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Barak Schoster, Palo Alto Networks | CUBE Conversation 2022


 

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cube, and we have a great guest here. Barack Shuster. Who's in Tel-Aviv senior director of chief architect at bridge crew, a part of Palo Alto networks. He was formerly the co-founder of the company, then sold to Palo Alto networks Brock. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation. >>Thanks John. Great to be here. >>So one of the things I love about open source, and you're seeing a lot more of the trend now that talking about, you know, people doing incubators all over the world, having open source and having a builder, people who are starting companies, it's coming more and more, you you're one of them. And you've been part of this security open source cloud infrastructure infrastructure as code going back a while, and you guys had a lot of success. Now, open source infrastructure as code has moved up to the stack, certainly lot going down at the network layer, but developers just want to build security from day one, right? They don't want to have to get into the, the, the waiting game of slowing down their pipelining of code in the CIC D they want to move faster. And this has been one of the core conversations this year is how to make developers more productive and not just a cliche, but actually more productive and not have to wait to implement cloud native. Right. So you're in the middle of it. And you've got you're in, tell us, tell us what you guys are dealing with that, >>Right? Yeah. So I hear these needles working fast, having a large velocity of releases from many of my friends, the SRAs, the DevOps, and the security practitioners in different companies. And the thing that we asked ourselves three years ago was how can we simplify the process and make the security teams an enabler instead of a gatekeeper that blocks the releases? And the thing that we've done, then we understood that we should do is not only doing runtime scanning of the cloud infrastructure and the cloud native clusters, but also shift left the findings and fixings the remediation of security issues to the level of the code. So we started doing infrastructure is good. We Terraform Kubernetes manifests cloud formation, server less, and the list goes on and we created an open source product around it, named checkup, which has an amazing community of hundreds of contributors. Not all of them are Palo Alto employees. Most of them are community users from various companies. And we tried to and succeeded to the democratic side is the creation of policy as code the ability to inspect your infrastructure as code and tell you, Hey, this is the best practice that you should use consider using it before applying a misconfigured S3 bucket into production, or before applying a misconfigured Kubernetes cluster into your production or dev environment. And the goal, >>The goal, >>The goal is to do that from the ID from the moment that you write code and also to inspect your configuration in CGI and CD and in runtime. And also understand that if there is any drift out there and the ability to fix that in the source code, in the blueprint itself. >>So what I hear you saying is really two problems you're solving. One is the organizational policies around how things were done in a environment before all the old way. You know, the security teams do a review, you send a ticket, things are waiting, stop, wait, hurry up and wait kind of thing. And then there's the technical piece of it, right? Is that there's two pieces to that. >>Yeah, I think that one thing is the change of the methodologies. We understood that we should just work differently than what we used to do. Tickets are slow. They have priorities. You have a bottleneck, which is a small team of security practitioners. And honestly, a lot of the work is repetitive and can be democratized into the engineering teams. They should be able to understand, Hey, I wrote the code piece that provision this instance, I am the most suitable person as a developer to fix that piece of code and reapply it to the runtime environment. >>And then it also sets the table for our automation. It sets the table for policies, things that make things more efficient scaling. Cause you mentioned SRS are a big part of this to dev ops and SRE. Those, those folks are, are trying to move as fast as possible at scale, huge scale challenge. How does that impact the scale piece become into here? >>So both themes Esri's and security teams are about a link to deploying application, but new application releases into the production environment. And the thing that you can do is you can inspect all kinds of best practices, not only security, best practices, but also make sure that you have provision concurrencies on your serverless functions or the amount of auto-scaling groups is what you expect it to be. And you can scan all of those things in the level of your code before applying it to production. >>That's awesome. So good, good benefits scales a security team. It sounds like too as well. You could get that policy out there. So great stuff. I want to really quickly ask you about the event. You're hosting code two cloud summit. What are we going to see there? I'm going to host a panel. Of course, I'm looking forward to that as well. You get a lot of experts coming in there. Why are you having this event and what topics will be covered? >>So we wanted to talk on all of the shifts, left movement and all of the changes that have happened in the cloud security market since inception till today. And we brought in great people and great practitioners from both the dev ops side, the chaos engineering and the security practitioners, and everybody are having their opinion on what's the current status state, how things should be implemented in a mature environment and what the future might hold for the code and cloud security markets. The thing that we're going to focus on is all of the supply chain from securing the CCD itself, making sure your actions are not vulnerable to a shut injection or making sure your version control system are configured correctly with single sign-on MFA and having branch protection rules, but also open source security like SCA software composition analysis infrastructure as code security. Obviously Ron thinks security drifts and Kubernetes security. So we're going to talk on all of those different aspects and how each and every team is mitigating. The different risks that come with. >>You know, one of the things that you bring up when you hear you talking is that's the range of, of infrastructure as code. How has infrastructure as code changed? Cause you're, you know, there's dev ops and SRS now application developers, you still have to have programmable infrastructure. I mean, if infrastructure code is real realize up and down the stack, all aspects need to be programmable, which means you got to have the data, you got to have the ability to automate. How would you summarize kind of the state of infrastructure as code? >>So a few years ago, we started with physical servers where you carried the infrastructure on our back. I, I mounted them on the rack myself a few years ago and connected all of the different cables then came the revolution of BMS. We didn't do that anymore. We had one beefy appliance and we had 60 virtual servers running on one appliance. So we didn't have to carry new servers every time into the data center then came the cloud and made everything API first. And they bill and enabled us to write the best scripts to provision those resources. But it was not enough because he wanted to have a reproducible environment. The is written either in declarative language like Terraform or CloudFormation or imperative like CDK or polluted, but having a consistent way to deploy your application to multiple environments. And the stage after that is having some kind of a service catalog that will allow application developer to get the new releases up and running. >>And the way that it has evolved mass adoption of infrastructure as code is already happening. But that introduces the ability for velocity in deployment, but also new kinds of risks that we haven't thought about before as security practitioners, for example, you should vet all of the open source Terraform modules that you're using because you might have a leakage. Our form has a lot of access to secrets in your environment. And the state really contains sensitive objects like passwords. The other thing that has changed is we today we rely a lot on cloud infrastructure and on the past year we've seen the law for shell attack, for example, and also cloud providers have disclosed that they were vulnerable to log for shell attack. So we understand today that when we talk about cloud security, it's not only about the infrastructure itself, but it's also about is the infrastructure that we're using is using an open source package that is vulnerable. Are we using an open source package that is vulnerable, is our development pipeline is configured and the list goes on. So it's really a new approach of analyzing the entire software bill of material also called Asbell and understanding the different risks there. >>You know, I think this is a really great point and great insight because new opera, new solutions for new problems are new opportunities, right? So open source growth has been phenomenal. And you mentioned some of those Terraform and one of the projects and you started one checkoff, they're all good, but there's some holes in there and it's open source, it's free, everyone's building on it. So, you know, you have, and that's what it's for. And I think now is open source goes to the next level again, another generational inflection point it's it's, there's more contributors there's companies are involved. People are using it more. It becomes a really strong integration opportunity. So, so it's all free and it's how you use it. So this is a new kind of extension of how open source is used. And if you can factor in some of the things like, like threat vectors, you have to know the code. >>So there's no way to know it all. So you guys are scanning it doing things, but it's also huge system. It's not just one piece of code. You talking about cloud is becoming an operating system. It's a distributed computing environment, so whole new area of problem space to solve. So I love that. Love that piece. Where are you guys at on this now? How do you feel in terms of where you are in the progress bar of the solution? Because the supply chain is usually a hardware concept. People can relate to, but when you bring in software, how you source software is like sourcing a chip or, or a piece of hardware, you got to watch where it came from and you gotta track track that. So, or scan it and validate it, right? So these are new, new things. Where are we with? >>So you're, you're you're right. We have a lot of moving parts. And really the supply chain terms of came from the automobile industry. You have a car, you have an engine engine might be created by a different vendor. You have the wheels, they might be created by a different vendor. So when you buy your next Chevy or Ford, you might have a wheels from continental or other than the first. And actually software is very similar. When we build software, we host it on a cloud provider like AWS, GCP, Azure, not on our own infrastructure anymore. And when we're building software, we're using open-source packages that are maintained in the other half of the war. And we don't always know in person, the people who've created that piece. And we do not have a vetting process, even a human vetting process on these, everything that we've created was really made by us or by a trusted source. >>And this is where we come in. We help you empower you, the engineer, we tools to analyze all of the dependency tree of your software, bill of materials. We will scan your infrastructure code, your application packages that you're using from package managers like NPM or PI. And we scan those open source dependencies. We would verify that your CIC is secure. Your version control system is secure. And the thing that we will always focus on is making a fixed accessible to you. So let's say that you're using a misconfigured backup. We have a bot that will fix the code for you. And let's say that you have a, a vulnerable open-source package and it was fixed in a later version. We will bump the version for you to make your code secure. And we will also have the same process on your run time environment. So we will understand that your environment is secure from code to cloud, or if there are any three out there that your engineering team should look at, >>That's a great service. And I think this is cutting edge from a technology perspective. What's what are some of the new cloud native technologies that you see in emerging fast, that's getting traction and ultimately having a product market fit in, in this area because I've seen Cooper. And you mentioned Kubernetes, that's one of the areas that have a lot more work to do or being worked on now that customers are paying attention to. >>Yeah, so definitely Kubernetes is, has started in growth companies and now it's existing every fortune 100 companies. So you can find anything, every large growler scale organization and also serverless functions are, are getting into a higher adoption rate. I think that the thing that we seeing the most massive adoption off is actually infrastructure as code during COVID. A lot of organization went through a digital transformation and in that process, they have started to work remotely and have agreed on migrating to a new infrastructure, not the data center, but the cloud provider. So at other teams that were not experienced with those clouds are now getting familiar with it and getting exposed to new capabilities. And with that also new risks. >>Well, great stuff. Great to chat with you. I want to ask you while you're here, you mentioned depth infrastructure as code for the folks that get it right. There's some significant benefits. We don't get it. Right. We know what that looks like. What are some of the benefits that can you share personally, or for the folks watching out there, if you get it for sure. Cause code, right? What does the future look like? What does success look like? What's that path look like when you get it right versus not doing it or getting it wrong? >>I think that every engineer dream is wanting to be impactful, to work fast and learn new things and not to get a PagerDuty on a Friday night. So if you get infrastructure ride, you have a process where everything is declarative and is peer reviewed both by you and automated frameworks like bridge and checkoff. And also you have the ability to understand that, Hey, once I re I read it once, and from that point forward, it's reproducible and it also have a status. So only changes will be applied and it will enable myself and my team to work faster and collaborate in a better way on the cloud infrastructure. Let's say that you'd done doing infrastructure as code. You have one resource change by one team member and another resource change by another team member. And the different dependencies between those resources are getting fragmented and broken. You cannot change your database without your application being aware of that. You cannot change your load Bonser without the obligation being aware of that. So infrastructure skullduggery enables you to do those changes in a, in a mature fashion that will foes Le less outages. >>Yeah. A lot of people getting PagerDuty's on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and on the old way, new way, new, you don't want to break up your Friday night after a nice dinner, either rock, do you know? Well, thanks for coming in all the way from Tel-Aviv really appreciate it. I wish you guys, everything the best over there in Delhi, we will see you at the event that's coming up. We're looking forward to the code to cloud summit and all the great insight you guys will have. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story. Looking forward to talking more with you Brock thanks for all the insight on security infrastructures code and all the cool things you're doing at bridge crew. >>Thank you, John. >>Okay. This is the cube conversation here at Palo Alto, California. I'm John furrier hosted the cube. Thanks for watching.

Published Date : Mar 18 2022

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host of the cube, and we have a great guest here. So one of the things I love about open source, and you're seeing a lot more of the trend now that talking about, And the thing that we asked ourselves The goal is to do that from the ID from the moment that you write code and also You know, the security teams do a review, you send a ticket, things are waiting, stop, wait, hurry up and wait kind of thing. And honestly, a lot of the work is repetitive and can How does that impact the scale piece become into here? And the thing that you can do is you can inspect all kinds of best practices, I want to really quickly ask you about the event. all of the supply chain from securing the CCD itself, You know, one of the things that you bring up when you hear you talking is that's the range of, of infrastructure as code. And the stage after that is having some kind of And the way that it has evolved mass adoption of infrastructure as code And if you can factor in some of the things like, like threat vectors, So you guys are scanning it doing things, but it's also huge system. So when you buy your next Chevy And the thing that we will And you mentioned Kubernetes, that's one of the areas that have a lot more work to do or being worked So you can find anything, every large growler scale What are some of the benefits that can you share personally, or for the folks watching And the different dependencies between and all the great insight you guys will have. I'm John furrier hosted the cube.

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Nick Schneider, Artic Wolf Networks | CUBE Conversation, September 2021


 

>> Viewers of our breaking analysis series know that we've been following the developments in cybersecurity for a number of years and of course, throughout the pandemic. Focusing on the permanent shifts that we see in cyber from remote work, distributed computing and technology advancements. We've reported how the adversaries are highly capable they're well-funded and they're motivated. And how they're constantly upping their game on defenders, island hopping, stealthily living off the land, planting self forming malware at various points in the digital supply chain, offering advanced ransomware as a service of the dark web to any disreputable individual with or without a high school diploma that may have access to a server and is brazen enough to steal from their company. We've also shared this chart from Optiv many, many times, it's a taxonomy of the cybersecurity landscape, and it is meant to make your eyes bleed, ask any CSO and they'll tell you they're drowning in fragmented tooling, technical debt, and their number one challenge is lack of talent. Not that their people aren't capable, they are, but CSOs just don't have enough of them. They can't hire fast enough or they can't retain qualified people with the talent war that's going on. Or they can't train people fast enough, or they just don't have the budget. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this video exclusive with Nick Schneider, president and CEO of Arctic Wolf Networks, Nick, so good to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. >> That's our pleasure. So Arctic Wolf networks, let's talk about the company, the problem, you heard my little narrative upfront. What are you guys all about? >> Yeah, so at its core, we're a cybersecurity technology company. You know, it's our belief that we've really pioneered the first full scale cloud native security operations platform and at its core, what we're trying to do as a business is make security operations something that's fast, easy and economical for really a company of any size and scale to implement with really two key components, one we're agnostic to the technology and the landscape of the technology that they have already implemented within their environment, and two, we can feather into really any organization, regardless of the skill set they have from a cybersecurity standpoint in house. And really the problem that we're setting out to solve, I think you illustrated well at the beginning of the show here is that it's our belief that the cybersecurity industry in a sense has failed the end user or failed the customer by throwing, you know, a myriad of different tools at them. And it's really, you know, our mission here as a company to end cyber risk. And it's our belief that through the cloud native platform that we've bought in the cybersecurity security operations cloud that we've built, that we can deliver the outcomes that have been promised over time to these customers, which at the end of the day, is really just to be safe and have their customer and have their business protected. >> So you guys are the experts. You can kind of provide a white glove service that essentially plugs in to my business. Is that right? And how easy is that to do, what do I have to do to, to set it up? How complicated is that for me, the customer? >> Yeah, so it's, it's very straightforward. We can implement our security operations platform, you know, in as short as a week and generally speaking, you know, about a month and we plug in really to the infrastructure that the customer has in place. And for some of our customers, that's very little and for some of our customers, most of our customers, that's quite a bit of technology. And the beauty of the way that we've built the platform is that we're really agnostic to that tech. So, we can take feeds from kind of any technology that are in place, that helps to augment the platform that we've built. And then we feather in kind of the technologies that we've built within the platform, into their existing infrastructure. And at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is give the customer visibility, you know, into the tools that they have, the gaps that they might have as a result of the tools, you know, in some cases, the duplication of efforts that they have, you know, between these tools and then deliver a security outcome or a protection that maybe they haven't otherwise felt as a business. And then outside of kind of the technology platform, we add what we call our concierge security team as a layer to the deliverable that we give to the customer. And why that's important is that not all customers are created equal and with regard to the skillset that they have in house, in that that concierge security platform allows us to kind of work with a customer at any kind of, you know, point along their security journey, regardless of the in-house technology talent that they have. >> Now, so I got to ask you, our largest footprint for the cube is in the heart of Silicon Valley. We love the valley, but I also love stories of high growth companies that are outside of Silicon Valley. You guys are in the Midwest in Minnesota, it's got some Compellent DNA in there. And I remember my, so my business friends, Phil Soren, and Larry Yasmin, you know them, Phil used to tell me, Dave, this is actually an advantage for us to be in the middle of the part of the country. There's a talent war going on, which back then was a lot less than it is today, even. So how do you see that? Are there advantages to you and being in that part of the country, or does it not matter because you're so distributed around the world? >> Yeah, I mean, I would follow a similar tune to Phil, right. I, you know, obviously worked at Compellent early and, you know, historically I've worked at other Minneapolis based technology companies and the reality is there's a really strong technology ecosystem in Minneapolis. And a lot of the, of the talent, you know, is not just in sales and marketing or just on the technical side, but it's in building high growth technology companies kind of from the ground up into, you know, large scale. And now we've seen not only the fortune 500 kind of base that we have here in Minneapolis, but also a growing contingency of larger technology companies using Minneapolis as at least, you know, one of the spokes against their hub, if not the hub themselves. And clearly my pedigree in history was out of Minneapolis based tech, you know, and I've moved to other locations throughout the country, but as we started to build out, you know, Arctic Wolf and what we wanted Artic Wolf's culture to look like, and as we started to lay out the foundation for what we wanted our growth to look like, it became very clear to myself, you know, our chairman and co-founder Brian Nesmith, that Minneapolis would be a great home for us as Arctic Wolf. And then we would continue to invest in some of the locations that we have, you know, both across the country and now across the globe. >> So there are a lot of companies that are doing managed security services, but if I got it right, you guys specifically target smaller and midsize companies, is that correct? And why is that? >> Yeah, so I would say that that would be correct as of a few years ago, the dynamic has changed quite a bit. And I think it's a result of the dynamic of the market. First and foremost, we are a technology company. We have this concierge layer on top, which is really what the customers are looking for, but it's all powered by the platform. So the platform kind of allows us to do what we've done as a business, into both small organizations, which is, you know, where we probably got our start, but over the last few years, we've seen tremendous growth up market, you know, so for example, we as a business have grown, you know, over a hundred percent now for eight years in a row and now on a much larger denominator, but our upmarket business is growing at four to 500%. And I think that's a result of really two things. I think, A, customers of that size and scale have realized that cyber security and cybersecurity operations as a problem is something that's really hard to accomplish in-house regardless of your size and complexity. And then two, I think what happened over the past year, year and a half is that we saw a lot of organizations move from a centralized I.T or a centralized, you know, security function where they could all operate within an office and all operate in a centralized environment, all of a sudden becoming very disparate in their geography. And that led to a lot more interest in what we did with larger customers, because we could deploy a security operation effectively, remotely in a really short amount of time. And we could do it more effectively and economically than, than they could do on their own. And then we also solve for a component of the human aspect of what a security operation means, right. And what I mean by that is these larger organizations can take their highly skilled cybersecurity talent and focus them on the strategic initiatives within the company. Whereas a lot of the security work or risk is in kind of the day to day, right? The dieting that takes place within an organization. And that's where a lot of the breaches take place is in making sure that you're actually paying attention to, you know, the alerts that you're getting and paying attention to the telemetry and the tools that you've made investments in. And we augment that portion of a cybersecurity operation really, really well for larger organizations and for smaller organizations, we are that security operation. So it's kind of dependent on the way in which they're set up. >> Okay. So it's a mix of both well augmenting, and basically you take the whole thing and so, so your ideal customer profile, your ICP is anybody with a security problem. I mean, that's everybody, well, maybe you could describe paint a picture of your perfect customer, if you would. >> Yeah, so, and you, I know you said that somewhat jokingly, but it, but it is true. We have customers of all sizes, you know, so I, I bet our smallest customer is under 10 employees. Our largest customer is over 50,000 employees. We have customers in every vertical of the market, you know, mostly centralized in healthcare, financial organizations, manufacturing, but, you know, the largest swath of customers by industry would probably not top 10%. So, we service really any account that's looking to develop and invest in a security operation and has the support of their organization and the support of their board and their leadership teams to make that investment. And then where we, where we fall within the account is really dependent on the way in which their current operation is set up. And certainly, you know, the massive organizations that have, you know, 50 people within their cybersecurity team, and they have a hundred different tools. They're probably not the best target for us, but if they have security awareness, if they have a security as a top need or a top priority within their business, and they're looking for a way to build out a true security operation within their account, whether that be wholesale through a third-party or in part through a third-party, we're a perfect fit for all those accounts, which makes our addressable market massive. >> Yeah, so what's unique about you guys, I mean, this may be not the right analogy, but you're kind of like the easy button for cyber. I mean, there's nothing easy about cyber., I get that, but you, you do make it easy, especially for companies that don't have any cyber expertise to engage and get up to speed fast, and certainly be more protected. That's one aspect of your uniqueness. The other is, I think, is your tech stack. I'm hearing, you've got a platform. I know you're focused on network detection and fast response. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what's unique about Arctic Wolf. >> Yeah, so the platform itself is really what we founded the company on. So we spent the first few years of our organization in really building out this cloud scale, multitenant cloud, native platform, understanding that the volume of data and the amount of sophistication that we would need to deliver the security operation in the long run was going to be massive. So the platforms really kind of, you know, set on a few different founding principles. One, the platform needs to work for any organization regardless of their size, regardless of their underlying tech and regardless of the skill set within their account. And that's really important. A lot of the tools in the market today require certain things of the, of the customer. And it's our premise, regardless of the customer that we won't require anything from the customers themselves. It's up to them to tell us which portions of the experience they want to own, verse Artic Wolf owning. The second would be that we need to be able to ingest a vast amount of data, and we need to be able to make intelligent decisions with that data, in a short amount of time. And as we've built out our machine learning and our AR algorithms, what we've been able to do is leverage a tool set that allows us to ingest. I think we're up to now 1.5 approaching 2 trillion observations a week, right. Which might equate to a few hundred alerts within our SOC on a per customer basis. But we're only bringing one or two things to a customer on a weekly basis that really need attention. And that's all about the platform kind of curating, cultivating the vast amount of data that we've brought into it. And then, how do we explain and how do we sell that platform with this concierge later into the customer base is also important. And we've done that through what we call modules. So we kind of founded the company on MDR managed detection and response, but we are not a managed detection and response company. It's one of our modules. We've then added manage risk, which competes kind of in the vulnerability management space. We've added a SAS and IAS monitoring, which is really cloud security. We've added what we call log search, which is really our first foray into collaboration. And then we just recently launched a quarter ago, what we call managed security awareness training, which is, you know, training the human aspect of the company on the threats of cybersecurity. And we actually just announced another acquisition in the managed security space today with habituate, which is going to give us, you know, kind of a Hollywood style approach to content within managed awareness training. But tying all those together is very unique in the market. So generally speaking, you'll see a company focused on a specific attack surface, or a specific threat. And what we're trying to say is, look, you're not a hundred percent protected as a business, or you don't have a robust security operation unless you're bringing together all aspects of cybersecurity under one umbrella. And that's really our goal as a company. >> Okay. So you got all these different modules and you may not want to go here cause you're in the cyber business and you're, you're prudently secretive, but, but I'm interested in kind of what's underneath. I presume you're using best of breed tooling underneath, but unlike, you know, the hosting company of the past or those, you know, a big, you know, integrator who could do this, but they've got one of everything and it's sort of, kind of a mess. You're building a scalable business, but you're not, you're not developing, you know, best of breed, identity access products for the marketplace. You're I presume you're buying those in integrating them and working through whatever APIs and making it all work across your stack. Can you talk a little bit about your tech stack? >> Yeah, so the technology stack has been built from the ground up by Arctic Wolf. So certainly we're using, you know, various technologies or open source technologies from within the ecosystem, but the technology and the platform itself is Arctic Wolf. So we're not beholden to any third parties for what we deliver to the customer. And that makes us very nimble in a few areas. One, it makes us very nimble in the way that we price the solution to the customer, which for us is a very predictable model. And then two, it allows us to be nimble with customer needs as to what they want from us, both of the existing modules that we have, but also additional modules or, you know, additional solutions that we might bring to the market. So a lot of vendors that have historically kind of lived within the MDR space and certainly vendors that have lived in the managed, you know, the MSSP or MSP space, which we are certainly not, they're generally leveraging third-party technologies. They're generally buying and implementing or white labeling third-party technologies. And then they're layering kind of a services component on top. And we are not doing that. We've built the technology ourselves and don't get me wrong. That was a massive investment in both time and resources. But I think in the end, what it'll allow us to do is be very nimble with the market and most importantly, be very nimble with the customer's requirements and requests. >> Right. Okay. So let's talk about your market opportunity. I mean, the cyberspace, I mean, I got it well over a hundred billion, I don't know, maybe it's 110, 120 billion. That's kind of your tan, you may be not serving that entire market today. Although you said you started in small and mid-size, you're targeting now your enterprise, your higher end businesses growing, you talked about, I think you said a hundred percent growth, like eight quarters in a row. And so there's no shortage of opportunity for you. How do you think about your total available market? Maybe you could add some color to that. >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's been eight years of a hundred percent growth. >> Eight years, not eight quarter, I apologize. >> It's been going really well for us. And it's a reflection on the market itself and the approach we're taking. So in our view, security operations is really the opportunity to unify all these disparate markets in cybersecurity. And, when I walk into a customer account, if I had to use two words to describe how they're feeling, one would be confused, the other would be frustrated. Sometimes they're both. Sometimes they're only one, but generally speaking, one of those two words comes out of their mouth. And the reason for it is at the end of the day, they just want to be protected. They want the outcome. And all of these disparate markets are promising the same outcome, but they're just promising it on the endpoint or just on the network or just in cloud or just an IOT or just an OT, or just in fill in the blank. And it's our view that it's our opportunity as a company to really fill that void for the customer, which is to unify all of these different technologies and spaces into one security operation. And sometimes that means that we're delivering our own end point. And sometimes that means that we're leveraging an end point or an end point solution that the customer has in house. And we're ingesting that data into our platform and we're making sense of it to the end user. But when you put that market together, you know, it's a hundred, I think Gartner's recent numbers there are 150 plus billion dollar market. And in 2021, I think it's growing at, you know, 12 to 15%. And it's our view that we can service the majority of that market, you know, I think on a conservative measure, you know, 90 to a hundred billion is the, is the Tam that we're addressing. And we're now starting to go, not only scaling out from the number of products for the markets that we service, and you can see that through managed security awareness training, but also the geographies we service, the segments of the market we service, specialization within verticals. And, for us, that is the opportunity at the end here. >> I wonder if you could help us squint through some of the data you hear in the industry, some of the trends you see in the press, certainly this came up in the, in the solar winds hack. We were seeing, I mentioned upfront, the adversaries are very capable. They're able to get in, live off the land, live stealthily, they're island hopping into the supply chain. You know, oftentimes you don't know, more than often, you don't know they're there, I've heard stats like, and we look at the solar winds hack, we saw that it was, you know, 300 days or over a year that they were inside the company. And you've heard, you know, average statistics from, you know, whatever that it's hundreds of days are those, are you able to compress those? Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of where you see your customers and how you're helping them, you know, respond? >> Yeah, so at the end of the day, you know, cybersecurity, the industry is really about limiting the volume of incidents within a customer account and then limiting the impact. And what you're talking about is the impact. And the impact as these threat actors have become, you know, more sophisticated is larger as they're in the environment for a longer period of time. So the faster you can get to an attack or the faster you can detect an attack, the better off you'll be as a business. And that is the core of what we do as a company. And, and certainly, you know, managed detection response or MDR, our first offering was all about that. It's all about detecting early and responding early to a threat so that you can get anything that has gotten through your perimeter defenses out of your systems, as fast as humanly possible. And then we feathered in, you know, manage risk, which is more about the front end. So how do we make sure that we have everything configured properly? How do we make sure that we, you know, fill any holes that are in the current environment so that we don't even get to a point where we have to manage the time with which an attack has had to live within your environment? So, it's all about kind of those two things, reduce the frequency and reduce the impact. And we're, we're focused on both, both the, kind of the proactive measures, which would be more on the front end and then the reactive measures, which is what do you do and how can you act as quickly as possible within your environment to ensure that, you know, they're not getting into the crown jewels of the business. >> We've seen lately where the, the attackers have. I mean, it's really insidious, right Nick, they, they will exfiltrate, they'll get in they'll exfiltrate stealthily and they'll be ready to attack from a ransomware standpoint. And then they, you know, maybe they're hitting the bank and they're scouring to see what the Chief Information Officer is going to invest in. And they're actually making trades ahead of that. They're making more money, you know, snooping than from the ransomware. And then when the company realizes and they respond, then they get them in a headlock and say, okay, now, now that you're going to stop us from making all this money through exfiltration, we're going to hit you with ransomware. So it's just, it's a really awful situation. So my point being that, or we've said, organizations have to be stealthy in their response. Have you seen that as a trend? Am I overstating that? >> No, no. I mean, customers are, you know, good news, bad news customers are very aware of the threats in particular ransomware, data exfiltration and all the other trends in the market. And I think they become more sophisticated in the way in which they respond. And I think as a result, we've seen both changes in the way customers kind of set up their environment technologically, but we've also seen a pretty dramatic shift recently with the way in which they view insurance and the way in which, you know, carriers, view insurance, and how that plays a role in, you know, cybersecurity in their cybersecurity operation. And for a lot of customers, I think recent trends are that the carriers are struggling to, you know, make money on their cyber books. And the reason for that is because they need to make sure that the customer's environment is truly secure, or they're kind of flying blind on what their book looks like. And we've started to see that both on the end-user side, we've seen that through the carriers themselves, and that also has played an integral role in the way in which the customer views risk. And I think that dynamics changing. And I think what the result of that will be is that customers are going to be looking more and more towards how they solve this problem by alleviating risk in-house, as opposed to transferring some of that risk to an insurance carrier or a third party. And what I hope that means for customers is that they'll have the proper investment. They'll have the proper tooling, they'll have the proper operations around how to react and how to respond in the quickest possible manner, which at the end of the day, the faster you can react to an incident, the smaller the impact will be and the smaller of a financial burden it will be. And they'll do that through vendors like Arctic Wolf, you know, tools that are best of breed within their infrastructure. And then a really well thought out plan about how to respond to anything that, that you know, happens within their environment. >> Yeah. I mean, if I'm an insurance company, I give a discount to somebody who's got an alarm in their house and they use it. Maybe I'll give a discount if they're working with a company like Arctic Wolf. >> Exactly. >> What percent, do you have a census to what percent of enterprises actually have a SOC? >> Yeah, we actually did a, some homework here and there's kind of two stats that jump out. And these are through a few different surveys through very well-known organizations in the cybersecurity market. But one is that last year, which would have been, you know, 2020, about 60% of organizations said that they suffered some semblance of a breach, 60%, you know, think about how many tools and how much money these organizations are investing in protecting their businesses. And over half are suffering some semblance of a breach. When those same customers are asked whether or not they felt like they have a security operation, over 99% answered no. >> Wow. >> Right. So they have a bunch of tools they're investing a ton of money, but at the end of the day, when asked, hey, do you feel like you have an operation that can protect your business? Their answer is no. And that's really the void we're trying to. >> And you and I both know that 60%, okay. But then the other 40%, they've been hacked. They just don't know it. So, all right. Let's wrap with the sub stats on the company. I think you've raised nearly half a million, half a billion dollars to date $500 million to date. So that's, I can infer from that some pretty lofty numbers, but where are you in funding with that kind of growth? I got to believe IPO is and you and your future. What can you tell, what metrics can you share? What can you tell us about where you want to take this thing? >> Yeah, so I'll give you a few metrics on the platform and a few metrics on the company. So the platform itself, you know, we're observing over 1.5 trillion observations a week, we have 10,000 plus sensors in the field. You know, we're ingesting coming from a, you know, Compellent infrastructure guy. You know, we're in ingesting over a petabyte and a half a data week. I would have loved to have been that sales guy in the glory days, you know, but the platforms, you know, operating at massive scale, we've grown the business eight years in a row, over a hundred percent. We've talked about that. Our subscription gross margins are very software-like. We have over 2000 customers. You know, our customers are really happy with an NPS score, you know, approaching 70, you know, over a million licensed users. So we're, we're doing very, very well as a business. And as a result, we've raised money to invest in that growth, which is to the tune of about a half a billion dollars and our path here, and we've stated this publicly now is that, you know, next summer give or take a quarter is really the timeframe that we're marching towards for an IPO. If I'm being honest, given the metrics that we have as a business, we could be a publicly traded company today, especially with the way the market's operating in the valuations of some of the businesses that have gone out. There might be some, even some pressure to do so, but we want to make sure that we are ready to go from a systems and an operation standpoint to not just be, you know, a flashing the pan awesome IPO, but a company that's really kind of the backbone of cybersecurity for years to come. >> Well, obviously a hot space. What we've been covering for a couple of years now, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, we've seen what's happened in the action in the market there. I mean, what are your comps? I mean, I know, I think dark trace is getting ready to go. I don't think they've gone yet. I know Sentinel One went out. How should we think about you? You're not an Okta or I don't think well, CrowdStrike, but you know, those are pure play product companies. How should we think about you guys? >> Yeah, I mean, companies that were on a similar trajectory as us at our size, Sentinel One's a very good example. And you can kind of look across all the core business metrics on that. And clearly those will all be public here in under a year. CrowdStrike's a great example. If you go, you know, reel back the tape to when they were, you know, our size we're right in line with them Zscaler, Okta, you know, I joke with our board and investors and our CFO, that the number of companies that we benchmark ourselves against is starting to become a very small number, given you know, our growth at the scale that we're at. >> Well, that's an awesome story, Nick. We're really excited that you could make some time to come on the Cube and we want to follow your progress. Welcome you back anytime. Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah. Great. Thanks for having me, Dave, and looking forward to continuing the conversation at some point. >> Excellent and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube and we'll see you next time.

Published Date : Sep 30 2021

SUMMARY :

and they'll tell you they're the problem, you heard my And it's really, you know, And how easy is that to do, that they have, you know, and being in that part of the And a lot of the, of the talent, you know, and the tools that you've and basically you take And certainly, you know, the easy button for cyber. So the platforms really kind of, you know, but unlike, you know, in the managed, you know, I mean, the cyberspace, I mean, So it's been eight years of Eight years, not eight is really the opportunity to unify all some of the trends you see in the press, And that is the core of And then they, you know, and how that plays a role in, you know, I give a discount to somebody which would have been, you know, And that's really the and you and your future. So the platform itself, you know, but you know, those are to when they were, you know, on the Cube and we want the conversation at some Excellent and thank you

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Alastair Johnson, Nuage Networks | CUBE Conversation, December 2018


 

[Music] hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube conversation from our outstanding studios in Palo Alto California got a great conversation today we're gonna be talking about some of the challenges and changes taking place in the MSP the managed service provider part of the marketplace made possible by software to find when SD Wang technologies and to do that we've got Alastair Johnson as a principal architect at nuage Networks here with us on the cube today Alastair welcome to the cube Thank You Peter it's great to be here so let's start corporate update nuage Networks what's going on well we've had a pretty good year so far a number of customers that we'll be announcing over the next few months that we've established this year in addition to the the major wins that I'm sure most of the markets familiar with over the last few years we're really seeing that in the managed services space that Sdn is gaining a lot of traction we're finding that particularly outside of North America but with increasing North American interest that enterprises are looking towards a managed SD wine service as opposed to doing it themselves going down the path of having a carrier come in and provide them with both connectivity and the service layer or looking at taking the service layer from a managed services provider and sourcing the connectivity themselves so this is an area that's especially fruitful and open for some significant innovation and innovation that's going to have enormous impact in how the market pays so let me let me run something by you so here's the observation I've made over the years that servers Moore's law meant that there was this kind of smooth growth and performance and even in software it would kind of followed Moore's law but network because of its because of the degree of interplay and natural integration amongst the components there was always this kind of weird step function where every four or five years the big telecommunications companies our managed service providers would make major investments in their networks and you got this very rough course odd step function and that sometimes scared some of these companies away from participating in all the innovation of the cloud have I got that right absolutely I mean the tradition of having both your service layer and your transport layer being coupled you know an IP Network is offering both the IP transport but also the services like MPLS VPNs or layer 2 VPNs has meant that you know the tech lifecycle became relatively long the process to qualify deploy managed and then eventually automate services and the delivery of those services took a long time Sdn has presented a really interesting opportunity for the carrier's as long along with the broader audience in the industry to really leverage software and the frequency of updates the software can give you without needing to make those hardware changes at the same time so you can still do the hardware changes but you get a smoother upward innovation curve absolutely so the underlying transport platforms the routers the DWDM systems etc those can be changed as needed to buy capacity demands or vendor changes or new technology that comes out in those spaces but we can use Sdn or in this case st wan to smooth out the service offering on the top and as it becomes a software delivered function we can upgrade that much faster and we can roll it out much more like we update our you know cell phones our tablets etc and introduce new functionality into the service layer much faster than we were able to do in the past where we had a very much a hardware coupled service offering now I made a comment that in many respects some of the big telecommunications companies some of the beginner Spees have not participated in this explosive innovation that's associated with the cloud and part of the reason is because when you think about cloud someone can say I can think of a new service and then they can create it and deploy because it's largely in software whereas a lot of the telecommunications MSP type companies go I get to give a new service but then they look around and they say oh the hardware's not ready and I don't wait for the hardware to be ready how does this notion of SD win and this software to find service layers start to alter the way that some of these big companies think about their underlying infrastructure cost structures how they think about automation how they go about competing for new services well well it's it becomes a very big competitive differentiator because you know I can be a carrier and I can offer new services much faster a we touched on I'm getting a benefit of automation very quickly because Sdn was heavily around automating the configuration in the service elements and I can become a lot more cost-effective with that you know customers are looking for more self control more self management information Diagnostics tooling etc but without the overheads of running very large IT and network specialized personnel so the carrier's get that advantage the enterprise's get that advantage everyone is getting you know effectively a much more modern service experience we saw that with the cloud I guess revolution if you want to put it that way that you know I no longer needed to order a server put it in a rack deploy an operating system put my application on it take six months that changed with the cloud everyone understands that the network layer did not change it's fast and that's where we saw Sdn and the data centers come along to address that problem that's what we're solving with sd1 as well so when we think about the relationship between big cloud players and some of these nm msps it is that we've got the big cloud pairs that are virtualizing everything the msps are still kind of physically stuck but still have the vast majority of those last miles that are so crucial to having that end and productivity and compatibility absolutely does that start to change as we start to think about new wireless technologies how does SD LAN improve the MS Pease ability to both bring new automation and bri new but also introduced some of these new technologies that will bring make it easier to think cloud last-mile in the same breath well it's an interesting point I mean you could look at an MSP that has no lost mile infrastructure at all.they or maybe reselling a carriers infrastructure or procuring a full their enterprise customers now they have the ability to actually manage the service layer and they could be using carrier a today to reach the customers location but they strike a new deal tomorrow with carry a B and they can swap that customer over effectively changing the engines on the airplane in flight the customer experience doesn't change for the enterprise they're still getting the same Sdn service but maybe they swapped from DSL to cable as a transport or they've added an MPLS service to a new site as well for greater reliability so this allows the msps and the carriers to you know get services out to the customers faster decoupling it from whatever the last mile technology may be and this where there's opportunities for wireless you know we're seeing a lot of interest from enterprises to augment with LTE and in the future 5g as a backup connectivity to their sites particularly in retail I mean I'm sure in Silicon Valley you've seen everyone here is swiping your card on a tablet well you know you don't want that tablet to be offline it needs connectivity or they're not making money so making sure you have reliable connectivity with the same experience is a big deal for these enterprises and and they're msps but it's not becomes part of a coherent solution as opposed to I'm gonna do my cloud thing and I'm gonna do my MSP thing absolutely and so that's another area where we're seeing a lot of interest I mean even if I look at what our internal IT is doing which is you know we need to make sure that the cloud is part of our LAN and we need to make sure that we can you know drop an application in our private data center but have resources in our public infrastructure also using that and the experience for me sitting at my desk down the street from here is the same regardless of where that application is being accessed from all right the last thing I want to talk to you about Alastair is this this notion I have I'm going to test something by you and see if I if I got it right and if I can if I'm anticipating some of the changes over in C so a lot of people presume that the cloud was a one-way ticket to something centralized and big and that had an enormous impact on how people think about the cloud we actually think about the cloud as a strategy in the technology for more easily and coherently distributing data and distributing function to where it needs to be on location basis and in certain respects I can look at the cloud kind of as a network programming model where the some of those hybrid cloud services are they're being introduced by some of the big cloud players now are really almost a layer 7 they're providing some structure to the developer about how to think about building hybrid distributed applications now I want to test that does that resonate with you from a networking standpoint absolutely and again that's something we see a lot of interest in a reasonable amount of demand as enterprises and their internal developers are getting their heads around that concept that the application can live anywhere whether it be on premises at the branch data center or in the cloud and that cloud as you point out can be rightly geographically distributed and being able to be the network glue that binds all of those locations together allows the developer and the IT organization supporting that developer to have you know if the effect of a single fabric regardless of where the application or the user is seamlessly connecting them and so it also suggestions there's nothing on a test with you that that that we are it makes it possible to imagine greater specialization in what those distributed services look like especially from a networking perspective which means that if MSPs and big teller codes do successfully incorporate some of these technologies improve their automate ability their ability to think about the service and then deliver the service very rapidly then we could see them actually being able to pick up a sizeable piece of this cloud business because they can introduce services that are specialized with a network strong network affinity that have that build on that heritage of distribution of function absolutely and you see that today you know the carriers are already providing a valuable service connecting the enterprises to the cloud but that goes beyond in you know an SDN 2.0 model I need to move certain applications to the branch there's some things that always need to live there and as an IT manager I need to manage that networking effectively but I have applications that I want to have that are running you know in a very public cloud you know SAS applications etc and I want to give my users the most efficient path to them but I also have my private applications that it may be running in a public environment but I want to carry that as if it was part of my internal corporate one and being able to get that the from an enterprise you know services perspective from an MSP from a carrier that can bundle all of this together that's a huge advantage and a time-saving for me yeah the one other thing I'd say is that we're actually talking some very large enterprises right now that are discovering that their customers there their customers are demanding very concrete strict and well-documented notions of the capabilities that they provide and this idea of SD wine is making it easier for them to sell services in to companies that want that digital interface that highly competent working digital interface absolutely so it's what last thing is we think about where this is going is there any technology on the horizon that you think Sdn is going to make easier to deploy or that's gonna make SD went that much more important oh that's an interesting question and I think as you know the ongoing digital transformation of business happens you know we're connectivity is more important than ever making sure it's reliable and available and that the user experience regardless of what type of site I'm visiting as a you know an enterprise employee making sure that you know my telephony works that my can access my documents that my R&D teams can span the globe that is a key requirement of today's enterprise at Nokia that's how we need to work internally and that's how we do work I travel around the world visit our offices my experience is seamless in the same and that I think is where Sdn is bringing a huge amount of automation value security in many cases and tell you some great anecdotes that we found in the Sdn world there and just the management and control layer well let's save another cube conversation to talk about those security antidotes well but this is Peterborough's we've been talking to Alastair Johnson who's a principal architect at nuage networks about the potential for SD when to increase the relevance of MSPs telecom providers in a marketplace that is being dominated by the cloud experience and how greater automation leads to improve service opportunities for a lot of customers and a lot of cloud related service providers Alastair thanks very much for being on the cube thanks Peter and once again on Peter Burris and you've been watching another cube conversation until next time [Music] you

Published Date : Dec 17 2018

SUMMARY :

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Michael Fagan, Village Roadshow | Palo Alto Networks Ignite22


 

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back to Vegas, guys and girls, it's great to have you with us. The Cube Live. Si finishing our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Ignite. 22 from MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave Cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about because it is so interesting. It is so dynamic. My other favorite thing is to hear the voice of our vendors' customers. And we could to >>Do that. I always love to have the customer on you get you get right to the heart of the matter. Yeah. Really understand. You know, what I like to do is sort of when I listen to the keynotes, try to see how well it aligns with what the customers are actually doing. Yeah. So let's >>Do it. We're gonna unpack that now. Michael Fagan joins us, the Chief Transformation Officer at Village Roadshow. Welcome Michael. It's great to have you >>And thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So this is a really interesting entertainment company. I find the name interesting, but talk to us a little bit about Village Roadshow so the audience gets an understanding of all of the things that you guys do cuz theme parks is part of >>This. Yeah, so Village Road show's Australia's largest cinema exhibitor in conjunction with our partners at event. We also own and operate Australia's largest theme parks. We have Warner Brothers movie World, wet and Wild. SeaWorld Top Golf in Australia is, is operated by us plus more. We also do studio, we also own movie studios, so Aquaman, parts of the Caribbean. We're, we're filming our movie studios Elvis last year. And we also distribute and produce movies and TV shows. Quite diverse group. >>Yeah, you guys have won a lot of awards. I mean, I don't know, academy Awards, golden Globe, all that stuff, you know, and so it's good. Congratulations. Yeah. >>Thank you. >>Cool stuff. I wanna also, before we dig into the use case here, talk to us about the role of a chief transformation officer. How long have you been in that role? What does it encompass and what do you get to drive from a transformation perspective? Yeah, >>So the, the, the nature and pace of disruption is accelerating and on, on one side. And then on the other side, the running business as usual is becoming increasingly complex and, and more difficult to do. So running both simultaneously and at pace can put organizations at risk, both financially and and other ways. So in my role as Chief Transformation officer, I support the rest of the executive team by giving them additional capacity and also bring capability to the team that wasn't there before. So I do a lot of strategic and thought leadership. There's some executive coaching in there, a lot of financial modeling and analysis. And I believe that when a transformation role in particularly a chief transformation role is done correctly, it's a very hands-on role. So there's certain things where I, I dive right down and I'm actually hands in, hands-on leading teams or leading pieces of work. So I might be leading particular projects. I tried to drive profit revenue and profitability across the divisions and does any multi or cross-divisional opportunities or initiative, then I will, I will lead those. >>The transformation, you know, a while ago was cloud, right? Okay, hey, cloud and transformation officers, whether or not they had that title, we'll tell you, look, you gotta change the operating model. You can't just, you know, lift and shift in the cloud. That's, you know, that's pennies. We want, you know, big bucks. That's the operating. Now it's, I'm my question is, is did the pandemic just accelerate your transformation or, or was it, you know, deeper than that? >>Yeah, so what in my role have both digital and business transformation, some of it has been organizational. I think the pandemic has had a, a significant and long lasting effect on society, not just on, on business. So I think if you think about how work work used to be a, a place you went to and how it was done beforehand, before the, before COVID versus now where, you know, previously, you know, within the enterprise you had all of the users, you had all of the applications, you had all of the data, you had all of the people. And then since March, 2020, just overnight, that kind of inverted and, you know, you had people working from home and a person working from home as a branch office of one. So, so we ended up with another thousand branches literally overnight. A lot of the applications that we use are now SASS or cloud-based, whether that's timekeeping with Kronos or communica employee communication or work Jam. So they're not sitting within our data center, they're not sitting within, within our enterprise. It's all external. >>So from a security perspective, you obviously had to respond to that and we heard a lot about endpoint and cloud security and refactoring the network and identity. These guys aren't really an identity. They partner for that, but still a lot of change in focus that the CISO had to deal with. How, how did you guys respond to that? And, and you had a rush to do it. Yeah. And so as you sit back now, where do you go from here? >>Well we had, we had two major triggers for our, our network and security transformation. The first being COVID itself, and then the second beam, we had a, a major MPLS telco renewal that came up. So that gave you an opportunity to look at what we were doing and essentially our network was designed for a near, that no longer exists for when, for when p like I said, when people, when people were from home, all the applications were inside. So, and we had aging infrastructure, our firewalls were end of life. So initially we started off with an SD WAN at the SD WAN layer and an SD WAN implementation. But when we investigated and saw the security capabilities that are available now, we that to a full sassy WAN implementation. >>Why Palo Alto Networks? Because you, you had, you said you had an aging infrastructure designed for an era that doesn't exist anymore, but you also had a number of tools. We've been talking about a consolidation a lot the last couple days. Yeah. How did, what did you consolidate and why with Palo Alto? >>So we had a great partner in Australia, incidentally also called Cube. Cube Networks. Yeah. That we worked with great >>Names. Yeah, right. >>So we, so we, we worked for Cube. We ran a, a form of tender process. And Palo Alto with, you know, Prisma access and Global Global Protect was the only, the only solution that gave us everything that we needed in terms of network modernization, the agility that we required. So for example, in our theme part, we want to send out a hotdog cart or an ice cream cart, and that becomes, all of a sudden you got a new branch that I want to spin up this branch in 10 minutes and then I wanna spin it back down again. So from agility perspective, from a flexibility perspective, the security that, that we wanted, you know, from a zero trust perspective, and they were the only, certainly from a zero trust perspective, they're probably the only vendor that, that exists that, that actually provided the, the, all those capabilities. >>And did you consolidate tools or you were in the process of consolidating tools now? >>Yeah, so we actually, we actually consolidated down to, to, to a, to a single vendor. And in my previous role I had, I had implemented SD WAN before and you know, interoperability is a, is a major issue in the IT industry. I think there's, it's probably the only industry in the, the only industry I can think of certainly that where we, we ship products that aren't ready. They're not of all the features, they, they don't have all the features that they should have. They're their plans. They were releasing patches, releasing additional features every, every couple of months. So, you know, if you, if if Ford sold the card, I said, Hey, you're gonna give you backseats in a couple of months, they'd be uproar. But, but we do that all the time in, in it. So I had, when I previously implemented an Sdwan transformation, I had products from two tier one vendors that just didn't talk to one another. And so when I went and spoke to those vendors, they just went, well, it's not me. It's clearly, clearly those guys. So, so there's a lot to be said for having a, you know, a champion team rather than a team of champions. And Palo Alto have got that full stack fully integrated that was, you know, exactly meant what we were looking for. >>They've been talking a lot the last couple days about integration and it, and I've talked with some of their executives and some analysts as well, including Dave about that seems to be a differentiator for them because they really focus on that. Their m and a strategy is very, it seems to be very clear and there's purpose on that backend integration instead of leaving it to the customer, like Village Road show to do it. They also talked a lot about the consolidation. I'm just curious, Michael, in terms of like what you've heard at the show in the last couple of days. >>Yeah, I mean I've been hearing to same mess, but actually we've, we've lived in a >>You're living it. That's what I wanted to >>Know. So, so, you know, we had a choice of, you know, do you try and purchase so-called best of breed products and then put a lot of effort into integrating them and trying to get them to work, which is not really what we want to spend time doing. I don't, I don't wanna be famous for, you know, integration and, you know, great infrastructure. I want to be, I want Village to be famous for delivering great experiences to our customers. Memories that last a lifetime. And you know, when kids grow up in Australia, they, everybody remembers going to the theme parks. That's what, that's what I want our team to be doing and to be delivering those great experiences, not to be trying to plug together bits of software and it may or may not work and have vendors pointing at one another and then we are left carrying the cannon and holding the >>Baby. So what was the before and after, can you give us a sense as to how life changed, you know, pre that consolidation versus post? >>Yeah, so our, our, our infrastructure, say our infrastructure was designed for, you know, the, you know, old ways of working where we had you knowm routers that were, you know, not designed for cloud, for modern traffic, including cloud Destin traffic, an old MPLS network. We used to back haul all the traffic from, from our branches back to central location run where we've got, you know, firewall walls, we've got a dmz, we could run advanced inspection services on that. So if you had a branch that wanted to access a website that was housed next door, even if it was across the country, then it would, we would pull that all the way back to Melbourne. We would apply advanced inspection services to it, send it up to the cloud out back across the country. Traffic would come back, come down to us, back out to our branch. >>So you talk about crossing the country four times, even at the website is, is situated next door now with, with our sasi sdwan transformation just pops out to the cloud now straight away. And the, the difference in performance for our, for our team and for our customers, it, it's phenomenal. So you'll talk about saving minutes, you know, on a log on and, and seconds then and on, on an average transaction and second zone sound like a lot. But when you, it's every click up, they're saving a second and add up. You're talking about thousands of man hours every month that we've saved. >>If near Zuke were sitting right here and said, what could we do better? You know, what do you need from us that we're not delivering today that you want to, you want us to deliver that would change your life. Yeah, >>There's two things. One, one of which I think they're all, they're already doing, but I actually haven't experienced myself. It's around the autonomous digital experience management. So I've now got a thousand users who are sitting at home and they've got, when they've got a problem, I don't know, is it, is it my problem or is it their problem? So I know that p were working on a, an A solution that digital experience solution, which can actually tell, well actually know you're sitting in your kitchen and your routes in your front room, maybe you should move closer to the route. So there, there they, that's one thing. And the second thing is using AI to tell me things that I wouldn't be able to figure out with a human training. A lot of time sifting through data. So things like where I've potentially overcompensated and, you know, overdelivered on the network and security side or of potentially underdelivered on a security side. So having AI to, you know, assess all of those millions and probably billions of, you know, transactions and packets that are moving around our network and say, Hey, you could optimize it more if you, if you dial this down or dial this up. >>So you said earlier we, this industry has a habit of shipping products before, you know they're ready. So based on your experience, seems like, first of all, it sounds like you got a at least decent technical background as well. When do you expect to have that capability? Realistically? When can we expect that as an industry? >>I think I, I think, like I said, the the rate and nature of change is, is, I think it's accelerating. The halflife of degree is short. I think when I left university, what I, what I learned in first year was, was obsolete within five years, I'd say now it's probably obsolete of you. What'd you learn in first year? It's probably obsolete by the time you finish your degree. >>Six months. Yeah, >>It's true. So I think the, the, the rate of change and the, the partnership that I see Palo building with the likes of AWS and Google and that and how they're coming together to, to solve, to jointly solve these problems is I think we will see this within 12 months. >>Who, who are your clouds? You got multiple clouds >>Or We got multiple clouds. Mostly aws, but there are certain things that we run that run in run in Azure as well. We, we don't really have much in GCP or, or, or some of the other >>Azure for collaboration and teams, stuff like that. >>Ah, we, we run, we run SAP that's we hosted in, in Azure and our cinema ticketing system is, is was run in Azure. It's, it was only available in, in in Azure the time we're mo we are mostly an AWS >>Shop. And what do you do with aws? I mean, pretty much everything else is >>Much every, everything else, anything that's customer facing our websites, they give us great stability. Great, great availability, great performance, you know, we've had and, and, and, and a very variable as well. So, we'll, you know, our, our pattern of selling movie tickets is typically, you know, fairly flat except when, you know, there's a launch of a, of a new movie. So all of a sudden we might say you might sell, you know, at 9:00 AM when, you know, spider-Man went on sale last year, I think we sold 100 times the amount of tickets in the forest, 10 minutes. So our website didn't just scale look beautifully, just took in all of that extra traffic scale up. We're at only any intervention and then scale back down >>Taylor Swift needs that she does need that. So yeah. And so is your vision to have Palo Alto networks security infrastructure have be a common sort of layer across those clouds and maybe even some on-prem? Is it, are you, are you working toward that? Yeah, >>We, yeah, we, yeah, we, we'd love to have, you know, our end, our end customers don't really care about the infrastructure that we run. They won't be >>Able to unless it breaks. >>Unless it breaks. Yeah. They wanna be able to go to see a movie. Do you wanna be able to get on a rollercoaster? They wanna be able to go, you know, play around around a top golf. So having that convergence and that seamless integration of working across cloud network security now for most of our team, they, they don't know and they don't need to know. In fact, I, I frankly don't want them to know and be, be thinking about networks and clouds. I kind of want them thinking about how do we sell more cinema tickets? How do we give a great experience to our guests? How do we give long lasting lifetime memories to, to the people who come visit our parks? >>That's what they want. They want that experience. Right. I'd love to get your final thoughts on, we, we had you give a great overview of the ch the role that you play as Chief transformation officer. You own digital transformation, you want business transformation. What advice would you give to either other treat chief transformation officers, CISOs, CSOs, CEOs about partnering, what's the right partner to really improve your security posture? >>I think there's, there's two things. One is if you haven't looked at this in the last two years and made some changes, you're outta date. Yeah. Because the world has changed. We've seen, I mean, I've heard somebody say it was two decades worth of, I actually think it's probably five 50 years worth of change in, in Australia in terms of working habits. So one, you need to do something. Yeah. Need to, you need to have a look at this. The second thing I think is to try and partner with someone that has similar values to your organization. So Village is a, it's a wonderful, innovative company. Very agile. So the, like the, the concept of gold class cinema, so, you know, big proceeds, recliners, waiter service, elevated foods concept that, that was invented by village in 1997. Thank you. And we had thanks finally came to the states so decade later, I mean we would've had the CEO of every major cinema chain in the world come to come to Melbourne and have a look at what Village is doing and go, yeah, we're gonna export that back around around the world. It's probably one of, one of Australia's unknown exports. Yeah. So it's, yeah, so, so partnering. So we've got a great innovation history and we'd like to think of ourselves as pretty agile. So working with partners who are, have a similar thought process and, and managed to an outcome and not to a contract Yeah. Is, is important for us. >>It's all about outcomes. And you've had some great outcomes, Michael, thank you for joining us on the program, walking us through Village Roadshow, the challenges that you had, how you tackled them, and, and next time I think I'm in a movie theater and I'm in reclining chair, I'm gonna think about you and village. So thank you. We appreciate your insights, your time. Thank you. Thanks Michael. For Michael Fagan and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube. Our live coverage of Palo Alto Networks. Ignite comes to an end. We thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging emerging tech coverage next year. >>Yeah.

Published Date : Dec 15 2022

SUMMARY :

The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Welcome back to Vegas, guys and girls, it's great to have you with us. I always love to have the customer on you get you get right to the heart of the matter. It's great to have you It's a pleasure to be here. us a little bit about Village Roadshow so the audience gets an understanding of all of the things that you guys do cuz theme And we also distribute and produce movies and TV shows. all that stuff, you know, and so it's good. do you get to drive from a transformation perspective? So in my role as Chief Transformation officer, I support the rest of the executive We want, you know, just overnight, that kind of inverted and, you know, you had people working from home So from a security perspective, you obviously had to respond to that and we heard a lot about endpoint So that gave you an opportunity to look at what we were doing and essentially for an era that doesn't exist anymore, but you also had a number of tools. So we had a great partner in Australia, incidentally also called Cube. Yeah, right. that we wanted, you know, from a zero trust perspective, and they were the only, fully integrated that was, you know, exactly meant what we were looking for. it to the customer, like Village Road show to do it. That's what I wanted to you know, integration and, you know, great infrastructure. consolidation versus post? back to central location run where we've got, you know, firewall walls, we've got a dmz, So you talk about crossing the country four times, even at the website is, is situated next door now You know, what do you need from us that we're not delivering today that you want to, you want us to deliver that would change So things like where I've potentially overcompensated and, you know, overdelivered on the network So you said earlier we, this industry has a habit of shipping products before, It's probably obsolete by the time you finish your degree. Yeah, So I think the, the, the rate of change and the, the partnership that I see Palo Mostly aws, but there are certain things that we run that run in run mo we are mostly an AWS I mean, pretty much everything else is So all of a sudden we might say you might sell, So yeah. We, yeah, we, yeah, we, we'd love to have, you know, you know, play around around a top golf. we, we had you give a great overview of the ch the role that you play as Chief transformation So one, you need to do something. Roadshow, the challenges that you had, how you tackled them, and, and next time I think I'm in a movie theater

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