(theCUBE theme music) >> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner ecosystem. >> Welcome back here to the show floor at AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls. Glad to have you here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here live from the nation's capital. Joining us now from Enlighten IT Consulting is John Eubank IV, Director of Program Management Office. John, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE, a CUBE rookie, I believe, is that correct? >> Yes, sir, yeah, thanks for the invite. >> Nice to break the maiden, good to have you aboard here. First off, tell us a little bit about your consulting firm for our viewers at home, to give an idea about your frame and why you're here at AWS. >> Absolutely, so we're a big data consulting company focused on cyber security solutions for the DOD IC community. What we jumped into about three years ago was a partnership with AWS. And seeing, just the volume, the velocity of data coming out of the DOD, that those on-premise server farms could not keep up, could not support it with the power, space and cooling needs. So we partnered with AWS and over the last three years we've been migrating our customers up to GovCloud, specifically. >> So what are you doing then for DOD specifically, then? When you said you solve problems, right? They've got reams and reams of data, trying to help them manage that process a little bit better, but, you know, drill down a little bit more specifically what you're doing for DOD. >> Absolutely, so we developed a proprietary technology called the Rapid Analytic Deployment and Management Framework, RADMF, it's available on RADMF.com, R A D M F dot com. >> John Walls: True marketer. >> Yeah, true marketer at heart. So that's our, sort of governance framework for DOD applications that want to move to the cloud. It automates the deployment process to get 'em out of their existing systems up to the cloud. One of the real problems inside the DOD that we've encountered is the disparate data sets to enable effective analytics when it comes to cyber security solutions. So, I like to think back to the day one conversation about, sort of the data swamp, not the data lake. That's exactly what we have inside the DOD. There's so many home-built sensors, paired with COT sensors, that it's created this absolute mess, or nightmare of data. That swamp needs to be drained. It needs to be, sort of refined in a way that we can call it a data lake, something understandable that people can-- >> I hate the term data lake, I, you've been listening, I, John knows I hate the term data lake. Love the term data swamp, because it illustrates exactly that, there is, if you don't watch the data, and don't share it, it's just stagnant, and it turns into a swamp. And I think, this is a huge issue. >> John Eubank IV: Absolutely correct. >> So I want you to just double down on that, just give some color. Is it the volume of the data, is it the lack of sharing, both? (laughs) >> It's really every, it's everything under the sun, there's, you know, sharing issues all across the federal government right now and who can see what data, Navy doesn't want to share with Army, inside the IC-- >> John Furrier: Well that'll never happen. >> Agencies don't want to share with each other. (laughs) I think we're, we're breaking down those walls. We're seeing that, when it comes to cyber security, no one person can defend an entire nation. No one agency can defend an entire nation on their own. It has to be a collaborative solution. It has to be a team effort. Navy, Army, Air Force, IC, etc., have to work together, in tendem, in partnership, if we're ever going to just, defend our nation from cyber hackers. >> I want to ask you a philosophical question, because, you know, as someone who's been online all my life, computer science, you've seen, there's always the notion of trolling, the notion of online message boards, back in the day when I was running, is now main stream now, >> John Eubank IV: Right. >> I mean people trolling each other on Twitter, for crying out loud, main stream. So, the culture of digital has an ethos, and open source is a big driver on that cyber security, there's a huge ethos of sharing, and it's kind of an honor among practitioners. >> John Eubank IV: Mm-hmm. 'cause they know how big the threat is. How is that evolving? Because this seems to highlight, your point about sharing, that it's, the digital world's different than the analog world, and some of the practices that are getting traction can be doubled-down on. So everyone's trying to figure out what's, what should be double-down on, and what are the good practices from the bad? Can you just share some cultural... >> Well, I think you hit the nail on the head with the open source model there. That is the key right here. It's not even within the government we need to share. It's industry and government, in partnership, need to approach these problem sets together and work on 'em as one cohesive body. So, for example, our company, our platform, it's entirely an open source platform. It's government-owned solution. We don't sell, it's the big data platform, it's provided by DISA right now. We don't sell that product. It's available to any government agency that wants it for free. We have 1500 different software developers and engineers from across the government community that collaborate together to evolve that platform. And that's really the only way we're going to make a significan difference right now. >> That creativity that could come out of this new process that you're referring to, I'm just kind of thinking out loud here on theCUBE, is interesting because you think about all those people on Twitch. >> John Eubank IV: Uh-huh. >> 34 million, I think, a day or whatever the big number, it's a huge number. Those idle gamers could be actually collaborating on a core problem that could be fun. So if you look at a crowd sourcing model of attacking data, this is kind of a whole new mindset of culture. To me, this is the kind of doors that open up when you start thinking like this model. Because the bad guys are already ahead of the game. I mean, so, how do you, how do you guys talk about that, 'cause you guys have to kind of keep some data masked, and you have to kind of, maybe not expose everything. How do you balance that secretive nature of it, and yet opening it up? >> That's a question that the DHS is struggling with, sort of day in and day out right now. They're going through a couple different iterations of different efforts. There was the ESSA program, there's the Automated Indicator Sharing program going on right now with DHS and some of the IC partners of what do we share with industry, because we're recognizing as a government we can't defend this nation on our own. We need an industry partnership. How do we open that up to the general public of the United States to do that crowd sourced mentality. Threat hunting is a lot of fun if you know what you're doing, and if somebody will guide you down the path, it's an endless world and a need for threat analysts to study the data sets that are out there. Indicators of compromise point you in a general direction, but they're a wide-open direction, and... >> They're already playing, it's like lagging in a video game, they're, gamers are already ahead of, the hackers are already ahead of you. Interesting point, Berkeley, University of California at Berkeley has a new program, they call it the quote Navy Seals of cyber. It's an integrated computer science and engineering and Haas business school program. And it's a four-year degree specifically for a special forces kind of thinking. Interdisciplinary, highly data driven, computer science, engineering and business so they can understand, again, hackers run a business model. These are organized units. This is kind of what we're up against. >> Absolutely agree. >> John Furrier: What are your thoughts on that? You think that's the, the right direction, we need more of it? >> We need more of it, absolutely. DOD is moving in the same direction with the cyber protection teams or CPTs. They're beginning to do sort of the same formal training models for the soldiers. Unfortunately, right now a lot of the cyber protection teams are just scavenged resources from other branches of the military. So you have guys in EOD that are now transitioning into cyber, and they're going from diffusing bombs to diffusing cyber threats. It's a totally different scenario and use case, and it's a tough struggle to transition into that when your background was diffusing a bomb. >> And you brought up the industry collaboration, talking about private, you know, private sector and public sector. I know, you know, personal experience in the wireless space, there was a lot of desire to share information, but yet there was a congressional reluctance. >> John Eubank IV: Mm-hmm. >> To allow that. For different concerns. Some we thought were very unwarranted at the time. So how do you deal with that, because that's another influence in this, is that you might have willing parties, but you've got another body over here that might not be on board. >> I think we're going to start seeing more of a shift as private industry acknowledges their need for government support and that government collaboration, so data breaches like the Target breach and massive credit card breaches that, you know, these private industries cannot keep up with defending their own network. They need government supoort for defending very large corporations. Walmart, Target, Home Depot, the list goes on of breaches. >> Final question as we wrap up here, but what's the coolest tech that you're seeing that's enabling you to be successful, whether it's cool tech that you're looking at, you're kicking the tires on. From software to Amazon, hardware, what are you seeing that's out there that's really moving the needle and getting people motivated? >> So a surprising thing there, I'm going to say the Snowball Edge. And people go, it's just a data hard drive. Well, not really. It's way more than a data hard drive. So when you come to Amazon you think enterprise solutions, enterprise capabilities. What the Snowball Edge provides is a deployable unit that has processing, compute, storage, etc., onboard that you can take into your local networks. They're putting it so you can run any VM you want on the Snowball Edge. What we're doing is we're taking that inside DOD tactical spaces that don't have connections to the internet. We're able to do computation analytics on threats facing that local regional onclave using a hard drive. It's really cool technology that hasn't been fully explored, but that's uh, that's where we're-- >> You can tell you're excited about it. Your eyes light up, you got a big smile on your face. >> Drove the new Ferrari that came out. >> Yeah, right. >> When I saw it, I just jumped all in. >> John Walls: You loved it, right. >> So, three months ago... >> You knew right away, too. >> Right. >> John Furrier: The big wheel. >> John, thank you for being with us. I think they're going to kick us out of the place, John. >> Hey, they got to unplug us. We're going to go until they unplug us. >> Alright, John, again thanks for being with us. >> Well, thank you guys for your time, much appreciated. >> Thank you for joining us here from Washington, for all of us here at theCUBE, we appreciate you being along for the ride at AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. (theCUBE theme music)