that spacecraft would have to be up there on the list. Whether it's the NASA spacecraft that explore other planets, or GPS satellites that amazingly provide a wonderful service to the entire globe and beyond. They are amazing technological machines. That's not going to stop. I mean, all the work that Roland talked about, even that we're doin' at the kind of the microsat level is putting cutting-edge technology into small a package as you can to get some sort of capability out of that. As we expand our activities further and further into space for national security purposes, or for exploration or commercial or civil, the cutting-edge technologies of artificial intelligence and machine-to-machine engagements and machine learning are going to be part of that design work moving forward. And then there's the threat piece. As we operate these capabilities, as these constellations grow, that's going to be done via networks. And as I've already pointed out space is a war-fighting domain. That means those networks will come under attack. We expect that they will and that may happen early on in a conflict. It may happen during peace time in the same way that we see cyber attacks all the time, everywhere in many sectors of activity. And so by painting that picture, we start to see how it's intertwined at the very, very most basic level, the cutting edge of cyber and cutting edge of space. With that then comes the need to, any cutting edge cybersecurity capability that we have is naturally going to be needed as we develop space capabilities. And we're going to have to bake that in from the very beginning. We haven't done that in the past as well as we should, but moving forward from this point on, it will be an essential ingredient that we work into all of our capability. >> Roland, we're talkin' about now, critical infrastructure. We're talkin' about new capabilities being addressed really fast. So, it's kind of chaotic now there's threats. So it's not as easy as just having capabilities, 'cause you've got to deal with the threats the general just pointed out. But now you've got critical infrastructure, which then will enable other things down the line. How do you protect it? How do we address this? How do you see this being addressed from a security standpoint? Because malware, these techniques can be mapped in, extended into space and takeovers, wartime, peace time, these things are all going to be under threat. That's pretty well understood, and I think people kind of get that. How do we address it? What's your take? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I couldn't agree more with General Shaw, with cybersecurity and space being so intertwined. And, I think with fast and rapid innovation comes the opportunity for threats, especially if you have bad actors that want to cause harm. And so, as a technology innovator and you're pushing the bounds, you kind of have a common goal of doing the best you can, and pushing the technology bounds, making it smaller, faster, cheaper. But a lot of times what entrepreneurs and small businesses and supply chains are doing, and don't realize it, is a lot of these components are dual use. I mean, you could have a very benign commercial application, but then a small modification to it, can turn it into a military application. And if you do have these bad actors, they can exploit that. And so, I think that the big thing is creating a organization that is non-biased, that just wants to kind of level the playing field for everybody to create a set standard for cybersecurity in space. I think one group that would be perfect for that is CCI. They understand both the cybersecurity side of things, and they also have at Cal Poly the small satellite group. And just having kind of a clearing house or an agency where can provide information that is free, you don't need a membership for. And to be able to kind of collect that, but also reach out to the entire value chain for a mission, and making them aware of what potential capabilities are and then how it might be potentially used as a weapon. And keeping them informed, because I think the vast majority of people in the space industry just want to do the right thing. And so, how do we get that information free flowing to the U.S. government so that they can take that information, create assessments, and be able to, not necessarily stop threats from occurring presently, but identify them long before that they would ever even happen. Yeah, that's- >> General, I want to follow up on that real quick before we move to the next top track. Critical infrastructure you mentioned, across the oceans long distance, volume. When you look at the physical world, you had power grids here in the United States, you had geography, you had perimeters, the notion of a perimeter and a moat, and then you had digital comes in. Then you have, we saw software open up, and essentially take down this idea of a perimeter, and from a defense standpoint, and everything changed. And we have to fortify those critical assets in the U.S. Space increases the same problem statement significantly, because you can't just have a perimeter, you can't have a moat, it's open, it's everywhere. Like what digital's done, and that's why we've seen a surge of cyber in the past two decades, attacks with software. So, this isn't going to go away. You need the critical infrastructure, you're putting it up there, you're formulating it, and you got to protect it. How do you view that? Because it's going to be an ongoing problem statement. What's the current thinking? >> Yeah, I think my sense is that a mindset that you can build a firewall, or a defense, or some other system that isn't dynamic in its own right, is probably not headed in the right direction. I think cybersecurity in the future, whether it's for space systems, or for other critical infrastructure is going to be a dynamic fight that happens at a machine-to-machine speed and dynamic. I don't think that it's too far off where we will have machines writing their own code in real time to fight off attacks that are coming at them. And by the way, the offense will probably be doing the same kind of thing. And so, I guess I would not want to think that the answer is something that you just build it and you leave it alone and it's good enough. It's probably going to be a constantly-evolving capability, constantly reacting to new threats and staying ahead of those threats. >> That's the kind of use case, you know as you were, kind of anecdotal example is the exciting new software opportunities for computer science majors. I mean, I tell my young kids and everyone, man it's more exciting now. I wish I was 18 again, it's so exciting with AI. Roland, I want to get your thoughts. We were joking on another panel with the DoD around space and the importance of it obviously, and we're going to have that here. And then we had a joke. It's like, oh software's defined everything. Software's everything, AI. And I said, "Well here in the United States, companies had data centers and then they went to the cloud." And then he said, "You can do break, fix, it's hard to do break, fix in space. You can't just send a tech up." I get that today, but soon maybe robotics. The general mentions robotics technologies, in referencing some of the accomplishments. Fixing things is almost impossible in space. But maybe form factors might get better. Certainly software will play a role. What's your thoughts on that landscape? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, for software in orbit, there's a push for software-defined radios to basically go from hardware to software. And that's a critical link. If you can infiltrate that and a small satellite has propulsion on board, you could take control of that satellite and cause a lot of havoc. And so, creating standards and that kind of initial threshold of security, for let's say these radios, or communications and making that available to the entire supply chain, to the satellite builders, and operators is incredibly key. And that's again, one of the initiatives that CCI is tackling right now as well. >> General, I want to get your thoughts on best practices around cybersecurity, state-of-the-art today, and then some guiding principles, and kind of how the, if you shoot the trajectory forward, what might happen around supply chain? There's been many stories where, we outsource the chips and there's a little chip sittin' in a thing and it's built by someone else in China, and the software is written from someone in Europe, and the United States assembles it, it gets shipped and it's corrupt, and it has some cyber, I'm making it up, I'm oversimplifying the statement. But this is what when you have space systems that involve intellectual property from multiple partners, whether it's from software to creation and then deployment. You got supply chain tiers. What are some of best practices that you see involving, that don't stunt the innovation, but continues to innovate, but people can operate safely. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so on supply chain, I think the symposium here is going to get to hear from General JT Thompson from space and missile system center down in Los Angeles, and he's just down the road from us there on the coast. And his team is the one that we look to to really focus on, as he fires and develops to again bake in cybersecurity from the beginning and knowing where the components are coming from, and properly assessing those as you put together your space systems, is a key piece of what his team is focused on. So I expect, we'll hear him talk about that. When it talks to, I think, so you asked the question a little more deeply about how do the best practices in terms of how we now develop moving forward. Well, another way that we don't do it right, is if we take a long time to build something and then General JT Thompson's folks take a while to build something, and then they hand it over to me, and my team operate and then they go hands free. And then that's what I have for years to operate until the next thing comes along. That's a little old school. What we're going to have to do moving forward with our space capabilities, and with the cyber piece baked in is continually developing new capability sets as we go. We actually have partnership between General Thompson's team and mine here at Vandenberg on our ops floor, or our combined space operation center, that are actually working in real time together, better tools that we can use to understand what's going on in the space environment to better command and control our capabilities anywhere from military satellite communications, to space domain awareness, sensors, and such. And we're developing those capabilities in real time. And with the security pieces. So DevSecOps is we're practicing that in real time. I think that is probably the standard today that we're trying to live up to as we continue to evolve. But it has to be done again, in close partnership all the time. It's not a sequential, industrial-age process. While I'm on the subject of partnerships. So, General Thompson's team and mine have good partnerships. It's partnerships across the board are going to be another way that we are successful. And that it means with academia and some of the relationships that we have here with Cal Poly. It's with the commercial sector in ways that we haven't done before. The old style business was to work with just a few large companies that had a lot of space experience. Well, we need a lot of kinds of different experience and technologies now in order to really field good space capabilities. And I expect we'll see more and more non-traditional companies being part of, and organizations, being part of that partnership that will work goin' forward. I mentioned at the beginning that allies are important to us. So everything that Roland and I have been talking about I think you have to extrapolate out to allied partnerships. It doesn't help me as a combined force component commander, which is again, one of my jobs. It doesn't help me if the United States capabilities are cybersecure, but I'm tryin' to integrate them with capabilities from an ally that are not cybersecure. So that partnership has to be dynamic and continually evolving together. So again, close partnering, continually developing together from the acquisition to the operational sectors, with as many different sectors of our economy as possible, are the ingredients to success. >> General, I'd love to just follow up real quick. I was having just a quick reminder for a conversation I had with last year with General Keith Alexander, who does a lot of cybersecurity work, and he was talking about the need to share faster. And the new school is you got to share faster to get the data, you mentioned observability earlier, you need to see what everything's out there. He's a real passionate person around getting the data, getting it fast and having trusted partners. So that's not, it's kind of evolving as, I mean, sharing's a well known practice, but with cyber it's sensitive data potentially. So there's a trust relationship. There's now a new ecosystem. That's new for government. How do you view all that and your thoughts on that trend of the sharing piece of it on cyber? >> So, I don't know if it's necessarily new, but it's at a scale that we've never seen before. And by the way, it's vastly more complicated and complex when you overlay from a national security perspective, classification of data and information at various levels. And then that is again complicated by the fact you have different sharing relationships with different actors, whether it's commercial, academic, or allies. So it gets very, very complex web very quickly. So that's part of the challenge we're workin' through. How can we effectively share information at multiple classification levels with multiple partners in an optimal fashion? It is certainly not optimal today. It's very difficult, even with maybe one industry partner for me to be able to talk about data at an unclassified level, and then various other levels of classification to have the traditional networks in place to do that. I could see a solution in the future where our cybersecurity is good enough that maybe I only really need one network and the information that is allowed to flow to the players within the right security environment to make that all happen as quickly as possible. So you've actually, John you've hit on yet another big challenge that we have, is evolving our networks to properly share, with the right people, at the right clearance levels at the speed of war, which is what we're going to need. >> Yeah, and I wanted to call that out because this is an opportunity, again, this discussion here at Cal Poly and around the world is for new capabilities and new people to solve the problems. It's again, it's super exciting if you're geeking out on this. If you have a tech degree or you're interested in changin' the world, there's so many new things that could be applied right now. Roland, I want to get your thoughts on this, because one of the things in the tech trends we're seeing, and this is a massive shift, all the theaters of the tech industry are changing rapidly at the same time. And it affects policy law, but also deep tech. The startup communities are super important in all this too. We can't forget them. Obviously, the big trusted players that are partnering certainly on these initiatives, but your story about being in the dorm room. Now you've got the boardroom and now you got everything in between. You have startups out there that want to and can contribute. You know, what's an ITAR? I mean, I got all these acronym certifications. Is there a community motion to bring startups in, in a safe way, but also give them ability to contribute? Because you look at open source, that proved everyone wrong on software. That's happening now with this now open network concept, the general was kind of alluding to. Which is, it's a changing landscape. Your thoughts, I know you're passionate about this. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think as General Shaw mentioned, we need to get information out there faster, more timely and to the right people, and involving not only just stakeholders in the U.S., but internationally as well. And as entrepreneurs, we have this very lofty vision or goal to change the world. And oftentimes, entrepreneurs, including myself, we put our heads down and we just run as fast as we can. And we don't necessarily always kind of take a breath and take a step back and kind of look at what we're doing and how it's touching other folks. And in terms of a community, I don't know of any formal community out there, it's mostly ad hoc. And, these ad hoc communities are folks who let's say was a student working on a satellite in college. And they loved that entrepreneurial spirit. And so they said, "Well, I'm going to start my own company." And so, a lot of these ad hoc networks are just from relationships that have been built over the last two decades from colleagues at the university. I do think formalizing this and creating kind of a clearing house to handle all of this is incredibly important. >> And there's going to be a lot of entrepreneurial activity, no doubt, I mean there's too many things to work on and not enough time. I mean this brings up the question that I'm going to, while we're on this topic, you got the remote work with COVID, everyone's workin' remotely, we're doin' this remote interview rather than being on stage. Work's changing, how people work and engage. Certainly physical will come back. But if you looked at historically the space industry and the talent, they're all clustered around the bases. And there's always been these areas where you're a space person. You kind of work in there and the job's there. And if you were cyber, you were generally in other areas. Over the past decade, there's been a cross-pollination of talent and location. As you see the intersection of space, general we'll start with you, first of all, central coast is a great place to live. I know that's where you guys live. But you can start to bring together these two cultures. Sometimes they're not the same. Maybe they're getting better. We know they're being integrated. So general, can you just share your thoughts because this is one of those topics that everyone's talkin' about, but no one's actually kind of addressed directly. >> Yeah, John, I think so. I think I want to answer this by talkin' about where I think the Space Force is going. Because I think if there was ever an opportunity or an inflection point in our Department of Defense to sort of change culture and try to bring in non-traditional kinds of thinking and really kind of change maybe some of the ways that the Department of Defense does things that are probably archaic, Space Force is an inflection point for that. General Raymond, our Chief of Space Operations, has said publicly for awhile now, he wants the U.S. Space Force to be the first truly digital service. And what we mean by that is we want the folks that are in the Space Force to be the ones that are the first adopters, the early adopters of technology. To be the ones most fluent in the cutting edge, technologic developments on space and cyber and other sectors of the economy that are technologically focused. And I think there's some, that can generate some excitement, I think. And it means that we'll probably ended up recruiting people into the Space Force that are not from the traditional recruiting areas that the rest of the Department of Defense looks to. And I think it allows us to bring in a diversity of thought and diversity of perspective and a new kind of motivation into the service, that I think is frankly really exciting. So if you put together everything I mentioned about how space and cyber are going to be best friends forever. And I think there's always been an excitement from the very beginning in the American psyche about space. You start to put all these ingredients together, and I think you see where I'm goin' with this. That this is a chance to really change that cultural mindset that you were describing. >> It's an exciting time for sure. And again, changing the world. And this is what you're seeing today. People do want to change the world. They want a modern world that's changing. Roland, I'll get your thoughts on this. I was having an interview a few years back with a technology entrepreneur, a techie, and we were joking, we were just kind of riffing. And I said, "Everything that's on "Star Trek" will be invented." And we're almost there actually, if you think about it, except for the transporter room. You got video, you got communicators. So, not to bring in the "Star Trek" reference with Space Force, this is digital. And you start thinking about some of the important trends, it's going to be up and down the stack, from hardware to software, to user experience, everything. Your thoughts and reaction. >> Yeah, absolutely. And so, what we're seeing is timelines shrinking dramatically because of the barrier to entry for new entrants and even your existing aerospace companies is incredibly low, right? So if you take previously where you had a technology on the ground and you wanted it in orbit, it would take years. Because you would test it on the ground. You would verify that it can operate in a space environment. And then you would go ahead and launch it. And we're talking tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. Now, we've cut that down from years to months. When you have a prototype on the ground and you want to get it launched, you don't necessarily care if it fails on orbit the first time, because you're getting valuable data back. And so, we're seeing technology being developed for the first time on the ground and in orbit in a matter of a few months. And the whole kind of process that we're doing as a small business is trying to enable that. And so, allowing these entrepreneurs and small companies to get their technology in orbit at a price that is sometimes even cheaper than testing on the ground. >> You know this is a great point. I think this is really an important point to call out because we mentioned partnerships earlier, the economics and the business model of space is doable. I mean, you do a mission study. You get paid for that. You have technology that you get stuff up quickly, and there's a cost structure there. And again, the alternative was waterfall planning, years and millions. Now the form factors are doing, now, again, there may be different payloads involved, but you can standardize payloads. You've got robotic arms. This is all available. This brings up the congestion problem. This is going to be on the top of mind of the generals of course, but you've got the proliferation of these constellation systems. You're going to have more and more tech vectors. I mean, essentially that's malware. I mean, that's a probe. You throw something up in space that could cause some interference. Maybe a takeover. General, this is the real elephant in the room, the threat matrix from new stuff and new configurations. So general, how does the proliferation of constellation systems change the threat matrix? >> So I think the, you know I guess I'm going to be a little more optimistic John than I think you pitched that. I'm actually excited about these new mega constellations in LEO. I'm excited about the growing number of actors that are going into space for various reasons. And why is that? It's because we're starting to realize a new economic engine for the nation and for human society. So the question is, so I think we want that to happen. When we could go to almost any other domain in history and when air travel started to become much, much more commonplace with many kinds of actors from private pilots flying their small planes, all the way up to large airliners, there was a problem with congestion. There was a problem about, challenges about behavior, and are we going to be able to manage this? And yes we did. And it was for the great benefit of society. I could probably look to the maritime domain for similar kinds of things. And so this is actually exciting about space. We are just going to have to find the ways as a society, and it's not just the Department of Defense, it's going to be civil, it's going to be international, find the mechanisms to encourage this continued investment in the space domain. I do think that Space Force will play a role in providing security in the space environment, as we venture further out, as economic opportunities emerge, wherever they are in the lunar, Earth, lunar system, or even within the solar system. Space Force is going to play a role in that. But I'm actually really excited about those possibilities. Hey, by the way, I got to say, you made me think of this when you talked about "Star Trek" and Space Force and our technologies, I remember when I was younger watchin' the Next Generation series. I thought one of the coolest things, 'cause bein' a musician in my spare time, I thought one of the coolest things was when Commander Riker would walk into his quarters and say, "Computer play soft jazz." And there would just be, the computer would just play music. And this was an age when we had hard media. Like how will that, that is awesome. Man, I can't wait for the 23rd century when I can do that. And where we are today is so incredible on those lines. The things that I can ask Alexa or Siri to play. >> Well that's the thing, everything that's on "Star Trek," think about it, it's almost invented. I mean, you got the computers, you got, the only thing really is, holograms are startin' to come in, you got, now the transporter room. Now that's physics. We'll work on that. >> So there is this balance between physics and imagination, but we have not exhausted either. >> Well, firstly, everyone that knows me knows I'm a huge "Star Trek" fan, all the series. Of course, I'm an original purist, but at that level. But this is about economic incentive as well. Roland, I want to get your thoughts, 'cause the gloom and doom, we got to think about the bad stuff to make it good. If I put my glass half full on the table, this economic incentives, just like the example of the plane and the air traffic. There's more actors that are incented to have a secure system. What's your thoughts to general's comments around the optimism and the potential threat matrix that needs to be managed. >> Absolutely, so one of the things that we've seen over the years, as we build these small satellites is a lot of that technology that the General's talking about, voice recognition, miniaturized chips, and sensors, started on the ground. And I mean, you have your iPhone, that, about 15 years ago before the first iPhone came out, we were building small satellites in the lab and we were looking at cutting-edge, state-of-the-art magnetometers and sensors that we were putting in our satellites back then. We didn't know if they were going to work. And then a few years later, as these students graduate, they go off and they go out to other industries. And so, some of the technology that was first kind of put in these CubeSats in the early 2000s, kind of ended up in the first generation iPhone, smartphones. And so being able to take that technology, rapidly incorporate that into space and vice versa gives you an incredible economic advantage. Because not only are your costs going down because you're mass producing these types of terrestrial technologies, but then you can also increase revenue and profit by having smaller and cheaper systems. >> General, let's talk about that real quickly, that's a good point, I want to just shift it into the playbook. I mean, everyone talks about playbooks for management, for tech, for startups, for success. I mean, one of the playbooks that's clear from your history is investment in R&D around military and/or innovation that has a long view, spurs innovation, commercially. I mean, just there's a huge, many decades of history that shows that, hey we got to start thinking about these challenges. And next thing you know it's in an iPhone. This is history, this is not like a one off. And now with Space Force you're driving the main engine of innovation to be all digital. You know, we riff about "Star Trek" which is fun, the reality is you're going to be on the front lines of some really new, cool, mind-blowing things. Could you share your thoughts on how you sell that to the people who write the checks or recruit more talent? >> First, I totally agree with your thesis that national security, well, could probably go back an awful long way, hundreds to thousands of years, that security matters tend to drive an awful lot of innovation and creativity. You know I think probably the two things that drive people the most are probably an opportunity to make money, but beating that out are trying to stay alive. And so, I don't think that's going to go away. And I do think that Space Force can play a role as it pursues security structures, within the space domain to further encourage economic investment and to protect our space capabilities for national security purposes, are going to be at the cutting edge. This isn't the first time. I think we can point back to the origins of the internet, really started in the Department of Defense, with a partnership I should add, with academia. That's how the internet got started. That was the creativity in order to meet some needs there. Cryptography has its roots in security, in national security, but now we use it for economic reasons and a host of other kinds of reasons. And then space itself, I mean, we still look back to Apollo era as an inspiration for so many things that inspired people to either begin careers in technical areas or in space and so on. So I think in that same spirit, you're absolutely right. I guess I'm totally agreeing with your thesis. The Space Force will have a positive, inspirational influence in that way. And we need to realize that. So when we are asking for, when we're looking for how we need to meet capability needs, we need to spread that net very far, look for the most creative solutions and partner early and often with those that can work on those. >> When you're on the new frontier, you got to have a team sport, it's a team effort. And you mentioned the internet, just anecdotally I'm old enough to remember this 'cause I remember the days that it was goin' on, is that the policy decisions that the U.S. made at that time was to let it go a little bit invisible hand. They didn't try to commercialize it too fast. But there was some policy work that was done, that had a direct effect to the innovation. Versus take it over, and the next thing you know it's out of control. So I think there's this cross-disciplinary skillset becomes a big thing where you need to have more people involved. And that's one of the big themes of this symposium. So it's a great point. Thank you for sharing that. Roland, your thoughts on this because you got policy decisions. We all want to run faster. We want to be more innovative, but you got to have some ops view. Now, most of the ops view people want things very tight, very buttoned up, secure. The innovators want to go faster. It's the ying and yang. That's the world we live in. How's it all balance in your mind? >> Yeah, one of the things that may not be apparently obvious is that the U.S. government and Department of Defense is one of the biggest investors in technology in the aerospace sector. They're not the traditional venture capitalists, but they're the ones that are driving technology innovation because there's funding. And when companies see that the U.S. government is interested in something, businesses will revector to provide that capability. And, I would say the more recent years, we've had a huge influx of private equity, venture capital coming into the markets to kind of help augment the government investment. And I think having a good partnership and a relationship with these private equity, venture capitalists and the U.S. government is incredibly important because the two sides can help collaborate and kind of see a common goal. But then also too, on the other side there's that human element. And as General Shaw was saying, not only do companies obviously want to thrive and do really well, some companies just want to stay alive to see their technology kind of grow into what they've always dreamed of. And oftentimes entrepreneurs are put in a very difficult position because they have to make payroll, they have to keep the lights on. And so, sometimes they'll take investment from places where they may normally would not have, from potentially foreign investment that could potentially cause issues with the U.S. supply chain. >> Well, my final question is the best I wanted to save for last, because I love the idea of human space flight. I'd love to be on Mars. I'm not sure I'm able to make it someday, but how do you guys see the possible impacts of cybersecurity on expanding human space flight operations? I mean, general, this is your wheelhouse. This is your in command, putting humans in space and certainly robots will be there because they're easy to go 'cause they're not human. But humans in space. I mean, you startin' to see the momentum, the discussion, people are scratchin' that itch. What's your take on that? How do we see makin' this more possible? >> Well, I think we will see commercial space tourism in the future. I'm not sure how wide and large a scale it will become, but we will see that. And part of the, I think the mission of the Space Force is going to be probably to again, do what we're doin' today is have really good awareness of what's going on in the domain to ensure that that is done safely. And I think a lot of what we do today will end up in civil organizations to do space traffic management and safety in that arena. And, it is only a matter of time before we see humans going, even beyond the, NASA has their plan, the Artemis program to get back to the moon and the gateway initiative to establish a space station there. And that's going to be a NASA exploration initiative. But it is only a matter of time before we have private citizens or private corporations putting people in space and not only for tourism, but for economic activity. And so it'll be really exciting to watch. It'll be really exciting and Space Force will be a part of it. >> General, Roland, I want to thank you for your valuable time to come on this symposium. Really appreciate it. Final comment, I'd love you to spend a minute to share your personal thoughts on the importance of cybersecurity to space and we'll close it out. We'll start with you Roland. >> Yeah, so I think the biggest thing I would like to try to get out of this from my own personal perspective is creating that environment that allows the aerospace supply chain, small businesses like ourselves, be able to meet all the requirements to protect and safeguard our data, but also create a way that we can still thrive and it won't stifle innovation. I'm looking forward to comments and questions, from the audience to really kind of help, basically drive to that next step. >> General final thoughts, the importance of cybersecurity to space. >> I'll go back to how I started I think John and say that space and cyber are forever intertwined, they're BFFs. And whoever has my job 50 years from now, or a hundred years from now, I predict they're going to be sayin' the exact same thing. Cyber and space are intertwined for good. We will always need the cutting edge, cybersecurity capabilities that we develop as a nation or as a society to protect our space capabilities. And our cyber capabilities are going to need space capabilities in the future as well. >> General John Shaw, thank you very much. Roland Coelho, thank you very much for your great insight. Thank you to Cal Poly for puttin' this together. I want to shout out to the team over there. We couldn't be in-person, but we're doing a virtual remote event. I'm John Furrier with "theCUBE" and SiliconANGLE here in Silicon Valley, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's The Cube, covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, hosted by Cal Poly. >> Everyone, welcome to this special virtual conference, the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly with support from The Cube. I'm John Furey, your host and master of ceremony's got a great topic today, and this session is really the intersection of space and cybersecurity. This topic, and this conversation is a cybersecurity workforce development through public and private partnerships. And we've got a great lineup, we've Jeff Armstrong is the president of California Polytechnic State University, also known as Cal Poly. Jeffrey, thanks for jumping on and Bong Gumahad. The second, Director of C4ISR Division, and he's joining us from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for the acquisition and sustainment of Department of Defense, DOD, and of course Steve Jacques is Executive Director, founder National Security Space Association, and managing partner at Velos. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this session, we've got an hour of conversation, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So we've got a virtual event here, we've got an hour to have a great conversation, I'd love for you guys to do an opening statement on how you see the development through public and private partnerships around cybersecurity and space, Jeff, we'll start with you. >> Well, thanks very much, John, it's great to be on with all of you. On behalf of Cal Poly, welcome everyone. Educating the workforce of tomorrow is our mission at Cal Poly, whether that means traditional undergraduates, masters students, or increasingly, mid-career professionals looking to upskill or re-skill. Our signature pedagogy is learn by doing, which means that our graduates arrive at employers, ready day one with practical skills and experience. We have long thought of ourselves as lucky to be on California's beautiful central coast, but in recent years, as we've developed closer relationships with Vandenberg Air Force Base, hopefully the future permanent headquarters of the United States Space Command with Vandenberg and other regional partners, We have discovered that our location is even more advantageous than we thought. We're just 50 miles away from Vandenberg, a little closer than UC Santa Barbara and the base represents the Southern border of what we have come to think of as the central coast region. Cal Poly and Vandenberg Air Force Base have partnered to support regional economic development, to encourage the development of a commercial space port, to advocate for the space command headquarters coming to Vandenberg and other ventures. These partnerships have been possible because both parties stand to benefit. Vandenberg, by securing new streams of revenue, workforce, and local supply chain and Cal Poly by helping to grow local jobs for graduates, internship opportunities for students and research and entrepreneurship opportunities for faculty and staff. Crucially, what's good for Vandenberg Air Force Base and for Cal Poly is also good for the central coast and the U.S., creating new head of household jobs, infrastructure, and opportunity. Our goal is that these new jobs bring more diversity and sustainability for the region. This regional economic development has taken on a life of its own, spawning a new nonprofit called REACH which coordinates development efforts from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the South to Camp Roberts in the North. Another factor that has facilitated our relationship with Vandenberg Air Force Base is that we have some of the same friends. For example, Northrop Grumman has as long been an important defense contractor and an important partner to Cal Poly, funding scholarships in facilities that have allowed us to stay current with technology in it to attract highly qualified students for whom Cal Poly's costs would otherwise be prohibitive. For almost 20 years, Northrop Grumman has funded scholarships for Cal Poly students. This year, they're funding 64 scholarships, some directly in our College of Engineering and most through our Cal Poly Scholars Program. Cal Poly scholars support both incoming freshmen and transfer students. These are especially important, 'cause it allows us to provide additional support and opportunities to a group of students who are mostly first generation, low income and underrepresented, and who otherwise might not choose to attend Cal Poly. They also allow us to recruit from partner high schools with large populations of underrepresented minority students, including the Fortune High School in Elk Grove, which we developed a deep and lasting connection. We know that the best work is done by balanced teams that include multiple and diverse perspectives. These scholarships help us achieve that goal and I'm sure you know Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a very large contract to modernize the U.S. ICBM armory with some of the work being done at Vandenberg Air Force Base, thus supporting the local economy and protecting... Protecting our efforts in space requires partnerships in the digital realm. Cal Poly has partnered with many private companies such as AWS. Our partnerships with Amazon Web Services has enabled us to train our students with next generation cloud engineering skills, in part, through our jointly created digital transformation hub. Another partnership example is among Cal Poly's California Cyber Security Institute College of Engineering and the California National Guard. This partnership is focused on preparing a cyber-ready workforce, by providing faculty and students with a hands on research and learning environment side by side with military law enforcement professionals and cyber experts. We also have a long standing partnership with PG&E most recently focused on workforce development and redevelopment. Many of our graduates do indeed go on to careers in aerospace and defense industry. As a rough approximation, more than 4,500 Cal Poly graduates list aerospace or defense as their employment sector on LinkedIn. And it's not just our engineers in computer sciences. When I was speaking to our fellow panelists not too long ago, speaking to Bong, we learned that Rachel Sims, one of our liberal arts majors is working in his office, so shout out to you, Rachel. And then finally, of course, some of our graduates soar to extraordinary heights, such as Commander Victor Glover, who will be heading to the International Space Station later this year. As I close, all of which is to say that we're deeply committed to workforce development and redevelopment, that we understand the value of public-private partnerships, and that we're eager to find new ways in which to benefit everyone from this further cooperation. So we're committed to the region, the state and the nation, in our past efforts in space, cyber security and links to our partners at, as I indicated, aerospace industry and governmental partners provides a unique position for us to move forward in the interface of space and cyber security. Thank you so much, John. >> President Armstrong, thank you very much for the comments and congratulations to Cal Poly for being on the forefront of innovation and really taking a unique, progressive view and want to tip a hat to you guys over there, thank you very much for those comments, appreciate it. Bong, Department of Defense. Exciting, you've got to defend the nation, space is global, your opening statement. >> Yes, sir, thanks John, appreciate that. Thank you everybody, I'm honored to be in this panel along with Preston Armstrong of Cal Poly and my longtime friend and colleague Steve Jacques of the National Security Space Association to discuss a very important topic of a cybersecurity workforce development as President Armstrong alluded to. I'll tell you, both of these organizations, Cal Poly and the NSSA have done and continue to do an exceptional job at finding talent, recruiting them and training current and future leaders and technical professionals that we vitally need for our nation's growing space programs, as well as our collective national security. Earlier today, during session three, I, along with my colleague, Chris Samson discussed space cyber security and how the space domain is changing the landscape of future conflicts. I discussed the rapid emergence of commercial space with the proliferation of hundreds, if not thousands of satellites, providing a variety of services including communications, allowing for global internet connectivity, as one example. Within DOD, we continued to look at how we can leverage this opportunity. I'll tell you, one of the enabling technologies, is the use of small satellites, which are inherently cheaper and perhaps more flexible than the traditional bigger systems that we have historically used and employed for DOD. Certainly not lost on me is the fact that Cal Poly pioneered CubeSats 28, 27 years ago, and they set a standard for the use of these systems today. So they saw the value and benefit gained way ahead of everybody else it seems. And Cal Poly's focus on training and education is commendable. I'm especially impressed by the efforts of another of Steven's colleague, the current CIO, Mr. Bill Britton, with his high energy push to attract the next generation of innovators. Earlier this year, I had planned on participating in this year's cyber innovation challenge in June, Oops, Cal Poly hosts California middle, and high school students, and challenge them with situations to test their cyber knowledge. I tell you, I wish I had that kind of opportunity when I was a kid, unfortunately, the pandemic changed the plan, but I truly look forward to future events such as these, to participate in. Now, I want to recognize my good friend, Steve Jacques, whom I've known for perhaps too long of a time here, over two decades or so, who was an acknowledged space expert and personally I've truly applaud him for having the foresight a few years back to form the National Security Space Association to help the entire space enterprise navigate through not only technology, but policy issues and challenges and paved the way for operationalizing space. Space, it certainly was fortifying domain, it's not a secret anymore, and while it is a unique area, it shares a lot of common traits with the other domains, such as land, air, and sea, obviously all are strategically important to the defense of the United States. In conflict, they will all be contested and therefore they all need to be defended. One domain alone will not win future conflicts, and in a joint operation, we must succeed in all. So defending space is critical, as critical as to defending our other operational domains. Funny, space is the only sanctuary available only to the government. Increasingly as I discussed in a previous session, commercial space is taking the lead in a lot of different areas, including R&D, the so-called new space. So cybersecurity threat is even more demanding and even more challenging. The U.S. considers and futhered access to and freedom to operate in space, vital to advancing security, economic prosperity and scientific knowledge of the country, thus making cyberspace an inseparable component of America's financial, social government and political life. We stood up US Space Force a year ago or so as the newest military service. Like the other services, its mission is to organize, train and equip space forces in order to protect U.S. and allied interest in space and to provide spacecape builders who joined force. Imagine combining that U.S. Space Force with the U.S. Cyber Command to unify the direction of the space and cyberspace operation, strengthen DOD capabilities and integrate and bolster a DOD cyber experience. Now, of course, to enable all of this requires a trained and professional cadre of cyber security experts, combining a good mix of policy, as well as a high technical skill set. Much like we're seeing in STEM, we need to attract more people to this growing field. Now, the DOD has recognized the importance to the cybersecurity workforce, and we have implemented policies to encourage its growth. Back in 2013, the Deputy Secretary of Defense signed a DOD Cyberspace Workforce Strategy, to create a comprehensive, well-equipped cyber security team to respond to national security concerns. Now, this strategy also created a program that encourages collaboration between the DOD and private sector employees. We call this the Cyber Information Technology Exchange program, or CITE that it's an exchange program, which is very interesting in which a private sector employee can naturally work for the DOD in a cyber security position that spans across multiple mission critical areas, important to the DOD. A key responsibility of the cyber security community is military leaders, unrelated threats, and the cyber security actions we need to have to defeat these threats. We talked about rapid acquisition, agile business processes and practices to speed up innovation, likewise, cyber security must keep up with this challenge. So cyber security needs to be right there with the challenges and changes, and this requires exceptional personnel. We need to attract talent, invest in the people now to grow a robust cybersecurity workforce for the future. I look forward to the panel discussion, John, thank you. >> Thank you so much, Bob for those comments and, you know, new challenges or new opportunities and new possibilities and freedom to operate in space is critical, thank you for those comments, looking forward to chatting further. Steve Jacques, Executive Director of NSSA, you're up, opening statement. >> Thank you, John and echoing Bongs, thanks to Cal Poly for pulling this important event together and frankly, for allowing the National Security Space Association be a part of it. Likewise, on behalf of the association, I'm delighted and honored to be on this panel of President Armstrong, along with my friend and colleague, Bong Gumahad. Something for you all to know about Bong, he spent the first 20 years of his career in the Air Force doing space programs. He then went into industry for several years and then came back into government to serve, very few people do that. So Bong, on behalf of the space community, we thank you for your lifelong devotion to service to our nation, we really appreciate that. And I also echo a Bong shout out to that guy, Bill Britton. who's been a long time co-conspirator of ours for a long time, and you're doing great work there in the cyber program at Cal Poly, Bill, keep it up. But Professor Armstrong, keep a close eye on him. (laughter) I would like to offer a little extra context to the great comments made by President Armstrong and Bong. And in our view, the timing of this conference really could not be any better. We all recently reflected again on that tragic 9/11 surprise attack on our homeland and it's an appropriate time we think to take pause. While a percentage of you in the audience here weren't even born or were babies then, for the most of us, it still feels like yesterday. And moreover, a tragedy like 9/11 has taught us a lot to include, to be more vigilant, always keep our collective eyes and ears open, to include those "eyes and ears from space," making sure nothing like this ever happens again. So this conference is a key aspect, protecting our nation requires we work in a cyber secure environment at all times. But you know, the fascinating thing about space systems is we can't see 'em. Now sure, we see space launches, man, there's nothing more invigorating than that. But after launch they become invisible, so what are they really doing up there? What are they doing to enable our quality of life in the United States and in the world? Well to illustrate, I'd like to paraphrase elements of an article in Forbes magazine, by Bongs and my good friend, Chuck Beames, Chuck is a space guy, actually had Bongs job a few years in the Pentagon. He's now Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at York Space Systems and in his spare time, he's Chairman of the Small Satellites. Chuck speaks in words that everyone can understand, so I'd like to give you some of his words out of his article, paraphrase somewhat, so these are Chuck's words. "Let's talk about average Joe and plain Jane. "Before heading to the airport for a business trip "to New York city, Joe checks the weather forecast, "informed by NOAA's weather satellites, "to see what to pack for the trip. "He then calls an Uber, that space app everybody uses, "it matches riders with drivers via GPS, "to take him to the airport. "So Joe has launched in the airport, "unbeknownst to him, his organic lunch is made "with the help of precision farming "made possible to optimize the irrigation and fertilization "with remote spectral sensing coming from space and GPS. "On the plane, the pilot navigates around weather, "aided by GPS and NOAA's weather satellites "and Joe makes his meeting on time "to join his New York colleagues in a video call "with a key customer in Singapore, "made possible by telecommunication satellites. "En route to his next meeting, "Joe receives notice changing the location of the meeting "to the other side of town. "So he calmly tells Siri to adjust the destination "and his satellite-guided Google maps redirect him "to the new location. "That evening, Joe watches the news broadcast via satellite, "report details of meeting among world leaders, "discussing the developing crisis in Syria. "As it turns out various forms of "'remotely sensed information' collected from satellites "indicate that yet another banned chemical weapon "may have been used on its own people. "Before going to bed, Joe decides to call his parents "and congratulate them for their wedding anniversary "as they cruise across the Atlantic, "made possible again by communication satellites "and Joe's parents can enjoy the call "without even wondering how it happened. "The next morning back home, "Joe's wife, Jane is involved in a car accident. "Her vehicle skids off the road, she's knocked unconscious, "but because of her satellite equipped OnStar system, "the crash is detected immediately, "and first responders show up on the scene in time. "Joe receives the news, books an early trip home, "sends flowers to his wife "as he orders another Uber to the airport. "Over that 24 hours, "Joe and Jane used space system applications "for nearly every part of their day. "Imagine the consequences if at any point "they were somehow denied these services, "whether they be by natural causes or a foreign hostility. "In each of these satellite applications used in this case, "were initially developed for military purposes "and continued to be, but also have remarkable application "on our way of life, just many people just don't know that." So ladies and gentlemen, now you know, thanks to Chuck Beames. Well, the United States has a proud heritage of being the world's leading space-faring nation. Dating back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, today, we have mature and robust systems operating from space, providing overhead reconnaissance to "watch and listen," provide missile warning, communications, positioning, navigation, and timing from our GPS system, much of which you heard in Lieutenant General JT Thomson's earlier speech. These systems are not only integral to our national security, but also to our quality of life. As Chuck told us, we simply no longer can live without these systems as a nation and for that matter, as a world. But over the years, adversaries like China, Russia and other countries have come to realize the value of space systems and are aggressively playing catch up while also pursuing capabilities that will challenge our systems. As many of you know, in 2007, China demonstrated its ASAT system by actually shooting down one of its own satellites and has been aggressively developing counterspace systems to disrupt ours. So in a heavily congested space environment, our systems are now being contested like never before and will continue to be. Well, as a Bong mentioned, the United States have responded to these changing threats. In addition to adding ways to protect our system, the administration and the Congress recently created the United States Space Force and the operational United States Space Command, the latter of which you heard President Armstrong and other Californians hope is going to be located at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Combined with our intelligence community, today we have focused military and civilian leadership now in space, and that's a very, very good thing. Commensurately on the industry side, we did create the National Security Space Association, devoted solely to supporting the National Security Space Enterprise. We're based here in the DC area, but we have arms and legs across the country and we are loaded with extraordinary talent in scores of former government executives. So NSSA is joined at the hip with our government customers to serve and to support. We're busy with a multitude of activities underway, ranging from a number of thought-provoking policy papers, our recurring spacetime webcasts, supporting Congress's space power caucus, and other main serious efforts. Check us out at nssaspace.org. One of our strategic priorities and central to today's events is to actively promote and nurture the workforce development, just like Cal-Poly. We will work with our U.S. government customers, industry leaders, and academia to attract and recruit students to join the space world, whether in government or industry, and to assist in mentoring and training as their careers progress. On that point, we're delighted to be working with Cal Poly as we hopefully will undertake a new pilot program with them very soon. So students stay tuned, something I can tell you, space is really cool. While our nation's satellite systems are technical and complex, our nation's government and industry workforce is highly diverse, with a combination of engineers, physicists and mathematicians, but also with a large non-technical expertise as well. Think about how government gets these systems designed, manufactured, launching into orbit and operating. They do this via contracts with our aerospace industry, requiring talents across the board, from cost estimating, cost analysis, budgeting, procurement, legal, and many other support tasks that are integral to the mission. Many thousands of people work in the space workforce, tens of billions of dollars every year. This is really cool stuff and no matter what your education background, a great career to be part of. In summary, as Bong had mentioned as well, there's a great deal of exciting challenges ahead. We will see a new renaissance in space in the years ahead and in some cases it's already begun. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson, are in the game, stimulating new ideas and business models. Other private investors and startup companies, space companies are now coming in from all angles. The exponential advancement of technology and micro electronics now allows a potential for a plethora of small sat systems to possibly replace older satellites, the size of a Greyhound bus. It's getting better by the day and central to this conference, cybersecurity is paramount to our nation's critical infrastructure in space. So once again, thanks very much and I look forward to the further conversation. >> Steve, thank you very much. Space is cool, it's relevant, but it's important as you pointed out in your awesome story about how it impacts our life every day so I really appreciate that great story I'm glad you took the time to share that. You forgot the part about the drone coming over in the crime scene and, you know, mapping it out for you, but we'll add that to the story later, great stuff. My first question is, let's get into the conversations, because I think this is super important. President Armstrong, I'd like you to talk about some of the points that was teased out by Bong and Steve. One in particular is the comment around how military research was important in developing all these capabilities, which is impacting all of our lives through that story. It was the military research that has enabled a generation and generation of value for consumers. This is kind of this workforce conversation, there are opportunities now with research and grants, and this is a funding of innovation that is highly accelerated, it's happening very quickly. Can you comment on how research and the partnerships to get that funding into the universities is critical? >> Yeah, I really appreciate that and appreciate the comments of my colleagues. And it really boils down to me to partnerships, public-private partnerships, you have mentioned Northrop Grumman, but we have partnerships with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Space X, JPL, also member of an organization called Business Higher Education Forum, which brings together university presidents and CEOs of companies. There's been focused on cybersecurity and data science and I hope that we can spill into cybersecurity and space. But those partnerships in the past have really brought a lot forward. At Cal Poly, as mentioned, we've been involved with CubeSat, we've have some secure work, and we want to plan to do more of that in the future. Those partnerships are essential, not only for getting the R&D done, but also the students, the faculty, whether they're master's or undergraduate can be involved with that work, they get that real life experience, whether it's on campus or virtually now during COVID or at the location with the partner, whether it may be governmental or industry, and then they're even better equipped to hit the ground running. And of course we'd love to see more of our students graduate with clearance so that they could do some of that secure work as well. So these partnerships are absolutely critical and it's also in the context of trying to bring the best and the brightest in all demographics of California and the U.S. into this field, to really be successful. So these partnerships are essential and our goal is to grow them just like I know our other colleagues in the CSU and the UC are planning to do. >> You know, just as my age I've seen, I grew up in the eighties and in college and they're in that system's generation and the generation before me, they really kind of pioneered the space that spawned the computer revolution. I mean, you look at these key inflection points in our lives, they were really funded through these kinds of real deep research. Bong, talk about that because, you know, we're living in an age of cloud and Bezos was mentioned, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson, you got new ideas coming in from the outside, you have an accelerated clock now in terms of the innovation cycles and so you got to react differently, you guys have programs to go outside of the defense department, how important is this because the workforce that are in schools and/or folks re-skilling are out there and you've been on both sides of the table, so share your thoughts. >> No, thanks Johnny, thanks for the opportunity to respond to, and that's what, you know, you hit on the nose back in the 80's, R&D and space especially was dominated by government funding, contracts and so on, but things have changed as Steve pointed out, allow these commercial entities funded by billionaires are coming out of the woodwork, funding R&D so they're taking the lead, so what we can do within the DOD in government is truly take advantage of the work they've done. And since they're, you know, paving the way to new approaches and new way of doing things and I think we can certainly learn from that and leverage off of that, saves us money from an R&D standpoint, while benefiting from the product that they deliver. You know, within DOD, talking about workforce development, you know, we have prioritized and we have policies now to attract and retain the talent we need. I had the folks do some research and it looks like from a cybersecurity or workforce standpoint, a recent study done, I think last year in 2019, found that the cyber security workforce gap in U.S. is nearing half a million people, even though it is a growing industry. So the pipeline needs to be strengthened, getting people through, you know, starting young and through college, like Professor Armstrong indicated because we're going to need them to be in place, you know, in a period of about maybe a decade or so. On top of that, of course, is the continuing issue we have with the gap with STEM students. We can't afford not have expertise in place to support all the things we're doing within DoD, not only DoD but the commercial side as well, thank you. >> How's the gap get filled, I mean, this is, again, you've got cybersecurity, I mean, with space it's a whole other kind of surface area if you will, it's not really surface area, but it is an IOT device if you think about it, but it does have the same challenges, that's kind of current and progressive with cybersecurity. Where's the gap get filled, Steve or President Armstrong, I mean, how do you solve the problem and address this gap in the workforce? What are some solutions and what approaches do we need to put in place? >> Steve, go ahead., I'll follow up. >> Okay, thanks, I'll let you correct me. (laughter) It's a really good question, and the way I would approach it is to focus on it holistically and to acknowledge it upfront and it comes with our teaching, et cetera, across the board. And from an industry perspective, I mean, we see it, we've got to have secure systems in everything we do, and promoting this and getting students at early ages and mentoring them and throwing internships at them is so paramount to the whole cycle. And that's kind of, it really takes a focused attention and we continue to use the word focus from an NSSA perspective. We know the challenges that are out there. There are such talented people in the workforce, on the government side, but not nearly enough of them and likewise on the industry side, we could use more as well, but when you get down to it, you know, we can connect dots, you know, the aspects that Professor Armstrong talked about earlier to where you continue to work partnerships as much as you possibly can. We hope to be a part of that network, that ecosystem if you will, of taking common objectives and working together to kind of make these things happen and to bring the power, not just of one or two companies, but of our entire membership thereabout. >> President Armstrong-- >> Yeah, I would also add it again, it's back to the partnerships that I talked about earlier, one of our partners is high schools and schools Fortune, Margaret Fortune, who worked in a couple of administrations in California across party lines and education, their fifth graders all visit Cal Poly, and visit our learned-by-doing lab. And you've got to get students interested in STEM at an early age. We also need the partnerships, the scholarships, the financial aid, so the students can graduate with minimal to no debt to really hit the ground running and that's exacerbated and really stress now with this COVID induced recession. California supports higher education at a higher rate than most states in the nation, but that has brought this year for reasons all understand due to COVID. And so our partnerships, our creativity, and making sure that we help those that need the most help financially, that's really key because the gaps are huge. As my colleagues indicated, you know, half a million jobs and I need you to look at the students that are in the pipeline, we've got to enhance that. And the placement rates are amazing once the students get to a place like Cal Poly or some of our other amazing CSU and UC campuses, placement rates are like 94%. Many of our engineers, they have jobs lined up a year before they graduate. So it's just going to take a key partnerships working together and that continued partnership with government local, of course, our state, the CSU, and partners like we have here today, both Steve and Bong so partnerships is the thing. >> You know, that's a great point-- >> I could add, >> Okay go ahead. >> All right, you know, the collaboration with universities is one that we put on lot of emphasis here, and it may not be well known fact, but just an example of national security, the AUC is a national centers of academic excellence in cyber defense works with over 270 colleges and universities across the United States to educate and certify future cyber first responders as an example. So that's vibrant and healthy and something that we ought to take advantage of. >> Well, I got the brain trust here on this topic. I want to get your thoughts on this one point, 'cause I'd like to define, you know, what is a public-private partnership because the theme that's coming out of the symposium is the script has been flipped, it's a modern era, things are accelerated, you've got security, so you've got all of these things kind of happenning it's a modern approach and you're seeing a digital transformation play out all over the world in business and in the public sector. So what is a modern public-private partnership and what does it look like today because people are learning differently. COVID has pointed out, which is that we're seeing right now, how people, the progressions of knowledge and learning, truth, it's all changing. How do you guys view the modern version of public-private partnership and some examples and some proof points, can you guys share that? We'll start with you, Professor Armstrong. >> Yeah, as I indicated earlier, we've had, and I could give other examples, but Northrop Grumman, they helped us with a cyber lab many years ago that is maintained directly, the software, the connection outside it's its own unit so the students can learn to hack, they can learn to penetrate defenses and I know that that has already had some considerations of space, but that's a benefit to both parties. So a good public-private partnership has benefits to both entities and the common factor for universities with a lot of these partnerships is the talent. The talent that is needed, what we've been working on for years of, you know, the undergraduate or master's or PhD programs, but now it's also spilling into upskilling and reskilling, as jobs, you know, folks who are in jobs today that didn't exist two years, three years, five years ago, but it also spills into other aspects that can expand even more. We're very fortunate we have land, there's opportunities, we have ONE Tech project. We are expanding our tech park, I think we'll see opportunities for that and it'll be adjusted due to the virtual world that we're all learning more and more about it, which we were in before COVID. But I also think that that person to person is going to be important, I want to make sure that I'm driving across a bridge or that satellite's being launched by the engineer that's had at least some in person training to do that in that experience, especially as a first time freshman coming on campus, getting that experience, expanding it as an adult, and we're going to need those public-private partnerships in order to continue to fund those at a level that is at the excellence we need for these STEM and engineering fields. >> It's interesting people and technology can work together and these partnerships are the new way. Bongs too with reaction to the modern version of what a public successful private partnership looks like. >> If I could jump in John, I think, you know, historically DOD's had a high bar to overcome if you will, in terms of getting rapid... pulling in new companies, miss the fall if you will, and not rely heavily on the usual suspects, of vendors and the like, and I think the DOD has done a good job over the last couple of years of trying to reduce that burden and working with us, you know, the Air Force, I think they're pioneering this idea around pitch days, where companies come in, do a two-hour pitch and immediately notified of, you know, of an a award, without having to wait a long time to get feedback on the quality of the product and so on. So I think we're trying to do our best to strengthen that partnership with companies outside of the main group of people that we typically use. >> Steve, any reaction, any comment to add? >> Yeah, I would add a couple and these are very excellent thoughts. It's about taking a little gamble by coming out of your comfort zone, you know, the world that Bong and I, Bong lives in and I used to live in the past, has been quite structured. It's really about, we know what the threat is, we need to go fix it, we'll design as if as we go make it happen, we'll fly it. Life is so much more complicated than that and so it's really, to me, I mean, you take an example of the pitch days of Bong talks about, I think taking a gamble by attempting to just do a lot of pilot programs, work the trust factor between government folks and the industry folks and academia, because we are all in this together in a lot of ways. For example, I mean, we just sent a paper to the white house at their request about, you know, what would we do from a workforce development perspective and we hope to embellish on this over time once the initiative matures, but we have a piece of it for example, is a thing we call "clear for success," getting back to president Armstrong's comments so at a collegiate level, you know, high, high, high quality folks are in high demand. So why don't we put together a program that grabs kids in their underclass years, identifies folks that are interested in doing something like this, get them scholarships, have a job waiting for them that they're contracted for before they graduate, and when they graduate, they walk with an SCI clearance. We believe that can be done, so that's an example of ways in which public-private partnerships can happen to where you now have a talented kid ready to go on day one. We think those kinds of things can happen, it just gets back down to being focused on specific initiatives, giving them a chance and run as many pilot programs as you can, like pitch days. >> That's a great point, it's a good segue. Go ahead, President Armstrong. >> I just want to jump in and echo both the Bong and Steve's comments, but Steve that, you know, your point of, you know our graduates, we consider them ready day one, well they need to be ready day one and ready to go secure. We totally support that and love to follow up offline with you on that. That's exciting and needed, very much needed more of it, some of it's happening, but we certainly have been thinking a lot about that and making some plans. >> And that's a great example, a good segue. My next question is kind of re-imagining these workflows is kind of breaking down the old way and bringing in kind of the new way, accelerate all kinds of new things. There are creative ways to address this workforce issue and this is the next topic, how can we employ new creative solutions because let's face it, you know, it's not the days of get your engineering degree and go interview for a job and then get slotted in and get the intern, you know, the programs and you'd matriculate through the system. This is multiple disciplines, cybersecurity points at that. You could be smart in math and have a degree in anthropology and be one of the best cyber talents on the planet. So this is a new, new world, what are some creative approaches that's going to work for you? >> Alright, good job, one of the things, I think that's a challenge to us is, you know, somehow we got me working for, with the government, sexy right? You know, part of the challenge we have is attracting the right level of skill sets and personnel but, you know, we're competing, oftentimes, with the commercial side, the gaming industry as examples is a big deal. And those are the same talents we need to support a lot of the programs that we have in DOD. So somehow we have do a better job to Steve's point about making the work within DOD, within the government, something that they would be interested early on. So attract them early, you know, I could not talk about Cal Poly's challenge program that they were going to have in June inviting high school kids really excited about the whole idea of space and cyber security and so on. Those are some of the things that I think we have to do and continue to do over the course of the next several years. >> Awesome, any other creative approaches that you guys see working or might be an idea, or just to kind of stoke the ideation out there? Internships, obviously internships are known, but like, there's got to be new ways. >> Alright, I think you can take what Steve was talking about earlier, getting students in high school and aligning them sometimes at first internship, not just between the freshman and sophomore year, but before they enter Cal Poly per se and they're involved. So I think that's absolutely key, getting them involved in many other ways. We have an example of upskilling or work redevelopment here in the central coast, PG&E Diablo nuclear plant that is going to decommission in around 2024. And so we have a ongoing partnership to work and reposition those employees for the future. So that's, you know, engineering and beyond but think about that just in the manner that you were talking about. So the upskilling and reskilling, and I think that's where, you know, we were talking about that Purdue University, other California universities have been dealing with online programs before COVID, and now with COVID so many more Faculty were pushed into that area, there's going to be a much more going and talk about workforce development in upskilling and reskilling, the amount of training and education of our faculty across the country in virtual and delivery has been huge. So there's always a silver linings in the cloud. >> I want to get your guys' thoughts on one final question as we end the segment, and we've seen on the commercial side with cloud computing on these highly accelerated environments where, you know, SAS business model subscription, and that's on the business side, but one of the things that's clear in this trend is technology and people work together and technology augments the people components. So I'd love to get your thoughts as we look at a world now, we're living in COVID, and Cal Poly, you guys have remote learning right now, it's at the infancy, it's a whole new disruption, if you will, but also an opportunity enable new ways to encollaborate, So if you look at people and technology, can you guys share your view and vision on how communities can be developed, how these digital technologies and people can work together faster to get to the truth or make a discovery, hire, develop the workforce, these are opportunities, how do you guys view this new digital transformation? >> Well, I think there's huge opportunities and just what we're doing with this symposium, we're filming this on Monday and it's going to stream live and then the three of us, the four of us can participate and chat with participants while it's going on. That's amazing and I appreciate you, John, you bringing that to this symposium. I think there's more and more that we can do. From a Cal Poly perspective, with our pedagogy so, you know, linked to learn by doing in-person will always be important to us, but we see virtual, we see partnerships like this, can expand and enhance our ability and minimize the in-person time, decrease the time to degree, enhance graduation rate, eliminate opportunity gaps for students that don't have the same advantages. So I think the technological aspect of this is tremendous. Then on the upskilling and reskilling, where employees are all over, they can re be reached virtually, and then maybe they come to a location or really advanced technology allows them to get hands on virtually, or they come to that location and get it in a hybrid format. So I'm very excited about the future and what we can do, and it's going to be different with every university, with every partnership. It's one size does not fit all, There's so many possibilities, Bong, I can almost imagine that social network that has a verified, you know, secure clearance. I can jump in, and have a little cloak of secrecy and collaborate with the DOD possibly in the future. But these are the kind of crazy ideas that are needed, your thoughts on this whole digital transformation cross-pollination. >> I think technology is going to be revolutionary here, John, you know, we're focusing lately on what we call visual engineering to quicken the pace of the delivery capability to warfighter as an example, I think AI, Machine Language, all that's going to have a major play in how we operate in the future. We're embracing 5G technologies, and the ability for zero latency, more IOT, more automation of the supply chain, that sort of thing, I think the future ahead of us is very encouraging, I think it's going to do a lot for national defense, and certainly the security of the country. >> Steve, your final thoughts, space systems are systems, and they're connected to other systems that are connected to people, your thoughts on this digital transformation opportunity. >> Such a great question and such a fun, great challenge ahead of us. Echoing my colleagues sentiments, I would add to it, you know, a lot of this has, I think we should do some focusing on campaigning so that people can feel comfortable to include the Congress to do things a little bit differently. You know, we're not attuned to doing things fast, but the dramatic, you know, the way technology is just going like crazy right now, I think it ties back to, hoping to convince some of our senior leaders and what I call both sides of the Potomac river, that it's worth taking this gamble, we do need to take some of these things you know, in a very proactive way. And I'm very confident and excited and comfortable that this is going to be a great time ahead and all for the better. >> You know, I always think of myself when I talk about DC 'cause I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a political person, but I always say less lawyers, more techies than in Congress and Senate, so (laughter)I always get in trouble when I say that. Sorry, President Armstrong, go ahead. >> Yeah, no, just one other point and Steve's alluded to this and Bong did as well, I mean, we've got to be less risk averse in these partnerships, that doesn't mean reckless, but we have to be less risk averse. And also, as you talk about technology, I have to reflect on something that happened and you both talked a bit about Bill Britton and his impact on Cal Poly and what we're doing. But we were faced a few years ago of replacing traditional data, a data warehouse, data storage, data center and we partnered with AWS and thank goodness, we had that in progress and it enhanced our bandwidth on our campus before COVID hit, and with this partnership with the digital transformation hub, so there's a great example where we had that going. That's not something we could have started, "Oh COVID hit, let's flip that switch." And so we have to be proactive and we also have to not be risk-averse and do some things differently. That has really salvaged the experience for our students right now, as things are flowing well. We only have about 12% of our courses in person, those essential courses and I'm just grateful for those partnerships that I have talked about today. >> And it's a shining example of how being agile, continuous operations, these are themes that expand the space and the next workforce needs to be built. Gentlemen, thank you very much for sharing your insights, I know Bong, you're going to go into the defense side of space in your other sessions. Thank you gentlemen, for your time, for a great session, I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you all. I'm John Furey with The Cube here in Palo Alto, California covering and hosting with Cal Poly, the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, thanks for watching. (bright atmospheric music)

(energetic music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley; Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Power Panel recorded here in Palo Alto, California. We've got remote guests from around the Internet. We have Evan Anderson, Mark Anderson, Phil Lohaus. Thanks for comin' on. Evan is with INVNT/IP, an organization with companies and individuals that fight nation-sponsored intellectual property theft and also author of the huge report Theft Nation Almost a 100 pages of really comprehensive analysis on it. Mark Anderson with the Future in Review CEO of Pattern, Computer and Strategic New Service Chairman of Future in Review Conference, and author of the book "The Pattern Future: "Find the World's Greatest Secrets "and Predicting the Future Using Discovery Patterns" and Phil Lohaus, American Enterprise Institute. Former intelligent analyst, researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, studying competitive strategy and emerging technologies. Guys, thanks for coming on. This topic is, is industrial IoT the new battleground? Mark, you cover the Future Review. Security is the battleground. It's not just a silo'd space. It's horizontally scalable across every single touch point of the Internet, individuals, national security, companies, global, what's your perspective on this new battleground? >> Well, thank you, I took some time and watched your last presentation on this, which I thought was excellent. And maybe I'll try to pick up from there. There's a lot of discussion there about the technical aspects of IoT, or IIoT, and some of the weaknesses, you know firewalls failing, assuming that someone's in your network. But I think that there's a deeper aspect to this. And the problem I think, John, is that yes, they are in your network already, but the deeper problem here is, who is it? Is it an individual? Is it a state? And whoever it is, I'm going to put something out that I think is going to be worth talking more deeply about, and that is, if people who can do the most damage are already in there, and are ready to do it, the question isn't "Can they?" It's "Why have they not?" And so literally, I think if you ask world leaders today, are they in the electric grid? Yes. Is Russia in ours, are we in theirs? Yes. If you said, is China in our most important areas of enterprise? Absolutely. Is Iran in our banks and so forth? They are. And you actually see states of war going on, that are nuisances, but are not what you might call Cybergeddon. And I really believe that the world leaders are truly afraid. Perhaps more afraid of that than of nuclear war. So the amount of death and destruction that could happen if everybody cut loose at the same time, is so horrifying, my guess is that there's a human restraint involved in this, but that technically, it's already game over. >> Phil, Cybergeddon, I love that term, because that's a part of our theme here, is apocalypse now or later? Industrial IoT, or IIoT, or the Internet, all these touch points are creating a surface area that for penetration's purposes, any packet can get in. Nation-states, malware, you name it. It's all problem. But this is the new war battleground. This is now digital Cybergeddon. Forget the wall on the southern border, physical wall. We're talking about a digital wall. We have major threats going on to our society in the United States, and global. This is new, rules of engagement, or no rules of engagement on how to compete in a digital war. This is something that the government's supposed to protect us for. I mean, if someone drops troops in California, physical people, the government's supposed to stop that. But if it's a digital war, it's packets. And the companies are responsible for all this. This doesn't make any sense to me. Break it down, what's the problem? And how do we solve this? >> Sure, well the problem is is that we're actually facing different kinds of threats than we were typically used to facing in the past. So in the past when we go to war, we may have a problem with a foreign country, or a conflict is coming up. We tend to, and by we I mean the United States, we tend to think of these things as we're going to send troops in, or we're going to actually have a physical fight, or we're going to have some other kind of decisive culmination of events, end of a conflict. What we're dealing with now is very different. And it's actually something that isn't entirely new. But the adversaries that we're facing now, so let's say China, Russia, and Iran, just to kind of throw them into some buckets, they think about war very differently. They think about the information space more broadly, and partially because they've been so used to having to kind of be catching up to America in terms of technology, they found other ways to compete with America, and ways that we really haven't been focusing on. And that really, I would argue, extends most prominently to the information space. And by the information space I'm speaking very broadly. I'm talking about, not just information in terms of social media, and emails, and things like that, but also things like what we're talking about today, like IIoT. And these are new threat landscapes, and ones where our competitors have a integrated way of approaching the conflict, one in which the state and private sectors kind of are molded or fused or at least are compelled to work together and we have a very different space here in the United States. And I'm happy to unpack that as we talk about that today, but what we're now facing, is not just about technical capabilities, it's about differences in governing systems, differences in governing paradigms. And so it's much bigger than just talking about the technical specifics. >> Evan, I want you to weigh in on this because one of the things that I feel strongly about, and this is pretty obvious from the commentary, and experts I talk to is, the United States has always been good at defending itself physically, you know war, in being places. Digitally, we've been really good at offense, but terrible on defense, has been the metaphor. I spoke with former four-star General Keith Alexander, who ran the NSA and was first commander of the cyber command, who is now the CEO of IronNet. He and I were talking on-camera and privately and he's saying, "Look it. "we suck at defense digitally. "We're great at offense, we can take someone out "on the offense." But we're talking about IoT, about monitoring. These are technical challenges. This is network nerds, and software engineers have to solve this problem with the prism of defense. This is a new paradigm. This is what we're kind of getting to. And Mark, you kind of addressed it. But this is the challenge. IoT is going to create more points that we have to defend that we suck now at defending, how are we going to get better. This is the paradox. >> Yeah, I think that's certainly accurate. And one of our problems here is that as a society we've always been open. And that was how the Internet was born. And so we have a real paradigm shift now from a world in which the U.S. was leading an open world, that was using the Internet for, I mean there have been problems with security since day one, but originally the Internet was an information-sharing exercise. And we reached a point in human history now where there are enough malicious hackers that have the capabilities we didn't want them to have, but we need to change that outlook. So, looking at things like Industrial IoT, what you're seeing is not so much that this is the battlefield in specific, it's that everything like it is now the battlefield. So in my work specifically we're focused more on economic problems. Economic conflicts and strategies. And if you look at the doctrines that have come out of our adversaries in the last decade, or really 20 years, they very much did what Phil said, and they looked at our weaknesses, and one of those biggest weaknesses that we've always had is that an open society is also unable necessarily to completely defend itself from those who would seek to exploit that openness. And so we have to figure out as a society, and I believe we are. We're running a fine line, we're negotiating this tightrope right now that involves defending the values and the foundational critical aspects of our society that require openness, while also making sure that all the doors aren't open for adversaries. And so we'll continue to deal with that as a society. Everything is now a battlefield and a much grayer area, and IoT certainly isn't helping. And that's why we have to work so hard on it. >> I want to talk about the economic piece on the next talk track of rounds. Theft, and intellectual property that you cover deeply. But Mark and Phil, this notion of Cybergeddon meets the fact that we have to be more defensive. Again, principles of openness are out there. I mean, we have open source. There is a potential path here. Open source software has been, I think, depending on who you talk to, fourth generation, or fifth, depending on how old you are, but it's now mainstream enough now. Are we ever going to get to a formula where we can actually be strong in defense as well as just offense with respect to protecting digitally? >> Phil, do you want that? >> Well, yeah, I would just say that I'm glad to hear that General Alexander is confident about our offensive capabilities. But one of the... To NSA that is conducting these offensive capabilities. When we talk about Russia, Iran, China, or even a smaller group, like let's say an extremist group or something like that, there's an integration between command and control, that we simply don't have here in the States. For example, the Panasonic and Sony examples always come to mind, as ones where there are attacks that can happen against American companies that then have larger implications that go beyond just those companies. So and this may not be a case where the NSA is even tracking the threat. There's been some legislation that's come out, rather controversial legislation about so-called hacking back initiatives and things like that. But I think everybody knows that this is already kind of happening. The real question is going to be, how does the public sector, and how does the private sector work together to create this environment where they're working in synergy, rather than at cross purposes? >> Yeah, and this brings up, I've heard this before. I've heard people talk about the fact that open source nation states can actually empower by releasing tools in open source via the Dark Web or other vehicles, to not actually have, quote, their finger prints, on any attacks. This seems to be a tactic. >> Or go through criminals, right? Use proxies, things like that. It's getting even more complicated and Alexander's talked about that as well, right? He's talked about the convergence of crime and nation-state actions. So whereas with nation-states it's already hard-attributed enough, if that's being outsourced to either whether it's patriotic hackers or criminal groups, it's even more difficult. >> I think you know, Keith is a good friend of all of ours, obviously, good guy. His point is a good one. I'd like to take it a little more extreme state and say, defense is worth doing and probably hopeless. (everyone laughs) So, as they always say, all it takes is one failure. So, we always talk about defense, but really, he's right. Offense is easy. You want to go after somebody? We can get them. But if you want to play defense against a trillion potential points of failure, there's no chance. One way to say this is, if we ignore individuals for a moment and just look at nation-states, it's pretty clear that any nation-state of size, that wants to get into a certain network, will get in. And then the question will be, Well, once they're in, can they actually do damage? And the answer is probably yeah, they probably can. Well, why don't they? Why don't they do more damage? We're kind of back to the original premise here, that there's some restraint going on. And I suspect that Keith's absolutely right because in general, they don't want to get attacked. They don't want to have to come back at them what they're about to do to your banks or your grid, and we could do that. We all could do that. So my guess is, there's a little bit of failure on our part to have deep discussions about how great our defenses either are, or are not, when frankly the idea of defense is a good idea, worthwhile idea, but not really achievable. >> Yeah, that's a great point. That comes up a lot where it's like, people don't want retaliation, so it's a big, critical event that happens, that's noticeable as a counterstrike or equivalent. But there's been discussion of the, I call it "the slow bleed" where they push the line of where that is, like slowly infiltrate, and just cause disruption and inconvenience, as a tactic. This has become something we're seeing a lot of. Whether it's misinformation campaigns on fake news, to just disrupting operations slowly over time, and just kind of, 1,000 paper cuts, if you will. Your guys' thoughts on that? Is that something you guys see out there that's happening? >> Well, you saw Iran go after our banks. And we were pushing Iran pretty hard on the sanctions. Everybody knows they did that. It wasn't very much fun for anybody. But what they didn't do is take down the entire banking system. Not sure they could, but they didn't. >> Yeah, I would just add there that you see this on multiple fronts. You see this is by design. I'm sure that Mark is talking about this in his report but... they talk about this incremental approach that over time, this is part of the problem, right? Is that we have a very kind of black or white conception of warfare in this country. And a lot of times, even companies are going to think, well you know, we're at peace, so why would I do something that may actually be construed as something that's warlike or offensive or things like that? But in reality, even though we aren't technically at war, all of these other actors view this as a real conflict. And so we have to get creative about how we think about this within the paradigm that we have and the legal strictures that we have here in this country. >> Well there's no doubt at least in my non-expert military opinion, but as someone who is a techie, been on the Internet from day one, all my life, and all those tools, you guys as well, I personally think we're at war. 100%, there's no debate on that. And I think that we have to get better policy around this and understand it better. Because it's happening. And one of the obvious areas that we see in the news everyday, it's Huawei and intellectual property theft. This is an economic impact. I mean just look at what's happening in Brexit in the U.K. If that was essentially manipulated, that's the ultimate smart bomb, is to just destroy their financial system, which ended up happening through that misinformation. So there are economic realizations here, Evan,that not only come from the misinformation campaigns and other attacks, but there's real value with intellectual property. This is the report you put out. Your thoughts? >> There's very much an active conflict going on in the economic sphere, and that's certainly an excellent point. I think one of the most important things that most of the world doesn't quite understand yet, but our adversaries certainly understand, is that wars are fought for usually, just a few reasons. And there's a lot of different justification that goes on. But often it's for economic benefit. And if you look at human history, and you look at modern history, a lot of wars are fought for some form of economic benefit, often in the form of territory, et cetera, but in the modern age, information can directly and very quite obviously translate into economic benefit. And so when you're bleeding information, you're really bleeding money. And when I say information, again, it's a broad word, but intellectual property, which our definition, here at INVNT/IP is quite broad too, is incredibly valuable. And so if you have an adversary that's consistently removing intellectual property from what I would call our information ecosystem, and our business ecosystem, we're losing a lot of economic value there, and that's what wars are fought over. And so to pretend that this conflict is inactive, and to pretend that the underlying economy and economic strength that is bolstered or created by intellectual property isn't critical would be silly. And so I think we need to look at those kinds of dynamics and the kind of Gerasimov Doctrine, and the essential doctrine of unrestricted warfare that came out of the People's Republic of China are focused on avoiding kinetic conflict while succeeding at the kinds of conflict that are more preferable, particularly in an asymmetric environment. So that's what we're dealing with. >> Mark and Phil, people waking up to this reality are certainly. People in the know are that I talk to, but generally speaking across the board, is this a woke moment for tech? This Armageddon now or later? >> Woke moment for politicians not for tech, I think. I'm sure Phil would agree with this, but the old guard, go back to when Keith was running the NSA. But at that time, there was a very clear distinction between military and economic security. And so when you said security, that meant military. And now all the rules have changed. All the ways CFIUS works in the United States have changed. The legislation is changing, and now if you want to talk about security, most major nations equate economic security with national security. And that wasn't true 10 years ago. >> That's a great point. That's really profound, I totally agree. Phil. >> I think you're seeing a change in realization in Washington about this. I mean, if you look at the cybersecurity strategy of 2018, it specifically says that we're going to be moving from a posture of active defense to one of defending forward. And we can get into the discussion about what those words mean, but the way I usually boil down is it means, going from defending, but maybe a little bit forward, to actually going out and making sure that our interests are protected. And the reason why that's important, and we're talking about offense versus defense here, obviously the reason why, from what Mark was saying, if they're already in the networks, and they haven't actually done anything, it's because they're afraid of what that offensive response could be. So it's important that we selectively demonstrate what costs we could impose on different actors for different kinds of actions, especially knowing that they're already operating inside of our network. >> That's a great point. I mean, I think that's again another profound statement because it's almost like the pin in the grenade. Once they pull it, the damage is done. Again, back to our theme, Armageddon, now or later? What's the answer to this, guys? Is it the push to policy conversation and the potential consequences higher? Get that narrative going. Is it more technical protection in the networks? What's some of the things that people are talking about and thinking about around this? >> And it's really all of the above. So the tough part about this for any society and for our society is that it's expensive to live in a world with this much insecurity. And so when these kind of low-level conflicts are going on, it costs money and it costs resources. And companies had to deal with that. They spent a long time trying to dodge security costs, and now particularly with the advent of new law like the GDPR in Europe, it's becoming untenable not to spend that defensive money, even as a company, right? But we also are looking at a deepening to change policy. And I think there's been a lot of progress made. Mark mentioned the CFIUS reforms. There are a lot of different essentially games of Whack-A-Mole being played all around the world right now figuring out how to chase these security problems that we let go too long, but there's many, many, many fronts that we need to-- >> Whack-A-Mole's a great example. The visualization of that is just horrendous. You know, not the ideal scenario. But I got to get your point on this, because one of the things that comes up all the time in our conversations in theCUBE is, the government's job is to protect our securities. So again, if someone came in, and invaded my town in Palo Alto, it's not my responsibility to fight for the town. Maybe defend my own house. But if I'm a company being attacked by Russia, or China or Iran, isn't it the government's responsibility to protect me as a citizen and the company doing business there? So again, this is kind of the confusion that people have. If somebody's going to defend their hack, I certainly got to put security practices in place. This is new ground for the government, digitally speaking. >> When we started this INVNT/IP project, it was about seven years ago. And I was told by a very smart guy in D.C. that our greatest challenge was going to be American corporations, global corporations. And he was absolutely right. Literally in this fight to protect intellectual property, and to protect the welfare even of corporations, our greatest enemies so far have been American corporations. And they lobby hard for China, while China is busy stealing from them, and stealing from their company, and stealing from their country. All that stuff's going on, on a daily basis and they're in D.C. lobbying in favor of China. Don't do anything to make them mad. >> They're getting their pockets picked at the same time. And they're trying to do business in China. They're getting their pockets picked. That's what you're saying. >> They're going for the quarterly earnings report and that's all. >> So the problem is-- >> Yeah so-- >> The companies themselves are kind of self-inflicted wounds here for them. >> Yes. >> Yeah, just to add to that, on this note, there have been some... Business to settle interest. And this is something you're seeing a little bit more of. There's been legislation through CFIUS and things like that. There have been reforms that discourage the flow of Chinese money in the Silicon Valley. And there's actually a measurable difference in that. Because people just don't want to deal with the paperwork. They don't want to deal with the reputational risk, et cetera, et cetera. And this is really going to be the key challenge, is having policy makers not only that are interested in addressing this issue, because not all of them are even convinced it's a problem, if you can believe it or not, but having them interested and then having them understand the issue in a way that the legislation can actually be helpful and not get in the way of things that we value, such as innovation and entrepreneurialism and things like that. So it's going to take sophisticated policy-making and providing incentives so that companies actually want to participate and helping to make America safer. >> You're so right about the politicians. Capitol Hill's really not educated. I mean I tell my kids, and they ask the same questions, just look at Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai present to the government. They don't even know what an Android phone versus an iPhone is, nevermind what the Internet, and how this global economy works. This has become a makeup problem of the personnel in Capitol Hill. You guys see any movement? I'm seeing some change with a new guard, a new generation of younger people coming in. Certainly from the military, that's an easy when you see people get this. But a new generation of young millennials who are saying, "Hey, why are we doing this the old way?" and actually becoming more informed. Not being the lawyer at law-making. It's actually more technically savvy. Is there any movement, any bright hope there? >> I think there's a little hope in the sense that at a time when Congress has trouble keeping the lights on, they seem to have bipartisan agreement on this set of issues that we're talking about. So, that's hopeful. You know, we've seen a number of strongly bipartisan issues supported in Congress, with the Senate, with the House, all agreeing that this is an issue for us all, that they need to protect the country. They need to protect IP. They need to extend the definition of security. There's no argument there. And that's a very strange thing in today's D.C. to have no argument between the parties. There's no error between the GOP and the Democrats as far as I can tell. They seem to all agree on this, and so it is hopeful. >> Freedom has its costs and I think this is a new era of modern freedom and warfare and protection and all these dynamics are changing, just like Cloud 2.0 is changing application developers. Guys, this is a really important topic. Thank you so much for coming on, appreciate it. Love to do a follow-up on this again with you guys. Thanks for sharing your insight. Some great, profound statements there, appreciate it. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> It's been a CUBE Power Panel here from Palo Alto, California with Evan Anderson, Mark Anderson, and Phil Lohaus. Thank you guys for coming on. Power Panel: The Next Battleground in Industrial IoT. Security is a big part of it. Thanks for watching, this has been theCUBE. (energetic music)

>> live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering a ws public sector summit by Amazon Web services. >> Welcome back, everyone. You are watching the Cuban. We're kicking off our day two of our live coverage a ws public sector summit here in our nation's capital. I'm Rebecca Knight co hosting with John Fer Yer John. It's great to be here. 18,000 people having important conversations around around governments and cloud computing. Let's extract the signal from the noise. Let's do with the Cube. Does best, >> Yeah, I mean, this is to me a really exciting event because it's got the confluence of what we love tech and cloud computing and all the awesomeness of that and that enables. But even in Washington, D. C. With the backdrop against tech clash on this, you know, narrative run tech for illah tech for bad, bad check whatever you want to call it. Anti trust is a lot of narratives around that there's a huge story around check for good. So I think there's an interesting balance there around the conversations, but this is world of heavy hitters are this week You've got senior people at the government level here, you have senior tech people hear all kind of meddling and trying to figure out howto let the tail winds of cloud computing Dr Change within government against this backdrop of tech for ill as Jay Carney, whose the global marketing policy guy for Amazon on reports to Jeff Bezos, former Obama press secretary. He's super savvy on policy, super savvy on tech. But this is a really big point in time where the future's gonna be determined by some key people and some key decisions around the role of technology for society, for the citizens, United States, for nation states as people start to figure out the role of data and all the impact of this so super exciting at that level, but also dangerous and people are telling a little bit. But I also want to run hard. That's pretty much the big story. >> So let's let's let's get into this tech backlash because you're absolutely right. Through the public, sentiment about technology and the tech behemoths has really soured. The regulators are sharpening their blades and really paying much more attention, uh, particularly because so many people say, Hey, wait a minute, why? How does Google and Facebook know all this stuff about me, but what do you think? What are we hearing on the ground in terms of where regulation is going? Before, before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about this idea of regulators working closely with the innovators, observing but not meddling. I mean, do you think that that's that's That's these dollars underwears We're going in? >> Well, not really. I think that that's where people wanted to go in. I think right now the the surprise attack of tech taking over, if you will in the minds of people and or without Israel or not, it's happened, right? So I was talking yesterday around how the Internet, when Bill Clinton was president, really grew a little bit slower than the pace of this today. But they did a good job of managing that they had private sectors take over the domain name system. We saw that grow that created in the open Web and the Web was open. Today it's different. It's faster in terms of technology innovation, and it's not as open. You have Facebook, LinkedIn and these companies that have silos of data, and they're not sharing it with cyber security General Keith Alexander, former head of the NSA and the first commander of cyber command in the U. S. The United States under Obama. He pointed out that visibility into the cyber attacks aren't there because there's no sharing of data. We heard about open data and knishes from a think tank. The role of data and information is going to be a critical conversation, and I don't think the government officials are smart enough and educated enough yet to understand that So regulatory groups want to regulate they don't know how to. They're reaching out the Amazons, Google's and the Facebook to try to figure out what's going on. And then from there they might get a path. But they're still in the early stages. Amazon feels like they're not harming anyone there. Lower prices, fast delivery, more options. They're creating an enablement environment for tons of startups, so they feel like they're not harming anyone. You're the antitrust, but if they're going to being monopolizing the market place, that's another issue. But I still think Amazon still an enabling mode, and I think you know, they're just running so hard. It's going so fast, I think there's gonna be a big challenge. And if industry doesn't step up and partner with government, it's going to be a real mess. And I think it's just moving too fast. It's very complicated. Digital is nuanced. Now. You get the role of data all this place into into into effect there. >> Well, you're absolutely right that it's going fast. Teresa Carlson on the other day talking about eight of US growth, UH, 41% year over year and she said, Cloud is the new normal. The cloud cloud is here more and more governments on state and local, really recognizing and obviously international countries to recognize that this, this is they're adopting these cloud first approach is, >> yeah, I mean, I think the first approach is validated 100%. There's no debate. I think it's not an ah ha moment. Cloud Israel. Amazon has absolutely proven since the CIA deal in 2013 that this is a viable strategy for government to get to value fast, and that is the whole speed of cloud game. It's all about time to value with agility. Eccentric center. We've been talking about that with Dev Ops for a long, long time. The real thing that I think's happening that's going on. That's kind of, you know, to read the tea leaves and we'll hear from Corey Quinn. Our host at large will go on later. This is a new generation of talent coming on board and this new generation. It feels like a counterculture mindset. These are Dev ops, mindset, people not necessarily Dev ops like in the Cloud Computing Way. They're younger, they're thinking differently, and they think like Amazon not because they love Amazon, because that's their nature. Their got their getting content in a digital way, their digital natives. They're born into that kind of cultural mindset. Of what is all this nonsense red tape? What's the bottlenecked in solving these problems? There's really not a good answer anymore, because with cloud computing and machine learning an A I, you can solve things faster. So if you expose the data, smart people go well. That's a problem that could be song. Let's solve it. So I think there's going to be a resurgence is going to be a renaissance of of younger people, kind of in a counter culture way that's going to move fast and an impact society and I think it's gonna happen pretty quickly over the next 10 years. >> Well, that's one of the things that's so inspiring about being at a conference like this one a ws public sector summit, Because we are hearing getting back to what you just said. We're solving problems and these air problems about not just selling more widgets. This's actually about saving lives, helping people, delivery of healthcare, finding Mr Missing Persons and POWs who are missing in action. >> I mean, the problems could be solved with technology now for goodwill, I think will outweigh the technology for Ayla's Jay Carney calls it. So right now, unfortunately, was talking about Facebook and all this nonsense that happened with the elections. I think that's pretty visible. That's painful for people to kind of deal with. But in the reality that never should have happened, I think you're going to see a resurgence of people that's going to solve problems. And if you look at the software developer persona over the past 10 to 15 years, it went from hire. Some developers build a product ship it market. It makes some money to developers being the frontlines. Power players in software companies there on the front lines. They're making changes. They're moving fast, creating value. I see that kind of paradigm hitting normal people where they can impact change like a developer would foran application in society. I think you're gonna have younger people solving all kinds of crisis around. Whether it's open opioid crisis, healthcare, these problems will be solved. I think cloud computing with a I and machine learning and the role of data will be a big catalyst. >> But money, the money, the money is the thing we're going to have Cory Quinn on later talking about this this talent gap because there are people who are, As you said, they're young people who are motivated to solve these problems, and they want to work for mission driving institutions. What better mission, then helping the United States government >> just heard in the hallway? This has been the I've heard this multiple times here. This show I just heard someone saying Yeah, but that person's great. I can't keep them. What's happening is with the talent is the people that they need for cloud computing. Khun, get a job that pays three times Mohr orm or at the private sector. So, you know, Governor doesn't have stock options, >> right? All right, all right. If >> you're, ah, machine learning, >> people call girls in the lounge. >> Eso all kinds of different diners. But I think this mission driven culture of working for society for good might be that currency. That will be the equivalent stock option that I think is something that we were watching. Not haven't seen anything yet, But maybe that will happen. >> Paid in good feelings way. We've got a lot of great guests. Wave already teed up. We've got your E. Quinn. Bill Britain from Cal Poly to talk more about ground station. We have alien Gemma Smith of YSL Itics, uh, and Jameel Jaffer. >> Think ground station. But the biggest surprise for me and the show so far has been ground station that that product has got so much traction. That's ridiculous. I thought it would be kind of cool. Spacey. I like it, but it's turning into a critical need for a I ot I mean, I was just talking with you. Came on about the airplane having WiFi on the plane. We all like Wow, we expected now, but you go back years ago is like, Oh, my God. I got WiFi on the plane. That's a ground station, like dynamic people going. Oh, my God. I can provision satellite and get data back, all for io ti anywhere in the world. So that is pretty killer. >> Excellently. I'm looking forward to digging in with you with many guests today. >> Good. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. For John. For your stay tuned, you are watching the Cube.

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Washington DC. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington DC. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of John Furrier. We are excited to welcome to the program, General Keith Alexander former NSA Director, the first Commander to lead the US Cyber Command, Four-star General with a 40 year career. Thank you so much for coming theCUBE, we are honored, we are honored to have you. >> It is an honor to be here. Thank you. >> So let's talk about cyber threats. Let's start there and have you just give us your observations, your thoughts on what are the most pressing cyber threats that keep you up at night? >> Well, so, when you think about threats, you think about Nation States, so you can go to Iran, Russia, China, North Korea. And then you think about criminal threats, well all the things like ransomware. Some of the Nation State actors are also criminals at night so they can use Nation State tools. And my concern about all the evolution of cyber-threats, is that the attacks are getting more destructive, the malware has more legs with worms and the impact on our commercial sector and our nation, increasingly bigger. So you have all those from cyber. And then I think the biggest impact to our country is the theft of intellectual property, right. That's our future. So you look out on this floor here, think about all the technical talent. Now imagine that every idea that we have, somebody else is stealing, making a product out of it, competing with us, and beating us. That's kind of what Huawei did, taking CISCO code to make Huawei, and now they're racing down that road. So we have a couple of big issues here to solve, protect our future, that intellectual property, stop the theft of money and other ideas, and protect our nation. So when you think about cyber, that's what I think about going to. Often times I'll talk about the Nation State threat. The most prevalent threats is this criminal threat and the most, I think, right now, important for us strategically is the theft of intellectual property. >> So why don't we just have a digital force to counter all this? Why doesn't, you know, we take the same approach we did when we, you know, we celebrated the 75th anniversary D-day, okay, World War II, okay, that was just recently in the news. That's a physical war, okay. We have a digital war happening whether you call it or not. I think it is, personally my opinion. I think it is. You're seeing the misinformation campaigns, financial institutions leaving England, like it's nobody's business. I mean it crippled the entire UK, that like a big hack. Who knows? But its happening digitally. Where's the forces? Is that Cyber Command? What do you do? >> So that's Cyber Command. You bring out an important issue. And protecting the nation, the reason we set up Cyber Command not just to get me promoted, but that was a good outcome. (laughing) But it was actually how do we defend the country? How do we defend ourselves in cyber? So you need a force to do it. So you're right, you need a force. That force is Cyber Command. There's an issue though. Cyber Command cannot see today, attacks on our country. So they're left to try to go after the offense, but all the offense has to do is hit over here. They're looking at these sets of targets. They don't see the attacks. So they wouldn't have seen the attack on Sony. They don't see these devastating attacks. They don't see the thefts. So the real solution to what you bring up is make it visible, make it so our nation can defend itself from cyber by seeing the attacks that are hitting us. That should help us protect companies in sectors and help us share that information. It has to be at speed. So we talk about sharing, but it's senseless for me to send you for air traffic control, a letter, that a plane is located overhead. You get it in the mail seven days later, you think, well-- >> Too late. >> That's too late. >> Or fighting blindfolded. >> That's right. >> I mean-- >> So you can't do either. And so what it gets you to, is we have to create the new norm for visibility in cyber space. This does a whole host of things and you were good to bring out, it's also fake news. It's also deception. It's all these other things that are going on. We have to make that visible. >> How do you do that, though? >> What do you do? I do that. (laughing) So the way you do it, I think, is start at the beginning. What's happening to the network? So, on building a defensible framework, you've got to be able to see the attacks. Not what you expect, but all the attacks. So that's anomaly detection. So that's one of the things we have to do. And then you have to share that at network speed. And then you have to have a machine-learning expert system AI to help you go at the speeds the attacker's going to go at. On fake-news, this is a big problem. >> Yeah. >> You know. This has, been throughout time. Somebody pointed out about, you know, George Washington, right, seven fake letters, written to say, "Oh no, I think the King's good." He never wrote that. And the reason that countries do it, like Russia, in the elections, is to change something to more beneficial for them. Or at least what they believe is more beneficial. It is interesting, MIT has done some studies, so I've heard, on this. And that people are 70% more like to re-Tweet, re-Tweet fake news than they are the facts. So. >> Because it's more sensational, because it's-- >> That's food. It's good for you, in a way. But it's tasty. >> Look at this. It's kind of something that you want to talk about. "Can you believe what these guys are doing? "That's outrageous, retweet." >> Not true. >> Not true. Oh, yeah, but it makes me mad just thinking about it. >> Right, right. >> And so, you get people going, and you think, You know, it's like going into a bar and you know, you go to him, "He thinks you're ugly." and you go to me, and you go, "He thinks you're ugly." (laughs) And so we get going and you started it and we didn't even talk. >> Right, right. >> And so that's what Russia does. >> At scale too. >> At scale. >> At the scale point. >> So part of the solution to that is understanding where information is coming from, being able to see the see the environment like you do the physical environment at speed. I think step one, if I were to pick out the logical sequence of what'll happen, we'll get to a defensible architecture over the next year or two. We're already starting to see that with other sectors, so I think we can get there. As soon as you do that, now you're into, how do I know that this news is real. It's kind of like a block-chain for facts. How do we now do that in this way. We've got to figure that out. >> We're doing our part there. But I want to get back to this topic of infrastructure, because digital, okay, there's roads, there's digital roads, there's packets moving round. You mentioned Huawei ripping off CISCO, which takes their R and D and puts it in their pockets. They have to get that. But we let fake news and other things, you've got payload, content or payload, and then you've got infrastructure distribution. Right, so, we're getting at here as that there are literally roads and bridges and digital construction apparatus, infrastructure, that needs to be understood, addressed, monitored, or reset, because you've had email that's been around for awhile. But these are new kinds of infrastructure, but the payload, malware, fake news, whatever it is. There's an interaction between payload and infrastructure. Your thoughts and reaction to that as a Commander, thinking about how to combat all this? >> I, my gut reaction, is that you're going to have to change, we will have to change, how we think about that. It's not any more roads and avenues in. It's all the environment. You know, it's like this whole thing. Now the whole world is opened up. It's like the Matrix. You open it up and there it is. It's everything. So what we have to do is think about is if it's everything, how do we now operate in a world where you have both truths and fiction? That's the harder problem. So that's where I say, if we solve the first problem, we're so far along in establishing perhaps the level so it raises us up to a level where we're now securing it, where we can begin to see now the ideas for the pedigree of information I think will come out. If you think about the amount of unique information created every year, there are digital videos that claim it's doubling every year or more. If that's true, that half of, 75% of it is fiction, we've got a big road to go. And you know there is a lot of fiction out there, so we've got to fix it. And the unfortunate part is both sides of that, both the fiction and the finding the fiction, has consequences because somebody says that "A wasn't true, "That person, you know, they're saying, he was a rapist, "he was a robber, he was a drugger," and then they find out it was all fake, but he still has that stigma. And then the person over here says, "See, they accused me of that. "They're out to get me in other areas. "They can exclaim what they want." >> But sometimes the person saying that is also a person who has a lot of power in our government, who is saying that it's fake news, when it's not fake news, or, you know what, I-- >> So that's part of the issue. >> It's a very different climate >> Some of it is fake. Some of it's not. And that's what makes it so difficult for the public. So you could say, "That piece was fake, "maybe not the other six." But the reality is, and I think this is where the media can really help. This is where you can help. How do we set up the facts? And I think that's the hardest part. >> It's the truth. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a data problem. And you know, we've talked about this off camera in the past. Data is critical for the systems to work. The visibility of the data. Having contextual data, the behavioral data. This gets a lot of the consequences. There's real consequences to this one. Theft, IP, freedom, lives. My son was video-gaming the other day and I could hear his friends all talking, "What's your ping start word? "What's your ping time? "I got lag, I'm dead." And this is a video game. Military, lagging, is not a game. People are losing their lives, potentially if they don't have the right tactical edge, access to technology. I know this is near and dear to your heart. I want to get your reaction. The Department of Defense is deploying strategies to make our military in the field, which represents 85% infantry, I believe, some statistic around that number, is relying on equipment. Technology can help, you know, that. Your thoughts on, the same direction. >> Going to the Cloud. Their effort to go to the Cloud is a great step forward, because it addresses just what you're saying. You know, everybody used to have their own data centers. But a data center has a fixed amount of computational capability. Once you reach it, you have to get another data center, or you just live with what you've got. In the Cloud if the problem's bigger, elasticity. Just add more corridors. And you can do things now that we could never do before. Perhaps even more importantly, you can make the Clouds global. And you can see around the world. Now you're talking about encrypted data. You're talking about ensuring that you have a level of encryption that you need, accesses and stuff. For mobile forces, that's the future. You don't carry a data center around with an infantry battalion. So you want that elasticity and you need the connectivity and you need the training to go with it. And the training gets you to what we were just talking about. When somebody serves up something wrong, and this happened to me in combat, in Desert Storm. We were launched on, everybody was getting ready to launch on something, and I said, "This doesn't sound right." And I told the Division Commander, "I don't agree. "I think this is crazy. "The Iraqis are not attacking us down this line. "I think it's old news. "I think somebody's taken an old report that we had "and re-read it and said oh my God, they're coming." And when we found out that was a JSTARS, remember how the JSTARS MTI thing would off of a wire, would look like a convoy. And that's what it was. So you have to have both. >> So you were on the cusp of an attack, deploying troops. >> That's right. >> On fake information, or misinformation, not accurate-- >> Old information. >> Old information. >> Old information. >> Old, fake, it's all not relevant. >> Well what happens is somebody interprets that to be true. So it gets back to you, how do you interpret the information? So there's training. It's a healthy dose of skepticism, you know. There are aliens in this room. Well, maybe not. (laughing) >> As far as we know. >> That's what everybody. >> But what a fascinating anecdote that you just told, about being in Desert Storm and having this report come and you saying, "Guys, this doesn't sound right." I mean, how often do you harken back to your experience in the military and when you were actually in combat, versus what you are doing today in terms of thinking about these threats? >> A lot. Because in the military, when you have troops in danger your first thought is how can I do more, how can I do better, what can I do to get them the intelligence they need? And you can innovate, and pressure is great innovator. (crunching sound) And it was amazing. And our Division Commander, General Griffith, was all into that. He said, "I trust you. "Do whatever you want." And we, it was amazing. So, I think that's a good thing. Note that when you go back and look at military campaigns, there's always this thing, the victor writes the history. (laughing) So you know, hopefully, the victor will write the truthful history. But that's not always the case. Sometimes history is re-written to be more like what they would like it to be. So, this fake news isn't new. This is something where I think journalists, historians, and others, can come together and say, "You know, that don't make sense. "Let's get the facts." >> But there's so much pressure on journalists today in this 24-hour news cycle, where you're not only expected to write the story, but you're expected to be Tweeting about it, or do a podcast about it later, to get that first draft of history right. >> So it may be part of that is as the reporter is saying it, step back and say, "Here's what we've been told." You know, we used to call those a certain type of sandwich, not a good-- (laughing) If memory serves it's a sandwich. One of these sandwiches. You're getting fed that, you're thinking, "You know, this doesn't make sense. "This time and day that this would occur." "So while we've heard this report. "It's sensational. "We need to go with the facts." And that's one of the areas that I think we really got to work. >> Journalism's changing too. I can tell you, from we've talked, data drives us. We've no advertising. Completely different model. In-depth interviews. The truth is out there. The key is how do you get the truth in context to real-time information for those right opportunities. Well, I want to get before we go, and thanks for coming on, and spending the time, General, I really appreciate it. Your company that you've formed, IronNet, okay, you're applying a lot of your discipline and knowledge in military cyber and cutting-edge tech. Tell us about your company. >> So one of the things that you, we brought up, and discussed here. When I had Cyber Command, one of the frustrations that I discussed with both Secretary Gates and Secretary Panetta, we can't see attacks on our country. And that's the commercial sector needs to help go fix that. The government can't fix that. So my thought was now that I'm in the commercial sector, I'll help fix the ability to see attacks on the commercial sector so we can share it with the government. What that entails is creating a behavioral analytic system that creates events, anomalies, an expert system with machine-learning and AI, that helps you understand what's going on and the ability to correlate and then give that to the government, so they can see that picture, so they have a chance of defending our country. So step one is doing that. Now, truth and lending, it's a lot harder than I thought it would be. (laughing) You know, I had this great saying, "Nothing is too hard "for those of us who don't have to do it." "How hard can this be?" Those were two of my favorite sayings. Now that I have to do it, I can say that it's hard, but it's doable. We can do this. And it's going to take some time. We are getting traction. The energy sector has been great to work with in this area. I think within a year, what we deploy with the companies, and what we push up to the Cloud and the ability to now start sharing that with government will change the way we think about cyber security. I think it's a disruptor. And we have to do that because that's the way they're going to attack us, with AI. We have to have a fast system to defend. >> I know you got to go, tight schedule here, but I want to get one quick question in. I know you're not a policy, you know, wonk, as they say, or expert. Well, you probably are an expert on policy, but if we can get a re-do on reshaping policy to enable these hard problems to be solved by entrepreneurs like yourself expertise that are coming into the space, quickly, with ideas to solve these big problems, whether it's fake news or understanding attacks. What do the policy makers need to do? Is it get out of the way? Do they rip up everything? Do they reshape it? What's your vision on this? What's your opinion? >> I think and I think the acting Secretary of Defense is taking this on and others. We've got to have a way of quickly going, this technology changes every two years or better. Our acquisition cycle is in many years. Continue to streamline the acquisition process. Break through that. Trust that the military and civilian leaders will do the right thing. Hold 'em accountable. You know, making the mistake, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, says a great thing, "Go quickly to failure so we can get "to success." And we in the military say, "If you fail, you're a dummy." No, no, try it. If it doesn't work, go on to success. So don't crush somebody because they failed, because they're going to succeed at some point. Try and try again. Persevere. The, so, I think a couple of things, ensure we fix the acquisition process. Streamline it. And allow Commanders and thought leaders the flexibility and agility to bring in the technology and ideas we need to make this a better military, a better intelligence community, and a better country. We can do this. >> All right. All right, I'm thinking Rosie the Riveter. We can do this. (laughing) >> We can do it. Just did it. >> General Alexander, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> From the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering HOSHO CON 2018. Brought to you by HOSHO. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE special live coverage here in Las Vegas for the first ever, Blockchain Security Conference. Really discussing security as an industry, it's called HOSHO CON, put on by HOSHO. We're here with the Co-Founder and CEO of HOSHO and main supporters of sponsoring this project or event HOSHO CON. We have Yo Sub Kwon, who is the CEO and Co-Founder. Good to see you. >> Good to see you, good to be here. Hey thanks for putting this on. I've interviewed Hartej, your Co-founder, in Toronto the Futures conference. We've had many great conversations on theCUBE. But when we talked about HOSHO CON, this conference, he really wanted to do it as an industry conference. Not as just a HOSHO event. >> (Yo agrees) >> This is really key to you guys culture here at HOSHO your company. >> Yeah. >> Take a minute and explain the event. Why this event? Why the format? And that it is open? >> I mean basically, you know, like we've been to just so many events over the, like I think we've done like 80 events this year, and the topic of conversation is, you know, around investing, it's around ICO's, it's around all these things and security touches all of those and I just feel like, and we all felt it and like the other security companies felt it too, that it just wasn't a topic that was discussed in great enough depth especially given the increasing amounts of hacks and theft and all these problems that relate directly to security. And I just feel like it's really important for us as an industry to discuss, you know, what security practices are good? What should be done? How you should do them? What resources are available to companies to learn more about security? And what resources don't exist and need to be developed? And that needs to be done in a collaborative way. Well congratulations and props to you guys for really sponsoring this and taking the leadership role in the industry but again you guys are humble and it's a good way to do it. Is to have these conversations. So thank you for doing that, appreciate it and thanks for having theCUBE here. We really appreciate it. The question I want to ask you is: I've noticed a trend here, first of all a lot of smart people here, so it's like, it's not a massive, no IPO, ICO pitch competitions, this is really down and dirty security. >> Yeah. >> Okay, black hat, white hat but it's kind of a intercultural vibe it's the community. >> Yeah. >> Coming together. But also two kind of tracks are developing there's the crypto security and then there's cyber security threats coming up. Because you said it's touching on all these points. And you're hearing, even hearing a little bit of IOT and hardware, we had Rivetz on earlier the CEO Steven Sprague so a lot of different solutions and a lot of different opportunities, a lot of different vulnerabilities. Can you explain the landscape of how the players are here, where are they coming from? >> Okay, yeah. >> What's their backgrounds? >> Absolutely I mean there are definitely, a lot of brilliant minds here and that was one of the goals of HOSHO CON is to bring people that are of all different, you know, parts of the industry whether they're, they're layers or they're information security experts or they're, you now, regulators or they're it just, developers bring them all into the same room and to kind of discuss these problems that you know, plague all of us and you know a developer's going to have a much different perspective and solution than a lawyer and but those thing can work together and the problems might still be the same. And so we've been in the industry for just like, even though HOSHO's a young company, the people that are on our team, myself, I've been in, I got into Bitcoin eight years ago, like we just have this network of people that are in the industry, have seen the kind of like cyclic nature of, you know, like a gigantic influx of people come in, these problems arise where, you know, entrepreneurs are like really focused on like growing, getting traction and then they focus less on their security, it goes to the wayside and then these big hacks happen and then the industry kind of smartens up and everything you know starts getting a little bit closer to what seems you know maybe safe or like approachable for a growth trajectory and then another gigantic influx happens and then the same thing. And so what we really need to do is like when that next big influx happens is to have standards in place to have things that an entrepreneur can just turn to and be like: "Okay, this is what I need to do "if I want to be considered credible in this industry "and I want to protect my users and my investors." >> Can you talk about some of the top conversations that are going on here, because I think that's a great point? People want you know legitimacy, they want solutions that work, that are credible and then maintain kind of, I won't say enterprise grade, but commercial grade reliable so that people can focus on building up their companies and or preparing for the growth. What is some of the top conversations? >> A lot of it's just learning about what other people do, like even with like Rivetz, we're putting, they're using the trust executions based on like what's already on billions of devices and you know basically letting people know that that space exists on this hardware and that they can be used for all these different purposes to validate you know data going in. And, you know, there's been conversations around custody. I was on a panel earlier today about custody and basically the way I felt like it left off and the conclusion was that there is a long way to go on custody but it is incredibly crucial. Big institutional players that want to enter the markets and want to put their money into a regulated custodian they're, it's difficult to do so even with registered custodian's existing because the limitations that they have in understanding the technology and being able to provide support for all the different digital assets that exist. >> So we're reporting this morning the SEC herein the US has tightened the noose on the ICO-funded startups. I think the story originated out of Decrypt Media but essentially the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, is cracking down and they're going back and saying: "You got to refund some of that money." >> Yeah. >> Because of violations. That's one regulatory thing but there's also, there's software that writes these smart contracts. You guys are in that business. The software is software money, security is critical. How stable is this becoming in your mind? What's the to do items? How should a company who want's to either use the ICO process or and or use token economics to fuel their business model they got to be secure on the business front? >> Yeah. So basically smart contracts were so new when we first got in to it that people just didn't know how to develop securely in them and so there were just critical mistakes being made all over the place. We've seen over the last year a lot of improvement on that front, more libraries are being developed and people are writing consistently more secure contracts. But now what we're seeing is contracts are getting increasingly complex and with additional complexity, because it's software there's room for, you know more problems and I think that it's going to, it's going to be an interesting challenge going forward, there's thing like formal verification I think that has a huge place in the future regarding smart contracts but it's there's a lot of tools that need to be developed that's one of the things that we worked on and we're really excited about is Meadow Suite because that's software that let's you develop smart contracts. We built it intentionally with security analysis in mind and then we made it more full featured to become a development tool for writing smart contracts and developing a protocols. And so I think the more of those type of things that you see come out that bring it more to feature parity to what software developers are used to if they're say building a web application it makes it a lot easier to adhere to good practices and write secure code. >> And also kind a not have to do manual audits? >> Yeah. >> I mean at the end of the day you want to get to some sort of automation. >> Absolutely. >> Framework. >> I mean we've already automated a lot of the things that we do. But and there's still a lot left to do but we know that there is a lot left that can be automated and we hope that eventually the tools are just put into developers hands were they can do most of that work themselves. >> Yo Sub take your CEO hat off from HOSHO for a minute put your industry hat on. >> Okay. >> What are some of the names here that, and conversations, topics that you find interesting personally? >> Okay, I mean. >> (John laughs) >> A lot of people that we brought here are like our friends, we know them right? And so like I was talking to. >> Your kind of celebrities. >> I was talking with like TokenMarket earlier and like, you know, we're partners with them and they really, they're really great guys and like some of the stuff that they are trying to do and you know just listening to what other companies are trying to do with like security tokens that seem to be the thing that really moving forward. And I'm kind of fascinated like, we try to stay agnostic you know like when we're like looking at all these different technologies. But then like someone explains something to you and you're awe man that's really cool. >> Yeah. (both laughs) >> And there's some good minds here. What's the coolest thing you've seen so far? >> Well I've been locked in, I've been locked behind doors in a lot of meetings so far but the, let's see, I think what Unchained Capital is working on is really sweet. They basically, I mean like I think their business model makes a lot of sense. Like basically they hold your crypto's so you maintain exposure to it and then they'll issue you a loan. They can like turn around a loan like in 24 hous, you just hand then a bunch of Bitcoin and then they'll just give you cash and then you can you know you have that cash and then you still maintain exposure through crypto if you pay it all back you get your crypto back. (laughs) >> So it's collateralized crypto? >> Exactly I mean like that makes perfect sense to me. Like you know it's just like as long as you can liquidate that crypto and Bitcoin or Ethereum like those are big enough markets now where you can easily liquidate. Well that's awesome. Thanks for putting on this event and I want to get back to HOSHO. How's business going? You're the CEO, Commander in Chief, what's going on with the company? How's things going? >> Yeah. >> Quick update. >> Well everything's crazy right, like we're moving quickly and the next steps are Asia. We really want to basically penetrate those markets. Only, we don't have as much coverage there as we would like but having spent some time there earlier this year doing some reconnaissance it's a crazy, crazy space over there. There's a lot of action happening, there's a lot of adoption. People are really enthusiastic about it but security almost seems like six months to a year behind North America and Europe as far as what exchanges are requiring, what investors are demanding of their portfolio companies. And so I think that now that they've had such major hacks happen over the last six months they're starting to realize. >> Major hacks talking about 60 Million. I mean I heard numbers up to 300 plus million. >> Yeah. >> I mean these are it's not like five dollars out of your wallet. >> Yeah. >> This is massive. >> Like over a billion dollars has been stolen in some capacity and like it's been pretty crazy yeah, so. >> Where's the big vulnerability? Exchanges, is it the DApps, where's the holes? >> They're all over the place but the biggest numbers definitely come from exchanges. Exchanges just need to be far more responsible and just, I feel like a lot of it is just negligence. They're growing so quickly that they don't pay attention to, you know, putting resources into educating their staff on really simple security practices. You know things like phishing and social engineering, like things that were good security practices still are good security practices. And a lot of those attacks are not even anything like some new exploit of a new technology it's the same kind of thing of like phishing, social engineering, sims swapping, you know, poor user access control, bad passwords. >> I mean the basics. >> Yeah. >> But this is what growth does to you you've point earlier. As more people start feeling growth there's more exposure service area wise. >> Yeah. >> New dynamics are kicking in. >> Well I'm starting to see new exchanges that are popping up that are you know taking security very seriously and the way they're treating it is that is their differentiator but in my mind like security shouldn't be a differentiator. Everybody should. >> (John laughs) >> If you're an exchange and you're holding massive amounts of other people's assets you should take security very seriously. That should just be a default, a standard. >> You have to be differentiating strategy with security it's not, it doesn't make sense. >> Marketing 101 you shouldn't be different, it should be standard. (both laughs) >> I mean if that's the state of the art, this is the problem. This highlights the problem. >> It does yeah. >> Alright so what's, what's the future for this event? How do you guys see this unfolding? Obviously this is the first inaugural event here HOSHO CON, How do you see it evolving? >> I think a lot of conversations should hopefully spur from this and we want to make this a yearly event. So we're definitely going to take a lot of the feedback from people that attended and see what they want, what they really enjoyed, what they really want to talk about. And even I think, a lot, since we're recoding all of the talks we'll be putting them up online at some point and I think it'd be really good to see like what the transition is like next year from like, where we were in some of these problems and addressing those problems you know a year from now. Like I think that will be really exciting. >> You guys are expanding in Europe, HOSHO good job with that. Who's the kind of clientele that you guys have? Is it ICO's? Is it companies? It is enterprise? Who are your target customers? >> So we have a lot of companies that are ICO's for sure. We have more exchanges and protocols joining those ranks. And then we are trying to move into enterprise as well. We made a partnership with Telefónica and developed a partnership with them to be able to sell to more enterprise clients and what they need. >> And what's your value proposition that you guys are offering? >> We are, well, we do smart contract audits, we do penetration testing. Those are things that a lot of companies in this space need. And then also we've been helping with security architecture and cryptocurrency assessments. >> And tooling, tools for development. >> And tooling, yeah we're trying to do our part. I mean we can't and won't do it alone but we try to develop things that, if we develop anything that's useful from a security perspective, we try and make it available for everyone. >> Yo Sub thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate your time and congratulations, it's a great event. >> Thank you. >> HOSHO CON sponsored by HOSHO and other's in the industry, it's an industry event, it's not just their company, it's their friends all coming together to solve the major problems with security, making it standard, making it safe and supporting the growth with the community. It's theCUBE covering live here in Vegas. I'm John Furrier stay with us for more CUBE coverage after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

live from Orlando Florida it's the cube coverage conf 18 got to you by Splunk hey welcome back to Splunk kampf 18 conf 8 hashtag Splunk conf 18 my name is Dave Volante I'm here with my co-host a minimun you watching the cube the leader and live tech coverage there's two days of wall-to-wall coverage is our seventh year stew at conf we're seeing the evolution of Splunk from kind of analyzing log files to having deep business impact across the organization and doing more with data Jim Nichols is here is the DevOps manager in Improv odda healthcare company good to see it thanks for coming to the cube again thank you for having me thank you so tell us about M privada and then love the the title DevOps in the title we'll get into that sure first the company yep so in providers the healthcare IT security company and we provide health court healthcare organizations around the world with secure Identity Management multi-factor authentication and enable just ubiquitous access to whatever sort of medical systems that they need to get into and we really try to enable healthcare by establishing trust between the medical providers the patient's the data and do that all securely and seamlessly so that we're not Security's not a part of their workflow it's just in there and they don't have to think about it and they just get access to what they need when they need it so I hear yeah on your website trust between people technology and information reminds me a little bit of a certain software company that branding is all around us today that is there seems like there's a line up between what Splunk does in your company's mission oh they're there absolutely is and you know like Splunk in privada has a very strong on premises in the data center footprint and we're expanding that into the cloud and that's where most of my work is is kind of managing those cloud systems that kind of complement the on-premise appliance and we're looking at how that's going to move into the cloud and what that means and it's very similar to like what Splunk is done with Splunk enterprise and now moving into Splunk cloud and we're actually a customer's point cloud everything that we do that we could possibly do is out in the cloud not in the data center in you you've got DevOps two new titles maybe bring us inside you know what that means that improv odda you usually think about you know moving fast things are changing all the time it's themes that we heard in the keynote this morning so explain that a little bit yeah so the way the DevOps model that we follow at improv odd is really like kind of a consultant model where we've got a small team of a very senior very expert DevOps folks and they kind of get assigned out to the agile teams and they're a team member that gets planned into the Sprint's plan and what we're going to be dealing and really kind of make sure that those deployment events or the DevOps work that we need to do is planned in as part of the normal development work and that consultancy model is really good in regards to Splunk because we run the Splunk infrastructure we do all the training we do some of the basic dashboard work and make sure that no matter what the team products onshore offshore wherever they are we're all looking at data exactly the same way exact same dashboards and it really kind of forces the knowledge to get shared throughout the organization across products and how we think about things and so Splunk you know DevOps isn't like a tool or a thing or whatever but Splunk is definitely a great like enabling forcing function to make sure that we are sharing metrics how the system works what we're learning on and all that stuff in a really consistent way so you know the t-shirt met tricks I've seen that I have what do you think that means oh so it's like the same old same old man metrics so huh what does that mean to you guys you have new metrics do you have a sort of new set of KPIs that you're using ourselves so I think the metrics part is that it's maybe 10 years ago the IT industry figured out how to get every single metric about CPU memory disk ram and all the tool there are a lot of different tools for doing it you know Splunk zabbix data dog others I don't know if it's okay to talk about other products or whatever but you know when you get like a CPU alert that goes off all right the CPU usage is 92% is that good or is that bad it sounds kind of high and you get that alert you look at that CPU chart and it's like there's no context there's no information and you know you might be designing your system to run at 90% if it's doing some batch processing or something so it's like metrics it's like you need to get the alert you need to know what's going on but you really need to like get the insight into what it is and that's why a lot of this stuff that they show this morning at the keynote was really exciting where you've got the metrics in one place the logs in one place it's all in one place so you get that alert and you can look at it and then see what else is going on without having to like jump into a bunch of different systems and how about DevOps your DevOps in the title what is how do you guys look at DevOps what is DevOps to you and where did it come from and where is it going I think that I've been doing DevOps my entire career since I got out of college and I came out of WPI and was studying like performance evaluation and it's like how do you measure systems get the insight how do you make sure they're running efficiently and I think that what I was kind of doing on the performance engineering side kind of intersected with like the agile movement and folks get into agile development teams and trying to integrate that knowledge and the metrics and how you're gonna run it in production into that sort of product building process so I feel like I've been doing DevOps for a long time and called it different things over the years you know for for us at improv Adi it's really about enabling our developers to deliver functionality to our customers as fast and as safely as possible so you know we're in the healthcare industry and you know the the systems that we build and integrate and support support life right like these are doctors that are using these systems they have to work a hundred percent all the time and that adds some interesting wrinkles where you wouldn't really think about doing continuous deployment for the system that you know somebody's going to get logged into to get into their medical records you might want to be able to move that quickly if you need to if there's an emergency bug fix but the level of safety and testing that we need to put in before it actually gets into production that's really where we spend a lot of our time in DevOps is making sure that that's a fish but that's fast and then when it goes from going from like a test environment into production if it takes an hour for office is not that big of a deal we're doing like you know multi week to week release cycles or even longer and so as far as like DevOps a lot of the movement has been around like continuous delivery and deployment and we kind of use that to optimize like the test build and debug cycle and that way when we know when we get to production that's going to go smoothly and that there aren't going to be any unanticipated how do security fit into this conversation sometimes you know the the buzzword term you know dev sac ops is you know how to how to Splunk in your practice look at security well so you know where a security company you know you know and we wouldn't really ever call anything dev sack offs because security is ingrained in a part of every single thing that we do walking into the building every day when we badge in I think about it our security people like is the building's secure all the way into like what we're ending up doing in the system so obviously Splunk is a huge supporter of that so we've got audit trail information on all the systems and we can know not only what you are system administrators and DevOps users are doing but like what docker is doing what commands it runs and really get at a very very low level of detail and we literally have everything that ever happens on those systems is audited and we've built a whole set of alerts around things that we know about things that we think might be a problem and we use kind of our expertise in the healthcare security space and then apply that to all our cloud systems so it's like we never have a team called dev sack ops it's like it's it's just what we do it's the first most important thing that we think about every day is security so that's why it's a little bit different for us but we like some of the ideas and I've you know we've started doing some work around automated security testing on the application code you know running like static analysis dynamic analysis integrating web scanning tools into our CI CD pipelines so that it just makes it that much easier you know and not wait till the end before you ship it or whatever we have it right in the development process what's the regime for your organization you know the classic development and operations throw it over the fence and okay DevOps brings those together but you still got a spectrum of skills and presumably you've got people on you know some kind of maturity model where you've got sort of newer folks maybe guys coming out of college like you were several years ago and you're training them and sort of you're one unified team at the same time you you might have some degrees of specialization so what have you found is the right regime for the DevOps team well I think the consultant model that we've established works really well and we've got a very senior DevOps person that's on the agile team and they may do some of the really tricky bits but once we get out of the part that only us as DevOps can do we really try to get the developers to do it so a lot of that's like Splunk training how do you build a dashboard here's maybe a simple example dashboard now you do the next panel that sort of thing to try to level everybody up and get everybody on the same page you know turned in terms of this divide between like Devon Ops when I actually joined and provided DevOps was NIT it was managed as part of like our SAS management offering along with like a lot of the other applications that IT managed and one of the very first things that our senior vice-president did was like they get to be in development they can't Oregon is a we were working together we're all on the same teams we're all doing all that stuff but just mentally organizationally get rid of the divide put them in engineering and report to the VP of engineering just like the developers development managers and architects and that's the way we've just get rid of any organizational or thought divide between the between the groups Jim you mention alerts just now and we've heard a few times you get alerts and you know I imagined the beeper in the old days now you get an alert on your mobile phone where are we in terms of being able to take action on those alerts have the machines take action for us is that an objective that you have is that just too damn scary your thoughts yeah so my first my first impression is that it's a little scary we do have some problems that occur with some frequency right so losing an Amazon ec2 instance happens you know 10 times out of 100 instances in the cloud on a given month so there's certain types of those failures that we've automated around just because you have to as a part of just doing business in the cloud so why do the Amazon like auto scaling groups all that stuff we've got a couple of you know issues that happen that we want to just resolve faster and repair faster they don't impact customer experience or user experience but we just want to get on top of those sooner so we've started to automate some of the very thin small carefully controlled controlled use cases so that if the alert were to go up spurious lis I know it's not gonna then take down a system that was running and finding good false positives exactly so only were places where false positives can be tolerated is where we're looking to do that yeah you don't want to take the humans out of the equation just yet or maybe ever for some of the simple things we we have and we can and we will but some of the complicated things it's like just stop and look at it and think about it for 90 seconds and then make the action we're to come up with how to program that 90 seconds of thought is like maybe talk about it be complete about it off oh this way okay let me explain it to somebody a second time and make sure it's right and then go and do a quake like just philosophically that's where I have to get a sheen to do that so Jim you're wearing the revolution a word shirt my understanding in privada is now one of two two-time Award winners if I got it right you're a commander Award winner maybe you could explain what that means and what it means to you and your company sure so the commander award is really about getting you know other folks in your organization using Splunk looking you know either looking at a dashboard at a report or digging down into the data and you know so why I won the award was really around like our use of docker containers so it was really important to me that developers people in DevOps people and support don't really have like a strong like network operations function but those types of folks that they're all looking at the exact same thing all the exact same tools all the exact same data so kind of as part of that mission it's just I hold trainings I hold office hours I've got one of my DevOps folks down here today or at the conference to then kind of spread the Splunk gospel show people how to use it if they've got questions all that sort of stuff and then the other part of that is really just showing people what we can do and advocating for the making decisions based on the data we have it in data you know I have it in spunk let's look at that to make the decision so that's really what that commander Awards kind of all about so if you're doing the doctor stuff you're a bit of a trailblazer so we were only a few years into this container initiative I was walking the show floor I even saw some companies looking at like the serverless technology you know what what led you to kind of put these pieces together and you know it tell us a little bit about kind of the community that you lean on to learn these things yes so the the technology trend around containers was very strong and very fast like with Amazon's especially like that when they came out with their ECS orchestration it was really fast and very strong and really the the technology trend kind of led me into it and then the developers being like we're gonna use docker we're gonna have to figure you're gonna have to figure out how to Splunk it so really from the very beginning I've gone through each and every sort of possible way to get data out of a dr. container in this Splunk and part of that is you know networking with the Splunk folks pretty good relationship with the with the fella that wrote the logging driver that went into the dock or open source project and like looked at the code reviews and all that and then it's really just trying it out trying things out and eventually kind of got to the sweet spot now where I've got the developers are all using local docker compose and that's configured a certain way then when we run in Amazon it's using Amazon ECS where I've also been working on kubernetes for a while and the way that you configure your docker in each of those environments is totally different the code running in the is exactly the same so we've realized that vision but the runtime environment is totally different so kind of where we're at now the config may be totally different on the logging drivers but in the end when you load up Splunk and you look at it and Splunk it's exactly the same whether it's your local laptop and amazon in production staving staging or whatever and I think my kind of favorite part in terms of like the Splunk commander award and getting folks using Splunk is that the way that I have it set it up set up now there is literally no local log file for the developers on their laptop it just doesn't exist it all goes out to Splunk so you can do a lot with grep and text pad and stuff on your local local laptop and I get that but now that they're in Splunk and it's just it's been a great way to get folks on board with what its gonna look like in production I know what it looks like in dev so I can make sure that my logs are good I'm logging enough and not too much and all that stuff so that's really where docker is really software is the same now we've got the logging the same the tools are all the same but then the runtime bits those are a little bit different and that's abstracted away hopefully Jim what does a DevOps guy want from a vendor you got a lot of open source stuff that you're working with you got a lot of different tooling what do you look for in a vendor what's what's the thumbs-up and positives and what what stuff really kind of ticked you off well so you know we're we're a key trusted vendor for a lot of healthcare organizations so I can kind of talk about how I we prison if a customer or a user comes up comes to us with a problem doesn't matter what it is it's our problem and we go through exhaustive lengths to identify where the problem actually is and so that may be in our code that maybe in another vendors code some third party some open source thing doesn't matter we're after the evidence we're after the facts we don't care if it's not in our code we're gonna help our customer be successful and that's what we would want from any vendor right so if we contact them with a support case we've got a problem we don't want any of this uh looks like a firewall problem or something like get to the data get to the facts and if you can prove if the vendor can prove that the problem is somewhere else great but we want a reproducible test case we want this whole finger-pointing thing is like it's horrible inside of an organization in terms of like running operational systems but then when you've got like as your Google Cloud Amazon Cloud Salesforce service now all these things all working together like you can't people just going to own the problem basically and that's what that's what we do right so if the customer comes to us with an issue it's our problem and then we go from there and figure it out and that's really what any vendor that we work with especially like a production operational sort of system that's really what we look for so you look for collaboration and focus on solving the problem not not the finger-pointing you know a virtual single throat to choke if you will yeah exactly hm well thanks very much for joining us on the cube is great to have you yeah thank you thank you very much appreciate I keep right - everybody stew and I'll be back hashtag Splunk conf 18 you're watching the cube right back [Music]

>> Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Welcome back to The Cube. We are live at NAB 2017. I'm Lisa Martin. Very, very excited, kind of geeking out right now to be joined by our next two guests. Sam Blackman, the co-founder and CEO of AWS Elemental, welcome to The Cube. >> Sam: Thank you so much. >> And we have NASA astronaut, Tracy Caldwell Dyson. Both of you, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Today has been a very historic day for technology and space. This was the first ever live 4k video stream that happened between you on Earth, Sam, and Doctor Peggy Whitson, aboard the International Space Station. >> Sam: Yes. >> Wow. Tell us about that. >> It was truly amazing to be part of history and the amount of technology that came into play to make this possible. You know, sitting in the conference room in NAB in the middle of Las Vegas, seeing astronauts 250 miles ahead, going around the Earth, 17,000 miles an hour and a seamless, beautiful 4k picture. It was mind blowing. Hard to believe it's happened still. >> I can't even imagine. I'm getting goosebumps for you. Tell us some of the things that Dr. Whitson shared about her experiences. What was the interaction like? >> Well, Commander Whitson and Colonel Fisher was also in the interview and that guy is hilarious, by the way. >> Yeah, he is. >> He is hilarious. They talked about how advanced imaging technology really helps NASA perform experiments and bring experiments that are happening on the space station down to Earth for researchers to use that data and discover how the world works inside the universe. Some of the really interesting examples revolved around some experiments they showed. With thin film technology they had a very small, metallic structure that they could pull water out of and then corral that water, convert it into a spherical shape and in the 4k resolution, you could just see every element of that thin film in a way that looked like it was right next to us. I mean, it was transformative. >> Tracy: Yeah. >> I bet it was. Well, speaking of transformative, this was, I mentioned, a really historic event for a number of reasons. Obviously, for those of us on the ground, for AWS Elemental. But, Tracy, from your perspective, you've been in space for 188... I had it here somewhere, hours. >> Yeah, days. >> You've been on STS118, you've been on the Soyuz to the station on expeditions 23 and 24. What does this capability now mean in the life of an astronaut? >> I think what it does is it helps us bring the experience to everybody here on Earth. It is so hard to capture what we are not just seeing, but experiencing. The richness, the detail, the vividness of the colors and how they're changing are all a part of looking at our beautiful planet. And just from that alone, being able to bring that to the American people, the world, really, is, I think to me a great relief. Because it grieves me to think about how in the world I would describe this beautiful, magnificent view to everybody back home. >> I can imagine. You've done extra-vehicular space walks. >> Tracy: Yes. >> And I can imagine it's indescribable. >> It is. And from the fact you're looking at our planet from 250 miles above, you see the curvature of the Earth, you see it moving at a super high speed, you don't feel the wind in your face, but there's no doubt you're traveling very fast. Just the fact that you are out in the vacuum of space. If you could bring parts of that experience to people back home ... I'm excited to think about how that would transform just the way people think, not to mention the way that they act towards our planet. >> I also think inspiration ... We were talking before we went on that you were about 14 when the Challenger incident happened, we all kind of remember exactly where we were, and that really, a teacher being in space was so inspirational to you. Can you imagine shifting the conversation and what this technology is able to do inspiring the next generation of people that want to be the next Tracy Caldwell Dyson? >> Well, I think what the technology does today, especially in imaging capabilities, is it provides so much more detail than I could even describe. That a young person today watching that, and our generation today is so visual, that they're going to pick up on things that I wouldn't even think to describe to them. And it's going to capture their imagination in ways that are astounding. Compared to I, who, just the sheer knowledge of knowing there was a teacher that was going into space, propelled me to work really hard. I can only imagine what this generation's going to be capable of because of the images that we're bringing to them. >> It's so exciting. Sam, this is really kind of the tip of the iceberg. From AWS Elemental's perspective, first of all, you just had a rebrand. But what does this mean for the future of the video ecosystem? >> Well, I think it really shows you how the technology components came come together to create unbelievable pictures no matter where you are on the planet or in space. We had a live 4k encoder on the space station itself sending down signals to Johnson Space Center, then Johnson Space Center sending redundant links to Las Vegas, here, and the convention center. And then processing the video, the interview with Tracy, here in the space center-- or, here in NAB and then using the cloud to distribute that all over the world. So these 4k images, which take a significant amount of bandwidth, can be created in space, delivered here, produced and delivered anywhere in the world using the power of the cloud and advanced networking technology. And that's pretty amazing, when you think about it. >> Lisa: It really is. I don't think the three of us are smiling big enough. >> I know. It hurts! >> There's so much relief in this face. >> Lisa: I can imagine >> I bet. >> I absolutely can imagine, I think. One of the cool things about-- This is our first time at NAB with The Cube, but we're here: Media, entertainment, Hollywood. What this shows is this transcendence of technology to space. And there's so much interest in space. In fact, Tracy, you were an advisor to Jessica Chastain on "The Martian," which is probably pretty exciting. >> Oh, absolutely. It is. >> But just the transcendence of that and how this technology can be used to power things that everybody can understand, movies and things. But also the future of space exploration, which I can imagine, right now in the era of the space shuttle being retired now, depending on Soyuz rockets to get to the space station as the next vehicle is delivered, this must be quite inspirational for you as an astronaut, as not only is the next vehicle in development, but also, the exploration of Mars. In fact, you were just last month with President Trump. >> Tracy: Yes. >> As they signed a bill. What are your thoughts about that and how do you see imaging technology being an instrumental part of Mars exploration? >> In so many ways, but at the top is the momentum. Like you said, with Hollywood has captured space in some real endearing ways. And the images from NASA, from the human space flight program to Hubble to deep space, it is propelling ... it's momentum. And I think we need that momentum, especially with our young folks because they're going to be the ones, let's face it, who are going to be in the best condition to be on the planet of Mars. So, if we can continue to feed them the images as lifelike as we can, so that they feel they're there, I think we are heading in the right direction to actually being there. >> Wow, fantastic! Congratulations to both of you. Thank you both so much for joining us on The Cube. We can't wait to see what's next. >> Sam: Thank you so much. >> Tracy: Thank you. Thank you. >> Well, for Tracy and Sam, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube live from NAB 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back. (funky music)