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Thomas Hansen, UiPath & Jason Bergstrom, Deloitte | UiPath FORWARD IV


 

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante, the cube is here, live at UI path forward for very excited to be here in person. Next topic, the smart factory, a couple of guests here to unpack that for us, Jason Brixton joins us the smart factory lead at Deloitte and Thomas Hanson, the CRO of UI path gentlemen, and welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you for having us great to have you great to be in person. Let's talk about smart track factory factory Ford auto. What is it from Deloitte perspective and then UI path. >>So if you think about smart factory, it's really that transition from the old kind of analog manufacturing environment to the digital, digital operating type environment that we see today. So technology has really changed in the last three or four years. And as a result of that elevation of technology, we're able to do a lot more on the manufacturing floor than we ever could. So what used to be more analog or hybrid with a little bit of technology is now starting to shift really to end to end integrated manufacturing operations that are based on digital platforms and we're loving it. It's a great place to be >>Great. Tell us what's your perspective? >>Well, first of all, it's great to be here. Thank you for the invite. It's so nice to be away from soon calls or, or other type of, uh, of calls, right. And be in person. Uh, look, we have an amazing partnership with the lights. Um, we have worked together for years. We've done more than 400 joint engagements with the large companies across the world. And in that process, we've really gone deeper from a vertical and industry perspective and smart factory is really the starting point of going super specific and figuring out what does automation or how does automation rather play into, um, to a, to a smart factory, like a beautiful trombone, that music from a beautiful trombone. >>So years ago, we wrote a piece talking about the cloud as an opportunity and how to take advantage of it. And one of the, the premise of the piece was you've got to build ecosystems and maybe it's within an industry or within a practice and build data in different disciplines because the power of many versus the capabilities of one, this smart factory initiative that you guys have going, it feels like an ecosystem play. Can you describe that ecosystem? Who's involved? I know SAP in for AWS, but, but tell us more about the ECOS. >>Yeah, sure. So your, your hunch, there is a great one, right? We, we learned early on that trying to do this as Deloitte or Deloitte plus one just, wasn't going to get it done, right? You really needed to harness the power of the many. And so at the, at the core of what we're doing at the smart factory at Wichita, that you alluded to is about bringing an ecosystem to life. So we have 21 partners that are going to be participating out of the gate with the smart factory. Wichitan the intent is to show a seamless solution and actual end-to-end production facility that showcases 21 amazing technologies and partners. And we're just really thrilled about what we're able to show our clients. So, >>Yep. So Koch industries owns Inforce. So obviously that's the Wichita connection, is that right? So they got to be involved in this. I mean, they were amazing company, but what can you tell us about, uh, their, their involvement? >>Yep. So Coke, obviously the in for connection, uh, Dragos, which is another in four company as a founder within, uh, within the ecosystem, which is fantastic. There they play at the core. They're also an incredibly important client, right? So the Coke business on the whole is critical to how we think about manufacturing across a whole range of industries from discreet production to scale process. Um, they're fantastic partners and we've had a great time working with them. And you guys are just, >>It's about to launch through soft launch. Can you tell us more where you are in the progression? >>Sure. So soft launch started two days ago. Oh wow. So the building, we have the keys, uh, we are doing some visits with a handful of friends and family, that ecosystem partners that you mentioned, there'll be coming out, uh, to see it and to provide some feedback. And then we go live in earnest in January >>At Thomas where's UI path fit. >>Well, we fit in essay as a key part in this initiative. Um, look, we, as a company, we are part the preferred partner. First, we do all our business together with partners and we have right about almost 5,000 partners now, globally. And then there's a few, then there's a few in that 5,000 that are unique that really stand out. And Deloitte of course is one of those very, very special partners that we work with globally, but also locally here in the us, across all the states across all the industries. So we're thrilled to be part of this automation plays a key key part of smart factory. When you think about it, the evolution of work there's so much boring, mundane work on there. Humankind is better served, spending their time and effort on the non mundane on the innovative on the creative. And that's what we try to ensure that the humans in the loop so to speak are focused on the innovative work, the graded work, and we have software robots, RPA automation handle all that boring and mundane work, >>Right? Letting the folks focus on the value, add to themselves a value add to the organization, more strategic investments. Thomas question for you is in terms of you talked about this being horizontal across industries, but I'm curious about what some of the feedback is from some of your customers, 8,000 customers. Now you've got a very large what, 726 million ARR, huge lot of customers over a hundred million ARR. What's been the feedback from some of those guys. >>Well, so first of all, uh, personally, I I've been in enterprise software for more than 20 years. And what I've experienced over the years are most large scale enterprise software projects tends to be multi-year in nature, be rather complex. And the failure rate can be rather high. Then in comes RPA and automation, which is a complete different kettle of fish in the sense that from conceptualization of identifying a process, to getting it built, getting it tested, getting it into production, you're talking days and weeks only. So the path to seeing value is so fast. What I've learned yesterday and today from the 1516 customer meetings I've had so far is the same unique trend or learning across all industries and also from various parts of the world. And that is very fast realization of value, perhaps starting initially with 5, 10 20 processes and then scaling super fast because the find that return on investment incredibly quickly with our solution. So that's what unifies it across geographies and across industries. >>What'd you think about the smart factory? And one of the things we've learned during COVID is there's so much unknown. So sometimes these processes aren't linear like a trombone, you know, going back and forth in and out, but is there unknown in the smart factory processes or is it pretty well known? And you can do the process mining on that known base. What's the dynamic >>Back there. So there's a few different dimensions to it. So yes, it is well known because it's a controlled environment, but one of the things that we're doing is we're actually actively introducing a lot of unknown factors to try to let the bots and the process mining kick into effect. Right? So we're artificially, let's just say injecting opportunity for us to do that. The other thing that we're doing is, and what's really unique about the smart factory at Wichita is it's one of four across the globe for Deloitte. And so we're bringing data in from the other three sites, which is data, that'll be less controlled. We're going to do process mining on that. Just try to take advantage of some of the, some of the capabilities associated with the solutions. >>Okay. So, so w when you think about process mining, do you start there, or do you start with, I sometimes call it paving the cow path, you know, taking what you've known, that linear process that, that hit that as the quick win, and then worry about the process money, or do you step back and say, wait a minute, we have to rethink the entire factory experience. Where do you start? >>I think it depends in the case of the smart factory with that, we've got a few different places, so we're using it to do ingestion of orders. So that's obviously a very controlled environment. We're then using it to do a lot of work around inventory management and optimization as well as month end close plays, which will be a lot more we're learning as we go. Right. So I think on the spectrum, it could be on either end my personal belief. If you look at it more long-term or actually out in the real world is that this is all about learning new things. It's about generating insights from data that frankly, you don't want human beings to have to go do that. And so having the ability to take advantage of an intelligent automation solution, as powerful as UI path is really a great advantage. >>One of the things that's misunderstood, I think about UI path is they look at what happened post let's say 2015, 2016, and say, oh, just like, just like every other Silicon valley company, double, double, triple, triple. And that's not how you guys started. You sort of let things bake for the better part of a decade and then got product market fit and then exploded. Um, and so that's, that to me was a key to your success in scaling this. I feel like you guys are building a new offering here. This is not just doing a one-off the product market fit. It's not like a point product. It's a, it's a big thing. So can you talk about the go to market, your product market fit? You're testing it out now, your goals, are you trying to scale this up? What, what are some of the things that you can share about your aspirations? So >>The partnership from a UI path perspective to Deloitte is a critical partnership. One of the select few on a global level, uh, we have enjoyed tremendous, uh, amount of engagements together. I mentioned early on 400, and I believe we, we now have together right about 1000 developers trained within your organization on your iPod, right? That's right. Yep. So we have a strong base that, of course we want to build full and hopefully put a syrup behind the thousand to 10,000. And over time, we want to make sure that it's globally inclusive, that we can serve all the marketers across the world where we have giant presence. And there's a select number of verticals and industries where we really have had success together that we of course want to go and specifically shoe in on what would have caused now be manufacturing together. And of course, a classic vertical we've been very strong in together as BFSI bank and financial services industry. So those are good areas. >>Well, Jason, you're building a business out of this, right? I mean, you've got a business plan around it and you're going to scale this thing. >>Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That's 100% the case. So we have smart factory at Wichita. That is part of our positioning in the marketplace. What we found is that telling people about tech and about solutions is one thing, showing it to them in a production environment is altogether different, right? Giving clients the opportunity to explore the art of the possible in a real setting like that is incredibly impactful. And so you talked about go to market, we see this relationship with the ecosystem and what we're trying to do in Wichita, that's sort of the epicenter of building an entire business, which ultimately will have huge global potential. >>We talk about speed for a minute. And the growth trajectory that UI path Thomas has been on for the last five years or so. I think I was reading, I think it was analysis that Dave wrote that in 2016 revenue was 1,000,020, 20, 15, 20, 20 600 million. So massive growth very quickly. My question, Jason is for you in terms of the speed. Ha how quickly are you looking to see the smart factory for Dato really impacting organizations around the globe because these guys are on a fast bulleted. >>Yeah. So I wish we had those growth rates. I will say though, selling and delivering these solutions holistically to manufacturers takes more time. So we think of our cycle as be measured, certainly in many months, certainly not years. We are starting to see an acceleration of that entire sales cycle and delivery cycle, just because of things like the pandemic driving organizations to just need to move faster. Frankly, if you're not moving towards digital manufacturing operations right now, you're probably behind. And so we're seeing that urgency from the market start to pick up, but we don't have that kind of growth rate, unfortunately. >>Well, what's it. What's interesting about Deloitte to me is you guys here, I think of you as a virtual company. I mean, I know you got a lot of bodies out there, but it's not like you've got a lot of physical locations. Right. And so now, but now you're just, you're investing in a physical plant essentially, >>Which is extremely exciting. We, we keep telling ourselves when we talk to folks, they own lots of buildings. So just because we're excited about our building doesn't mean they are, but you're exactly right, right. We're obviously a global services and products company. So this is one of a handful of buildings that are going to start to represent us as an organization. And we're really excited about what should we watch? >>It's kind of milestones for progress success. What are the markers that we should be paying attention to is independence. >>I think specifically on this, um, rapid experiment together, I think one of the key learnings we can take away that we can apply to other companies in the manufacturing industry specifically look from a UI perspective. We work with many large scale manufacturers around the world, but we've seen amazing fast progress with Bridgestone. For example, we implemented a smaller set of, uh, uh, bots that help them reduce their paperwork by 85% onto their branches with a Turkish e-commerce retailer called Archer. Lik I think I get the pronunciation correctly. They put 85 processes in place with our bots and are now to date transacting or running. I think it's 3 million e-commerce transactions with our processes. So the impact we can have in manufacturing together with the learnings from this, my factory, I think is just so exciting. Really? >>Yeah. The impact, the potential there is, is unlimited. Guys. Thank you for joining David, me talking to us about smart factory Ford auto, what it means for both businesses, how the partnership is evolving. It sounds like music from a beautiful trombone. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me today. Thank you For Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. The Cubas live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio at UI path forward for we'll be right back.

Published Date : Oct 6 2021

SUMMARY :

UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. the smart factory, a couple of guests here to unpack that for us, Jason Brixton joins us the So technology has really changed in the last three or four years. Tell us what's your perspective? smart factory is really the starting point of going super specific and figuring out what does automation initiative that you guys have going, it feels like an ecosystem play. So we have 21 partners that are going to be participating out of the gate with the smart So obviously that's the Wichita connection, So the Coke business on Can you tell us more where you are in the progression? So the building, the loop so to speak are focused on the innovative work, the graded work, and we have software Letting the folks focus on the value, add to themselves a value add to the organization, So the path to seeing value is so fast. And one of the things we've learned during COVID is there's so much unknown. So there's a few different dimensions to it. and then worry about the process money, or do you step back and say, wait a minute, we have to rethink the entire And so having the ability talk about the go to market, your product market fit? One of the select few on a global level, uh, we have enjoyed tremendous, I mean, you've got a business plan around it and you're going to scale this thing. Giving clients the opportunity to And the growth trajectory that UI path Thomas has been on for to pick up, but we don't have that kind of growth rate, unfortunately. What's interesting about Deloitte to me is you guys here, I think of you as a virtual company. And we're really excited about what should we watch? What are the markers that we should be paying So the impact we can have in manufacturing together with the learnings Vegas at the Bellagio at UI path forward for we'll be right back.

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General Keith Alexander, IronNet Cybersecurity & Gil Quiniones, NY Power Authority | AWS PS Awards


 

(bright music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for the award for Best Partner Transformation, Best Cybersecurity Solution. I'm now honored to welcome our next guests, General Keith Alexander, Founder, and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. Welcome to the program gentlemen, delighted to have you here. >> Good to be here. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, I'd like to start with you. Tell us about the collective defense program or platform and why is it winning awards? >> Well, great question and it's great to have Gil here because it actually started with the energy sector. And the issue that we had is how do we protect the grid? The energy sector CEOs came together with me and several others and said, how do we protect this grid together? Because we can't defend it each by ourselves. We've got to defend it together. And so the strategy that IronNet is using is to go beyond what the conventional way of sharing information known as signature-based solutions to behavioral-based so that we can see the events that are happening, the unknown unknowns, share those among companies and among both small and large in a way that helps us defend because we can anonymize that data. We can also share it with the government. The government can see a tax on our country. That's the future, we believe, of cybersecurity and that collective defense is critical for our energy sector and for all the companies within it. >> Terrific. Well, Gil, I'd like to shift to you. As the CEO of the largest state public power utility in the United States, why do you think it's so important now to have a collective defense approach for utility companies? >> Well, the utility sector lied with the financial sector as number one targets by our adversaries and you can't really solve cybersecurity in silos. We, NYPA, my company, New York Power Authority alone cannot be the only one and other companies doing this in silos. So what's really going to be able to be effective if all of the utilities and even other sectors, financial sectors, telecom sectors cooperate in this collective defense situation. And as we transform the grid, the grid is getting transformed and decentralized. We'll have more electric cars, smart appliances. The grid is going to be more distributed with solar and batteries charging stations. So the threat surface and the threat points will be expanding significantly and it is critical that we address that issue collectively. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, with collective defense, what industries and business models are you now disrupting? >> Well, we're doing the energy sector, obviously. Now the defense industrial base, the healthcare sector, as well as international partners along the way. And we have a group of what we call technical and other companies that we also deal with and a series of partner companies, because no company alone can solve this problem, no cybersecurity company alone. So partners like Amazon and others partner with us to help bring this vision to life. >> Terrific. Well, staying with you, what role does data and cloud scale now play in solving these security threats that face the businesses, but also nations? >> That's a great question. Because without the cloud, bringing collective security together is very difficult. But with the cloud, we can move all this information into the cloud. We can correlate and show attacks that are going on against different companies. They can see that company A, B, C or D, it's anonymized, is being hit with the same thing. And the government, we can share that with the government. They can see a tax on critical infrastructure, energy, finance, healthcare, the defense industrial base or the government. In doing that, what we quickly see is a radar picture for cyber. That's what we're trying to build. That's where everybody's coming together. Imagine a future where attacks are coming against our country can be seen at network speed and the same for our allies and sharing that between our nation and our allies begins to broaden that picture, broaden our defensive base and provide insights for companies like NYPA and others. >> Terrific. Well, now Gil, I'd like to move it back to you. If you could describe the utility landscape and the unique threats that both large ones and small ones are facing in terms of cybersecurity and the risks, the populous that live there. >> Well, the power grid is an amazing machine, but it is controlled electronically and more and more digitally. So as I mentioned before, as we transform this grid to be a cleaner grid, to be more of an integrated energy network with solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations and wind farms, the threat is going to be multiple from a cyber perspective. Now we have many smaller utilities. There are towns and cities and villages that own their poles and wires. They're called municipal utilities, rural cooperative systems, and they are not as sophisticated and well-resourced as a company like the New York Power Authority or our investor on utilities across the nation. But as the saying goes, we're only as strong as our weakest link. And so we need- >> Terrific. >> we need to address the issues of our smaller utilities as well. >> Yeah, terrific. Do you see a potential for more collaboration between the larger utilities and the smaller ones? What do you see as the next phase of defense? >> Well, in fact, General Alexander's company, IronNet and NYPA are working together to help bring in the 51 smaller utilities here in New York in their collective defense tool, the IronDefense or the IronDome as we call it here in New York. We had a meeting the other day, where even thinking about bringing in critical state agencies and authorities. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and other relevant critical infrastructure state agencies to be in this cloud and to be in this radar of cybersecurity. And the beauty of what IronNet is bringing to this arrangement is they're trying to develop a product that can be scalable and affordable by those smaller utilities. I think that's important because if we can achieve that, then we can replicate this across the country where you have a lot of smaller utilities and rural cooperative systems. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, Gil, staying with you. I'd love to learn more about what was the solution that worked so well for you? >> In cybersecurity, you need public-private partnerships. So we have private companies like IronNet that we're partnering with and others, but also partnering with state and federal government because they have a lot of resources. So the key to all of this is bringing all of that information together and being able to react, the General mentioned, network speed, we call it machine speed, has to be quick and we need to protect and or isolate and be able to recover it and be resilient. So that's the beauty of this solution that we're currently developing here in New York. >> Terrific. Well, thank you for those points. Shifting back to General Alexander. With your depth of experience in the defense sector, in your view, how can we stay in front of the attacks, mitigate them, and then respond to them before any damage is done? >> So having run our nations, the offense. I know that the offense has the upper hand almost entirely because every company and every agency defends itself as an isolated entity. Think about 50 mid-sized companies, each with 10 people, they're all defending themselves and they depend on that defense individually and they're being attacked individually. Now take those 50 companies and their 10 people each and put them together and collect the defense where they share information, they share knowledge. This is the way to get out in front of the offense, the attackers that you just asked about. And when people start working together, that knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing is a solution for the future because it allows us to work together where now you have a unified approach between the public and private sectors that can share information and defend each of the sectors together. That is the future of cybersecurity. What makes it possible is the cloud, by being able to share this information into the cloud and move it around the cloud. So what Amazon has done with AWS has exactly that. It gives us the platform that allows us to now share that information and to go at network speed and share it with the government in an anonymized way. I believe that will change radically how we think about cybersecurity. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, you mention data sharing, but how is it now a common tactic to get the best out of the data? And now, how is it sharing data among companies accelerated or changed over the past year? And what does it look like going forward when we think about moving out of the pandemic? >> So first, this issue of sharing data, there's two types of data. One about the known threats. So sharing that everybody knows because they use a signature-based system and a set of rules. That shared and that's the common approach to it. We need to go beyond that and share the unknown. And the way to share the unknown is with behavioral analytics. Detect behaviors out there that are anonymous or anomalous, are suspicious and are malicious and share those and get an understanding for what's going on in company A and see if there's correlations in B, C and D that give you insights to suspicious activity. Like solar winds, recognizes solar winds at 18,000 companies, each defending themselves. None of them were able to recognize that. Using our tools, we did recognize it in three of our companies. So what you can begin to see is a platform that can now expand and work at network speed to defend against these types of attacks. But you have to be able to see that information, the unknown unknowns, and quickly bring people together to understand what that means. Is this bad? Is this suspicious? What do I need to know about this? And if I can share that information anonymized with the government, they can reach in and say, this is bad. You need to do something about it. And we'll take the responsibility from here to block that from hitting our nation or hitting our allies. I think that's the key part about cybersecurity for the future. >> Terrific. General Alexander, ransomware of course, is the hottest topic at the moment. What do you see as the solution to that growing threat? >> So I think, a couple things on ransomware. First, doing what we're talking about here to detect the phishing and the other ways they get in is an advanced way. So protect yourself like that. But I think we have to go beyond, we have to attribute who's doing it, where they're doing it from and hold them accountable. So helping provide that information to our government as it's going on and going after these guys, making them pay a price is part of the future. It's too easy today. Look at what happened with the DarkSide and others. They hit Colonial Pipeline and they said, oh, we're not going to do that anymore. Then they hit a company in Japan and prior to that, they hit a company in Norway. So they're attacking and they pretty much operate at will. Now, let's indict some of them, hold them accountable, get other governments to come in on this. That's the way we stop it. And that requires us to work together, both the public and private sector. It means having these advanced tools, but also that public and private partnership. And I think we have to change the rhetoric. The first approach everybody takes is, Colonial, why did you let this happen? They're a victim. If they were hit with missiles, we wouldn't be asking that, but these were nation state like actors going after them. So now our government and the private sector have to work together and we need to change that to say, they're victim, and we're going to go after the guys that did this as a nation and with our allies. I think that's the way to solve it. >> Yeah. Well, terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. Gil, I'd also like to ask you some key questions and of course, certainly people today have a lot of concerns about security, but also about data sharing. How are you addressing those concerns? >> Well, data governance is critical for a utility like the New York Power Authority. A few years ago, we declared that we aspire to be the first end-to-end digital utility. And so by definition, protecting the data of our system, our industrial controls, and the data of our customers are paramount to us. So data governance, considering data or treating data as an asset, like a physical asset is very, very important. So we in our cybersecurity, plans that is a top priority for us. >> Yeah. And Gil thinking about industry 4.0, how has the surface area changed with Cloud and IoT? >> Well, it's grown significantly. At the power authority, we're installing sensors and smart meters at our power plants, at our substations and transmission lines, so that we can monitor them real time, all the time, know their health, know their status. Our customers we're monitoring about 15 to 20,000 state and local government buildings across our states. So just imagine the amount of data that we're streaming real time, all the time into our integrated smart operations center. So it's increasing and it will only increase with 5G, with quantum computing. This is just going to increase and we need to be prepared and integrate cyber into every part of what we do from beginning to end of our processes. >> Yeah. And to both of you actually, as we see industry 4.0 develop even further, are you more concerned about malign actors developing more sophistication? What steps can we take to really be ahead of them? Let's start with General Alexander. >> So, I think the key differentiator and what the energy sector is doing, the approach to cybersecurity is led by CEOs. So you bring CEOs like Gil Quiniones in, you've got other CEOs that are actually bringing together forums to talk about cybersecurity. It is CEO led. That the first part. And then the second part is how do we train and work together, that collective defense. How do we actually do this? I think that's another one that NYPA is leading with West Point in the Army Cyber Institute. How can we start to bring this training session together and train to defend ourselves? This is an area where we can uplift our people that are working in this process, our cyber analysts if you will at the security operations center level. By training them, giving them hard tests and continuing to go. That approach will uplift our cybersecurity and our cyber defense to the point where we can now stop these types of attacks. So I think CEO led, bring in companies that give us the good and bad about our products. We'd like to hear the good, we need to hear the bad, and we needed to improve that, and then how do we train and work together. I think that's part of that solution to the future. >> And Gil, what are your thoughts as we embrace industry 4.0? Are you worried that this malign actors are going to build up their own sophistication and strategy in terms of data breaches and cyber attacks against our utility systems? What can we do to really step up our game? >> Well, as the General said, the good thing with the energy sector is that on the foundational level, we're the only sector with mandatory regulatory requirements that we need to meet. So we are regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to meet certain standards in cyber and critical infrastructure. But as the General said, the good thing with the utility is by design, just like storms, we're used to working with each other. So this is just an extension of that storm restoration and other areas where we work all the time together. So we are naturally working together when it comes to to cyber. We work very closely with our federal government partners, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy and the National Labs. The National Labs have a lot of expertise. And with the private sector, like great companies like IronNet, NYPA, we stood up an excellence, center of excellence with private partners like IronNet and Siemens and others to start really advancing the art of the possible and the technology innovation in this area. And as the governor mentioned, we partnered with West Point because just like any sporting or just any sport, actual exercises of the red team, green team, and doing that constantly, tabletop exercises, and having others try and breach your walls. Those are good exercises to really be ready against the adversaries. >> Yeah. Terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. General Alexander, now I'd like to ask you this question. Can you share the innovation strategy as the world moves out of the pandemic? Are we seeing new threats, new realities? >> Well, I think, it's not just coming out of the pandemic, but the pandemic actually brought a lot of people into video teleconferences like we are right here. So more people are working from home. You add in the 5G that Gil talked about that gives you a huge attack surface. You're thinking now about instead of a hundred devices per square kilometer up to a million devices. And so you're increasing the attack surface. Everything is changing. So as we come out of the pandemic, people are going to work more from home. You're going to have this attack surface that's going on, it's growing, it's changing, it's challenging. We have to be really good about now, how we trained together, how we think about this new area and we have to continue to innovate, not only what are the cyber tools that we need for the IT side, the internet and the OT side, operational technology. So those kinds of issues are facing all of us and it's a constantly changing environment. So that's where that education, that training, that communication, working between companies, the customers, the NYPA's and the IronNet's and others and then working with the government to make sure that we're all in sync. It's going to grow and is growing at an increased rate exponentially. >> Terrific. Thank you for that. Now, Gil, same question for you. As a result of this pandemic, do you see any kind of new realities emerging? What is your position? >> Well, as the General said, most likely, many companies will be having this hybrid setup. And for company's life like mine, I'm thinking about, okay, how many employees do I have that can access our industrial controls in our power plants, in our substations, and transmission system remotely? And what will that mean from a risk perspective, but even on the IT side, our business information technology. You mentioned about the Colonial Pipeline type situation. How do we now really make sure that our cyber hygiene of our employees is always up-to-date and that we're always vigilant from potential entry whether it's through phishing or other techniques that our adversaries are using. Those are the kinds of things that keep myself like a CEO of a utility up at night. >> Yeah. Well, shifting gears a bit, this question for General Alexander. How come supply chain is such an issue? >> Well, the supply chain, of course, for a company like NYPA, you have hundreds or thousands of companies that you work with. Each of them have different ways of communicating with your company. And in those communications, you now get threats. If they get infected and they reach out to you, they're normally considered okay to talk to, but at the same time that threat could come in. So you have both suppliers that help you do your job. And smaller companies that Gil has, he's got the 47 munis and four co-ops out there, 51, that he's got to deal with and then all the state agencies. So his ecosystem has all these different companies that are part of his larger network. And when you think about that larger network, the issue becomes, how am I going to defend that? And I think, as Gil mentioned earlier, if we put them all together and we operate and train together and we defend together, then we know that we're doing the best we can, especially for those smaller companies, the munis and co-ops that don't have the people and a security ops centers and other things to defend them. But working together, we can help defend them collectively. >> Terrific. And I'd also like to ask you a bit more on IronDefense. You spoke about its behavioral capabilities, it's behavioral detection techniques, excuse me. How is it really different from the rest of the competitive landscape? What sets it apart from traditional cybersecurity tools? >> So traditional cybersecurity tools use what we call a signature-based system. Think of that as a barcode for the threat. It's a specific barcode. We use that barcode to identify the threat at the firewall or at the endpoint. Those are known threats. We can stop those and we do a really good job. We share those indicators of compromise in those barcodes, in the rules that we have, Suricata rules and others, those go out. The issue becomes, what about the things we don't know about? And to detect those, you need behavioral analytics. Behavioral analytics are a little bit noisier. So you want to collect all the data and anomalies with behavioral analytics using an expert system to sort them out and then use collected defense to share knowledge and actually look across those. And the great thing about behavioral analytics is you can detect all of the anomalies. You can share very quickly and you can operate at network speed. So that's going to be the future where you start to share that, and that becomes the engine if you will for the future radar picture for cybersecurity. You add in, as we have already machine learning and AI, artificial intelligence, people talk about that, but in this case, it's a clustering algorithms about all those events and the ways of looking at it that allow you to up that speed, up your confidence in and whether it's malicious, suspicious or benign and share that. I think that is part of that future that we're talking about. You've got to have that and the government can come in and say, you missed something. Here's something you should be concerned about. And up the call from suspicious to malicious that gives everybody in the nation and our allies insights, okay, that's bad. Let's defend against it. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, how does the type of technology address the President's May 2021 executive order on cybersecurity as you mentioned the government? >> So there's two parts of that. And I think one of the things that I liked about the executive order is it talked about, in the first page, the public-private partnership. That's the key. We got to partner together. And the other thing it went into that was really key is how do we now bring in the IT infrastructure, what our company does with the OT companies like Dragos, how do we work together for the collective defense for the energy sector and other key parts. So I think it is hit two key parts. It also goes on about what you do about the supply chain for software were all needed, but that's a little bit outside what we're talking about here today. The real key is how we work together between the public and private sector. And I think it did a good job in that area. >> Terrific. Well, thank you so much for your insights and to you as well, Gil, really lovely to have you both on this program. That was General Keith Alexander, Founder and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, the President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. That's all for this session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host for theCUBE, Natalie Erlich. Stay with us for more coverage. (bright music)

Published Date : Jun 30 2021

SUMMARY :

President and CEO of the I'd like to start with you. And the issue that we had is in the United States, why do and it is critical that we and business models and other companies that we also deal with that face the businesses, And the government, we can and the risks, the the threat is going to be we need to address the issues and the smaller ones? and to be in this radar of cybersecurity. I'd love to learn more So the key to all of this is bringing in the defense sector, and defend each of the sectors together. the best out of the data? and share the unknown. is the hottest topic at the moment. and the private sector and of course, certainly and the data of our customers how has the surface area and we need to be prepared What steps can we take to the approach to are going to build up and the North American Electric like to ask you this question. and the OT side, operational technology. do you see any kind of Well, as the General said, most likely, this question for General Alexander. doing the best we can, like to ask you a bit more and that becomes the engine if you will Well, how does the type And the other thing it went and to you as well, Gil, really lovely

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