>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent Executive Summit 2020. Sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >> Welcome to CUBE 365's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, part of AWS re:Invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by a CUBE alum, Karthik Narain. He is Accenture's senior managing director and lead Accenture Cloud First, welcome back to the show Karthik. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me here. >> Always a pleasure. So I want to talk to you. You are an industry veteran, you've been in Silicon Valley for decades. I want to hear from your perspective what the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been, what are you hearing from clients? What are they struggling with? What are their challenges that they're facing day to day? >> I think COVID-19 has been a eye-opener from various facets, first and foremost, it's a health situation that everybody's facing, which not just has economic bearings to it. It has enterprise and organizational bearing to it, and most importantly, it's very personal to people because they themselves and their friends, family, near and dear ones are going through this challenge from various different dimension. But putting that aside, when you come to it from an organizational enterprise standpoint, it has changed everything, the behavior of organizations coming together, working in their campuses, working with each other as friends, family, and near and dear colleagues, all of them are operating differently. So that's one big change to get things done in a completely different way from how they used to get things done. Number two, a lot of things that were planned for normal scenarios, like their global supply chain, how they interact with their client, customers, how they co-innovate with their partners, and how their employees contribute to the success of an organization, they're all changed. And there are no data models that give them a hint of something like this for them to be prepared for this. So we are seeing organizations that have adapted to this reasonably okay, and are launching to innovate faster in this, and there are organizations that have started with struggling, but are continuing to struggle. And the gap between the leaders and laggards are widening. So this is creating opportunities in a different way for the leaders with a lot of pivot in their business, but it's also creating significant challenge for the laggards, as we defined in our future systems research that we did a year ago, and those organizations are struggling further. So the gap is actually widening. >> So you just talked about the widening gap. You've talked about the tremendous uncertainty that so many companies, even the ones who have adapted reasonably well in this time. Talk a little bit about Accenture Cloud First and why now? >> I think it's a great question. We believe that for many of our clients COVID-19 has turned cloud from an experimentation aspiration to an urgent mandate. What I mean by that is everybody has been doing something on the other end cloud. There's no company that says "We don't believe in cloud," or "We don't want to do cloud." It was how much they did in cloud. And they were experimenting, they were doing the new things in cloud, but they were operating a lot of their core business outside the cloud or not in the cloud. Those organizations have struggled to operate in this new normal, in a remote fashion, as well as their ability to pivot to all the changes the pandemic has brought to them. But on the other hand, the organizations that had a solid foundation in cloud were able to pivot faster and are actually gone into the stage of innovating faster and driving a new behavior in the market, new behavior within their organization. So we are seeing that this pandemic has actually fast forwarded something that we always believed was going to happen, this movement to cloud over the next decade, it has fast forwarded it to happen in the next three to five years. And it's created this moment where it's a once in an era, really replatforming of businesses in the cloud that we are going to see. And we see this moment as a cloud-first moment where organizations will use cloud as the canvas, as the foundation with which they're going to reimagine their business after they were born in the cloud. And this requires a whole new strategy. And at Accenture, we are doing a lot in cloud, but we thought that this is the moment where we bring all of that capabilities together because we need a strategy for addressing movement to cloud or embracing cloud in a holistic fashion. And that's what Accenture Cloud First brings together, a holistic strategy, a team that's 70,000 plus people that's coming together with rich cloud skills, but investing to tie in all the various capabilities of cloud to deliver that holistic strategy to our clients. >> So I want you to delve into a little bit more about what this strategy actually entails. I mean, it's clearly about embracing change and being willing to experiment, and having capabilities to innovate. Can you tell us a little bit more about what this strategy entails? >> Yeah. The reason why we say there is a need for strategy is like I said, cloud is not new. There's almost every customer client is doing something with the cloud, but all of them have taken different approaches to cloud and different boundaries to cloud. Some organizations say, "I just need to consolidate my multiple data centers to a small data center footprint and move the rest to cloud." Certain other organizations say that "Oh, I'm going to move certain workloads to cloud." Certain other organizations said, "Oh, I'm going to build this greenfield application or workload in cloud." Certain others said, "I'm going to use the power of AI/ML in the cloud to analyze my data and derive insights." But a cloud-first strategy is all of this tied with the corporate strategy of the organization with an industry specific cloud journey. To say, if in this current industry, if I were to be reborn in the cloud, would I do it in the exact same fashion that I did it in the past, which means that the products and services that they offer need to be reimagined, how they interact with their customers and partners need to be revisited, how they build and operate their IT systems need to be reimagined, how they unearth the data from all the systems under which they are trapped need to be liberated so that you could derive insights. A cloud-first strategy hence is a corporate-wide strategy, and it's a C-suite responsibility. It doesn't take the ownership away from the CIO or CDIO, but the CIOs and CDIOs felt that it was just their problem and they were to solve it, and everyone else being a customer. Now the center of gravity is elevated to it becoming a C-suite agenda on everybody's agenda, where probably the CDIO is the instrument to execute that. That's a holistic cloud-first strategy. >> And it's a strategy, but the way you're describing it, it sounds like it's also a mindset and an approach, as you were saying, this idea of being reborn in the cloud. So now how do I think about things? How do I communicate? How do I collaborate? How do I get done what I need to get done? Talk a little bit about how this has changed the way you support your clients and how Accenture Cloud First is changing your approach to cloud services. >> Wonderful. You know, I did not cover one very important aspect in my previous question, but that's exactly what you just asked me now, which is, to do all of this, I talked about all the variables an organization or an enterprise is going to go through, but the good part is they have one constant. And what is that? That is their employees, because if those employees are able to embrace this change, if they are able to change themselves, pivot themselves, retool and train themselves, to be able to operate in this new cloud-first world, the ability to reimagine every function of the business would be happening at speed. And cloud-first approach is to do all of this at speed, because innovation is directly proportional to the rate of probability on experimentation. You need to experiment a lot, for any kind of experimentation, there's a probability of success, and organizations need to have an ability and a mechanism for them to be able to innovate faster, for which they need to experiment a lot. The more they experiment and the lower cost at which they experiment is going to help them experiment a lot, and experiment them at speed, fail fast, succeed more. And hence, they're going to be able to operate this at speed. So the cloud-first mindset is all about speed. I'm helping the clients fast track their innovation journey, and this is going to happen, like I said, across the enterprise in every function, across every department, and the agent of this change is going to be the employees who have to embrace this change through new skills and new tooling, and new mindset that they need to adapt to. >> So Karthik, what you're describing, it sounds so exciting. And yet for a pandemic-weary workforce that's been working remotely, that may be dealing with uncertainty for their kid's school and for so many other aspects of their life, it sounds hard. So how are you helping your clients, employees get onboard with this? And because the change management is often the hardest part. >> Yeah, I think it's, again, a great question. A bottle has only so much capacity. Something got to come out for something else to go in. That's what you're saying, it's absolutely right. And that is again, the power of cloud. The reason why cloud is such a fundamental breakthrough technology and capability for us to succeed in this era, because it helps in various forms. What we talked so far is the power of innovation that we could create, but cloud can also simplify the life of the employees in an enterprise. There are several activities and tasks that people do in managing their complex infrastructure, complex IT landscape. They used to do certain jobs and activities in a very difficult and a roundabout way, cloud has simplified and democratized a lot of these activities, so that things which had to be done in the past, like managing the complexity of the infrastructure, keeping them up all the time, managing the obsolescence of the capabilities and technologies and infrastructure, all of that could be offloaded to the cloud, so that the time that is available for all of these employees can be used to further innovate. Every organization is going to spend almost the same amount of money, but rather than spending activities, by looking at the rear view mirror, on keeping the lights on, they're going to spend more money, more time, more energy, and spend their skills on things that are going to add value to their organization. Because every innovation that an enterprise can give to their end customer need not come from that enterprise. The world of platform economy is about democratizing innovation. And the power of cloud is to get all of these capabilities from outside the four walls of the enterprise. >> It will add value to the organization, but I would imagine also add value to that employee's life because the employee will be more engaged in his or her job and therefore bring more excitement and energy into his or her day-to-day activities too. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is a normal evolution we would have seen, everybody would have seen in their lives, that they keep moving up the value chain of what activities that gets performed by those individuals. And this is, you know, no more true than how the United States, as an economy has operated where this is a powerhouse of innovation, where the work that's done inside the country keeps moving up the value chain and US leverages the global economy for a lot of things that is required to power the United States. And that global economic phenomenon is very true for an enterprise as well. There are things that an enterprise needs to do themselves, there are things an employee needs to do themselves, but there are things that they could leverage from the external innovation and the power of innovation that is coming from technologies like cloud. >> So at Accenture, you have long, deep stand, sorry, you have deep and long standing relationships with many cloud service providers, including AWS. How does the Accenture Cloud First strategy, how does it affect your relationships with those providers? >> Yeah. We have great relationships with cloud providers like AWS. And in fact, in the cloud world, it was one of the first capability that we started about 13 years ago, when we started developing these capabilities. But five years ago, we hit a very important milestone where the two organizations came together and said that we are forging a formal partnership with joint investments to build this partnership, and we named that as Accenture AWS Business Group, AABG, where we co-invested, brought skills together and developed solutions. And we will continue to do that, and through that investment, we've also made several acquisitions that you would have seen in the recent times, like Enimbos and Gekko that we made acquisitions in Europe. But now we're taking this to the next level. What we are saying is through cloud-first and the $3 billion investment that we are bringing in through cloud-first, we are going to make specific investment to create unique joint solution and landing zones, foundation cloud packs, with which clients can accelerate their innovation or their journey to cloud-first. And one great example is what we are doing with Takeda, a global pharmaceutical giant, with whom we've signed a five-year partnership. And it was out in the media just a month ago or so, where the two organizations are coming together, we have created a partnership as a power of three partnership where the three organizations are jointly holding hands and taking responsibility for the innovation and the leadership position that Takeda wants to get to. With this, we are going to simplify their operating model and organization by providing it flexibility. We're going to provide a lot more insights. Takeda is a 230 year old organization. Imagine the amount of trapped data and intelligence that is there. How about bringing all of that together with the power of AWS and Accenture and Takeda to drive more customer insights, come up with breakthrough R and D, accelerate clinical trials, and improve the patient experience using AI, ML, and edge technologies. So all of these things that we will do through this partnership with joint investment from Accenture Cloud First, as well as partner like AWS, so that Takeda can realize their gain. And their CEO actually made a statement that five years from now, every Takeda employee will have an AI assistant that's going to make that Takeda employee move up the value chain on how they contribute and add value to the future of Takeda, with the AI assistant making them even more equipped and smarter than what they could be otherwise. >> So, one last question to close this out here. What is your future vision for Accenture Cloud First? What are we going to be talking about at next year's Accenture Executive Summit? >> Yeah, the future is going to be evolving, but the part that is exciting to me, and this is a fundamental belief that we are entering a new era of industrial revolution, from industrial first, second, and third industrial, the third happened probably 20 years ago with the advent of silicon and computers and all of that stuff that happened in the Silicon Valley. I think the fourth industrial revolution is going to be in the cross section of physical, digital, and biological boundaries. And there's a great article in World Economic Forum that your audience can Google and read about it. But the reason why this is very, very important is we are seeing a disturbing phenomenon that over the last 10 years, we are seeing a plateauing of the labor productivity and innovation, which has dropped to about 2.1%. And when you see that kind of phenomenon over that long a period of time, there has to be breakthrough innovation that needs to happen to come out of this barrier and get to the next base camp, as I would call it, to further this productivity lag that we are seeing, and that is going to happen in the intersection of the physical, digital, and biological boundaries. And I think cloud is going to be the connective tissue between all of these three, to be able to provide that, where it's the edge, especially is going to come closer to the human lives. It's going to come from cloud. Pictorally in your mind, you can think about cloud as central, either in a private cloud, in a data center, or in a public cloud, everywhere. But when you think about edge, it's going to be far-reaching and coming close to where we live and where we work and where we get entertained and so on and so forth. And there's going to be intervention in a positive way in the field of medicine, in the field of entertainment, in the field of manufacturing, in the field of mobility, when I say mobility, human mobility, people, transportation, and so on and so forth, with all of this stuff, cloud is going to be the connective tissue and the vision of cloud-first is going to be plowing through this big change that is going to happen. And the evolution that is going to happen where, you know, the human race of mankind, or personkind, being very gender neutral in today's world, cloud-first needs to be that beacon of creating the next generation vision for enterprises to take advantage of that kind of an exciting future. And that's why in Accenture we say "Let there be change" as our purpose. And I genuinely believe that cloud-first is going to be in the forefront of that change agenda, both for Accenture as well as for the rest of the world. >> Excellent. Let there be change indeed. Thank you so much for joining us Karthik. A pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you so much, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of CUBE 365's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit.

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

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage from RSA Conference on Moscone South. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You know, cybersecurity is changing, and the next technology is right around the corner, and it's got to be invented somewhere, and of course Accenture Labs is part of it. Our next guest is Lisa O'Connor, Global Security R&D Lead for Accenture Labs. Lisa's working on some of those hard problems all around the world. Thank you for joining me today. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, we always get the good scoop from Accenture, because you have a lot of smart people in that company. You know, they know their stuff. I know you got a huge analytics team. I've talked to Jean-Luc Chatelain before, and I know you got a massive amount of, deep bench of talent. But as you have to go do the applied R&D, and maybe some of the crazy ideas, you got to start thinking about where the puck is going to be. >> Absolutely. >> You got to understand that. Well, it's pretty clear to us that Cloud is certainly there. Palo Alto Networks had a disappointing earnings yesterday, because their on-premises business is shifting to the Cloud. You're seeing hybrid operating model and multicloud for the enterprise, but now you got global challenges. >> We absolutely do. >> Huge, so what are you guys working on that's coming? Tell us. >> So we're working on lots of exciting things, and Cloud is one of them. But, some of the things I'm so passionate about in labs, and I have the best job at Accenture. Don't tell anyone. (laughs) I do. So, we are working on, like Jean-Luc is working on applied intelligence, we are working on robust AI. So, when we think about AI in the future, how do we feel that, and know that it's okay? How do we put it out there and know it's safe in production, we've done the right training, we've made our model resilient to what's out there? One of the things we see happening, and I love AI, love it. It has great potential, and we get great insights out of it, but a lot of times we stop, we get the insights, and we say, "Okay, it's in the box, we got a couple hits there, "we're good, it's good." No, maybe not. And so really, it's learning and creating the actually applied attacks on AI, and then figuring out what the right defenses are. And, depending on what type of machine learning you're using, those defenses change. And so, we're having a great time in our lab in Washington D.C., working on basically defending AI and building those techniques, so that what we put out as Accenture is robust. >> You know, it's interesting, AI, you watch some of the hardcore, you know, social justice warriors out there going after Amazon, Google, you know, because they're doing some pretty progressive things. Oh, facial recognition, you got AI, you got Alexa. You know, a lot of people are like, "Oh, I'm scared." But, at the end of the day, they also have some challenges like network security, so you have all this AI up and down the stack. And, one thing I like about what's being talked about in the industry is the shared responsibility model. So, I got to ask you, as AI becomes exciting, but also, balancing, frightening to people, how do you get that shared responsibility model, so we get it right, do the experimentation, without people freaking out? (laughs) So, it's kind of like this weird mode we're in now, where I want to do more AI, because I think it benefits society, but everyone's freaking out. >> Yeah, so, in our tech vision that we just launched, The Tech Vision 2020, there's a lot of talk about value and values, which is really important when we think about AI because we can get great value out of it, but there's a values piece of it and it's how we're using it, how we're getting those insights. Because, the one thing, we have this circle, and it's between customer experience, because the companies that do customer experience well are going to excel, they're going to keep their clients, they're going to do amazing things, they're going to become sticky. But, to do that well, you have to be a good custodian of their data and their information, and curated experiences that they want, and not the creepy ones, not the ones they don't want. And so, we really look at that trust is necessary in that ecosystem, in building that, and keeping that with clients. So, that's something that came out of our technology vision. And, in fact, we're going to be talking at the Executive Women's Forum, this is tomorrow, and we're going to be having a panel on AI, and defending it, which will be very interesting. >> Make sure your people film that conference. We'd like to get a view of it on YouTube after. We love those conferences, really insightful. But, I want to get back to what you were talking about, the fun side. >> Yeah. >> You got a lot of new things on, your guys are kicking the tires on, scratching the surface on. You have two operating labs, one in Washington D.C., and one in Israel. What city in Israel? Is it in Tel Aviv or-- >> Herzliya. >> Okay, did not know. >> Yeah, the tech district, just north of Tel Aviv. It's the hotspot. >> So, Silicon Valley, D.C., and Israel, hotbeds of technology now. >> Yes. >> What's coming out of those labs, what's hot? >> Oh, there's so much exciting stuff coming out of our lab in Herzliya. One of the things that we have, and it's something that's been long and coming, it's been brewing for a while, but it's really looking at creating a model of the enterprise security posture. And, when I say a model of it, I'm talking about a cyber digital twin. Because, so much we can't do in our production networks, we don't have the capabilities. We can look around the room, but we don't have the capabilities on the SOCs team side, to ingest all this stuff. We need a playground where we can ask the what-ifs, where we can run high performance analytics, and we do that through a temporal knowledge graph. And, that's a hard thing to achieve, and it's a hard thing to do analytics at scale. So, that's one of the big projects that we're doing out of our Israel lab. >> Are you saying digital twins is a framework for that? >> Yeah. >> Does it really work well with that? >> So the knowledge graph, we can create digital twins around many things, because a digital twin is a model of processes, people, technologies, the statefulness of things, and configurations, whatever you want to pull in there. So, when we start thinking about, what would we take in to create the perfect enterprise security posture? What would give us all the insights? And, then we can ask the questions about, okay, how would an adversary do lateral movement through this? I can't fix everything that's a 10, but I could fix the right ones to reduce the risk impactfully. And, those are the kind of what-ifs that you can do. >> That's real sci-fi stuff, that's right around the corner. >> Yeah, it is. >> That simulation environment. >> It is. >> What-ifs. Oh my god, the company just got hacked, we're out of business. That's your simulation. You could get to, that's the goal, right? >> It absolutely is, to ask those good business questions about the data, and then to report on the risk of it. And, the other thing, as we move to 5G, this problem's getting bigger and bigger, and we're now bringing in very disparate kinds of compute platforms, computing-at-the-edge. And, what does that do to our nice little network model that we had, that our traditional systems are used to defending against? >> I mean, just the segmentation of the network, and the edge opens up so much more aperture-- >> Yes, it does (laughs). >> to the digital twin, or a knowledge graph. You brought up knowledge graph, I want to get your thoughts on this. I was just having dinner last night with an amazing woman out of New York. She's a Ph.D. in computer science. So, we're talking about graphs, and I love riffing on graph databases. But, the topic came up about databases in general, because with the cloud, it's horizontally scalable, you've got all kinds of simulation, a lot of elasticity going on, there's a lot of software being written on this. You got time series database, you got relational database, you got unstructured, and you got graphs. You got to make them all work together. This is kind of the unique challenge. And, with security, leveraging the right database, and the right construct is a super important thing. How do you guys look at that in the labs? Because, is it something that you guys think about, or is it going to be invisible someday? >> Oh, we think about it a lot. In fact, we've had a number of research projects over the last five years now, actually six years, where we've really pivoted hard in cyber security to graph databases. And, the reason for that is, the many-to-many relationships, and what we can do in terms of navigating, asking the questions, pulling on a thread, because in cyber hunting, that's what we're doing. In many of these use cases that we're trying to defend an enterprise, we're following the next new path based on the newest information of now what the challenge is, or what the current configuration is. So, that's really important. So, graph databases enable that so well. Now, there's still the architecture challenge of, okay, when I ask a query, what am I doing? Am I disrupting the whole apple cart? Do I have to process everything over, or is there a way to do that elegantly, where I can ask my query, and because of how I've structured it in storage, I can do it much better, and I can do it much more efficiently. And that, I think, is where the opportunities are. >> I got to tell you, I'm getting exited now on this whole database discussion, because you think about the logic around what you just said. A graph database with that kind of complexity, when you factor in contextually different things happening at any given time, the database needs to be parsed and managed differently. >> Yes. >> That's a huge challenge. >> It is a great research challenge, which is why we're doing it. >> What is that, how far along are we going to be able to have this dynamic, self-evolving, self-governing, self-healing data modeling? Is that coming soon, or... >> Yeah, I hope so. We wrote about it a couple of years ago. >> You did? >> The self-healing enterprise, aspirational. But I think, I mean, we try to get to real time, right? And, we try to get to real time, and again, refactoring. As we talk about what an adversary is going to do, or lateral movement through a business process, we're talking about a lot of computational horsepower to recalculate all that, process it again, update it, and then again present that back. So the number of things we're asking, how we're asking it becomes also very important to the structure. >> Just, it goes zooming up a little bit, high level, what we're really talking about here is value >> of the data. >> Absolutely. >> And, when you get into the valuation of the nodes, and the arcs, and all that graphs, and other databases, you got to know what to pay attention to. It's kind of like going into the hospital and hearing all these alarms going off. At some point you don't know what's, until they hear a flat line, or whatever. >> Right. That's a bad one. >> I mean, well that's obvious. But, now sometimes there's so many alerts, there's so many alarms. How do you understand at any given time what to pay attention to, because obviously when someone's having a problem you want to pay attention to it. If it's a security alert, that's prioritized. >> And the devil is in the analytics, right? What's the question we're asking, and the analytics that give us that prioritization? And that's non-trivial, because there are a lot of other folks that are doing prioritization in a different manner. To do it at scale, and to do it, not just one hop out, but I want to go all the way to the crown jewels, I want that whole path navigated, and I want to know where to cut along that path. That's a hard thing to do. And so, we've actually developed, and we've submitted patents for them, but we've developed new analytics that'll support that. >> Awesome. Well Lisa, I want to ask you kind of a, I'll give you a plug here, just going to get it out, because I think it's important. Skills gap's a big thing, so I want to give you a minute to explain, or share what you're looking for in your hiring. Who are you looking for? What kind of, the make-up of individual, obviously? Maybe, do you use straight, more academic paper kind of people, or practitioners? I mean, when you look to hire, what are some of the priorities that you look for, and who would thrive in an Accenture Lab's environment? >> Oh, my goodness. >> Take a minute to share what you're looking for. >> Yeah, so we love people that think out of the box, and those kinds of people come from very different backgrounds. And so, part of that is, some of them we look for Ph.D.'s, that have wonderful applied skills, and applied is a key word there. White papers are great, I need to be able to prove something, I need to be able to demo something that has value. So, having the applied skills to a business challenge is really important. So, that sort of ground, understanding the business, very important too. But, our talent comes from many different areas. I mean, I kind of joke, my lab looks like the UN, it's wonderful. I have people from across the globe that are in our cyber security lab. I have, in our Washington D.C. lab, we're 50% women, which is also exciting, because we want different experiences, and we shoot for cognitive diversity, right? So, we're looking for people that think differently about solving problems, and are not encumbered by what they've seen in the past, because we're trying to be tip of spear. And, I'm sure you know that from Paul Daugherty. >> Yeah. >> We are trying to be three to five years over the horizon. >> You guys got a good narrative. I always love talking to Accenture, they have a good vision. So, I got to ask you, the next logical question is, obviously, in the news, you see everyone talking about breaches, and ya know, it's not a breach if the door's open, you just walk in. They're really walking in, nothing was really breached, you're just giving it to them. >> Yeah. It's a passive invitation. >> (laughs) Hey come on in. Human error is a big part of it, but then, breach is obviously targeted, phishing, and all that good stuff. But, as those stories get told, there's a whole nother set of stories that aren't being told that are super important. So, I'd love to get your thoughts on, what are the most important stories that we should be talking about that aren't being talked about? >> Yeah, so I have two that are front-of-mind for me. One theme we come back to, and it's not sexy, it's hygiene. It is IT hygiene, and so many of the large companies, and even medium, small companies, we have legacy technology, and keeping that adds complexity, it adds to the whole breadth and depth of what we have to manage and defend. Keeping that attack surface simple and small, cloud-enabled, all those good things, is a real asset and it makes it much easier to defend. So, that's kind of the first non-sexy one, hygiene. The other one I'll say that I think is a challenge that we are not dealing with yet, quantum computing, right? And so, we're on the way to getting our post quantum cryptography in place, but there's another dimension to it, and it's our histories. So, all of the things that have passed on the wire, all the communications with the key exchanges, all that brilliant stuff, is sitting somewhere. Once we get to that point where this becomes very routine, and it's coming fast, we predicted eight years, two years ago. >> So, all that exhaust is somewhere, pent up. >> It's somewhere that, we have to think about how much data we're keeping as custodians, how we're managing it, and then we have to think about the exposure from our past, and say, "Okay, what does that mean that, that was out there?" "Is it aged enough that it doesn't have value?" And, I think there's a real triage that needs to be done, and certainly data management. >> I think, you know, the hygiene brings up a good point. It reminds me of the story Andy Jassy was telling about the mainframe customer that they couldn't find who had the password. They had to find their person, who was retired 10 years earlier to get the password. You don't forget things, but also, there's a human component in all this. Humans and machines are working together. >> Absolutely. >> And. that's a huge part of it. It's not just machines dominating it all, there's going to be a human component, there's a societal impact that we're seeing with information. And, whether that's out in the open, or behind closed doors, there's all kinds of things looming. >> There are, and I think one of the things in the companies that we're seeing who are embracing innovation well, are doing a lot of retraining. Because, the things that people are excellent at, AI is not good at, and the things that AI is good at, are not at all what people are good at. So, the good news is there is a beautiful teaming there, if we retool the skills, or if we re-envision those roles, so that people can get into those roles, and I think that's really important, because I'd rather see AI do all the heavy lifting well, and be trustworthy, and robust and all those great things, and the people be doing the much smarter things that require a human. >> Does the process serve the purpose? Does the purpose serve the process? Same kind of question, right? >> Exactly. >> AI, you can't have great AI that does nothing. >> That's right. >> (laughs) So, it has to be relevant. >> It absolutely does. >> Relevance is kind of a big thing. >> And we own that context, right? Humans own that context. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming in, and sharing the insight. Really appreciate it. Final question, it's always tough to pick your favorite child, but what is your most coolest thing you're working on right now? >> I'll tell you, the cyber digital twin stuff is so cool. >> The what? >> The cyber digital twin stuff is so cool. When you see the power of what that picture, and the analytics can do, we'll show ya. >> Do you have a demo of that now? >> We absolutely do. >> You do. Is it online, or is it more in person you got to see it? >> More in person. >> Okay. >> Folks can reach out, yeah. >> We'll have to get the exclusive on that. >> We do. >> I love those simulations. I think it's very beneficial. >> It is. >> A lot of learning. I mean, who doesn't want practice? >> Well, and a picture, you know that is worth a million dollars. It's just incredible to look at it, and it clicks. It clicks of all the potential things you could ask or do. And, that's the exciting part now, as we show this with customers' and we co-innovate with customers', they're coming up with a laundry list of questions. >> And, this is the beautiful thing about cloud, is that new capabilities are emerging every day, and you could use the good ones. Lisa O'Connor is here. Thank you very much for sharing your insights. Global Security R&D Lead for Accenture Labs. TheCUBE coverage, getting all the signal here on the show floor, extracting that from all the noise. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from Las Vegas. It's the cues covering quality security Conference 2019. Bike. Wallace. >>Hey, welcome back it. Ready? Geoffrey here with the Q worth the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas for the quality security conference. This thing's been going on for 19 years. I had no idea. It's our first time here, but it's pretty interesting out. Felipe and the team have evolved this security company over a lot of huge technological changes and security changes, and they're still clipping along, doing a lot of cool things in cloud and open source. We're excited of our next guest. She's Laurie McCarthy, the EVP of worldwide field >>operations. Lori, great to see you. >>Thanks. Glad to be here. >>Absolutely. So first off, congratulations in doing some homework for this. I was going through the earnings call. The last turning call, which A was a nice earnings call. You're making money buying back stock. Also, you were promoted or the announcement of your promotion on that call and really some nice, complimentary words from Philippe and the team about the work that you've done actually >>very grateful. Thank you. And >>one of the things we >>talked about, which is unique in your background as you came from a customer. Not It's always a day ago. These shows we have people that I came from customers that went to the vendor, and then we have people that rest of Endor and they went over to the customers. There's a lot of that kind of movement, but he really complimented your execution at CVS as a big reason why you got the promotion that you did. So again. Congrats. But let's talk about, you know, kind of the CVS experience from when you were running it. Not when you're on the quality side. Yeah, that the threats. And CBS is in class nationwide, all kinds of stuff. >>Yeah, well, I mean, you know, just like any other company that's in that health care vertical, you've got so many different things to think about. Additionally, we were also in the retail vertical, so we had a lot of compliance. E's to worry about p c p c i p. I s O. A lot of the programs had been very much, uh, checkbox driven prior to the team that moved in there, including myself, and kind of changed that. So I helped to rebuild the vulnerability program there. And we started to do it in such a way that it was for the sake of security, not just checking a box. And we were really innovated how they do things. A lot of my friends are still there, and they have their own stock now, and we kind of brought everything in house. So a lot of that was outsourced. >>So what was the catalyst to make the change To move from beyond simple compliance and check in the box, Actually making a strategic part of the execution? >>Yeah, at the time and a new sea so had been put into place. And it was someone with that vision, and I think that's what really drove it. I came in just after that and was brought in on the premise that this is what we're going to change and move toward. So I was part of that process from that >>point, right? It clearly, qualities was part of the solution. So what? What did you use calls for their and how is the solution changed? You know, kind of >>so back then when >>you want to call it, >>we're talking. In 9 4010 2011 Right around there. If you opened up the quality platform, you had three things to choose from. Versus today, when you log in, you've got 18 or more, depending. And S O CVS used a little bit of all of that with the mainstay having been the vulnerability management. So I ran to full vulnerability management programs there because we had to keep our pharmacy benefit company and our retail companies separate. So I sort of did double duty, >>Right? So what you doing now on field operations? >>So is the E V p of worldwide for Wallace. I'm running all of the technical account managers for our company way have a unique sales model here, so it's a little different. So everyone in the field to service is our clients rolls up to me, and then that also includes some additional teams, like our federal team, our strategic alliances team and also our subject matter experts >>today. So you said a couple >>times you guys have your account management structure is different than maybe traditional. Kind of >>walk through. Yeah, absolutely. So versus a traditional sales model. We have a salesperson. You have client service person. You have a technical, you know, social architect kind of person. We service our clients all with one person. We have a technical account manager. We break them up into two flavors. We have a presales who are very technical folks that go out and help us get our business. And then those accounts get handed over to our post sales, who are basically the farmers in our business, maintaining and growing our existing clients. What that allows for, which is really special, is we can go in and really build a relationship built on trust and understanding and strategy, because we bring people into our company like myself who have done this, who have sat on that side of the table. So you know, someone comes in and says What? You know, how would you like to buy one of my gizmos? It's a lot different conversation when it's like, Look at what I do with this gizmo like it's amazing. So it's It's kind of a similar feeling that you guys >>have your kind of platform with application strategy enables you to kind of do a land and expand, and in fact you even a something that people can try for free. >>Yeah, absolutely. So we review our model as, like, try and buy. So for both our non clients are freemium service is that we offer our, you know, out of this world for people being able to just log in without even being a client and start to evaluate their environment. And then when they see the value that we bring, it's very easy to translate that into a buy and then likewise, for our clients who sign up for a service or two enabling additional trials and having them work within our new service is as they're being rolled out, is very, very simple, the way our platform is built. So it's just it's a really effortless, very natural progression of business that we that we built. And it's one of the reasons that I work here because as a client, I really enjoyed my relationship with this company because it never felt like I was being sold anything. It always felt like I was being handed solutions to my challenges, and that's what we tried to do. And that's how I lead everyone today is Let's get out, Let's listen, let's strategize and let's see where we fit in with folks, right strategies for, you know, the coming >>future. So must be a team >>approach, though, right? Because one person you know to say, trying to manage the CVS account, that would be, >>Oh, so we have a little bit of a break out in our post side. We have what a new role that I helped get implemented here at the company, which is a major account solution architect they handle are bigger, more complex accounts. So as our platform has matured, so have our clients are bigger. Clients are using more of our platform. They're using it in a more expert way. So we had to answer that with the right kind of people who could speak to that expert level of usage and be able to finance that. So that's a little bit part of it. And on our bigger clients, we do have more of a team approach. We have a product management, a project management organization. The S M E team are subject matter. Experts roll up under me. They're experts in each of our solutions. So it's a sizeable team and they are liaise between product management, engineering our fields and our clients. And that's another support mechanism. And then our support at Wallace is also something that augments our technical account managers jobs on a daily basis. >>So new opportunity with a sure that was recently announced a bundle. Yeah, you're bundled in kind of under the covers, not not really under the covers. So a little bit about how that's gonna work from kind of an account management and and from your kind of point of view, >>So it's It's actually not gonna change much of anything on the way that we are. Mom are our model is a hybrid, right? So we have direct sales that we have indirect sales, even honor in direct sales through partners through relationships like we've just built with azure MSs peas and reach whatever. We still treat every end customer and every partner like a direct customer. So we work very hard to educate her partners, to work with them, to make sure they're successful with our clients. And we're also treating our clients who are through that avenue the same way. So it's it's just gonna blend right in with what we >>d'oh Yeah, that's great, but hopefully it's a sales channel and they get more than they just bought it under the covers and start implementing. >>It's easy for them to jump in with us. And then from there we can build those relationships with perhaps, you know, prospects and folks that aren't our clients now and be able to show them more things that we do. Besides just, you know, the one thing that they might be signing up for at that time, >>right? Right. Okay, great. I want to shift gears a little bit. >>We had windy by front earlier from from Nutanix. When he's a fantastic lady, yes, and she is super super involved in in girls Who Code and women in Tech and trying to drive that kind of forward along a number of parameters everything from the board to getting people jobs, training little girls to staying at staying in the industry. I know that's a big, passionate area of yours. I wonder if you could share some of the activities you guys were doing around women. I could think more specifically, and security is a subset of all tech, but share the some of the activities you have going on. >>So personally, I try to be very involved locally. Four Children. One of them is a daughter. She's too little, quite yet for getting into tact. I have two older sons and s so I try to be really involved in middle school high school. Hey, put me in, Coach, I'll come in and talk to the kids. Generating interest in getting into this field at a young age is what we need to do. They're still aren't enough gals and, honestly, guys heading into our business in college. So I I really take it upon myself as a security professional to try to promote that specifically around women. I'm really pleased that our company supports an organization which I've been a part of for a while, and that's the Executive Woman's Forum, and we sponsor their conference every year, and we sponsor events with them. I personally am part of their mentor program, so that allows me a channel. Thio have ah, unassigned person to work with, and I really enjoy that, and our company itself is just very excellent at promoting and enabling women within our organization. And it's another reason that I really loved working here for the past eight years, >>right? Well, from the top. Because the board, I think, is either for more than half. Yemen, which is certainly half >>women CEO, is very supportive. Our presidents, two men way have a great environment. Thio grow women professionally here in my company, >>right? That's great. So, ah, year from now, when we come back, what are we gonna be talking about? What's kind of on a road map? For the next year, >>we're going to be talking about our data leak efforts, or Sim. We're gonna be talking about our improved Edie, our capabilities that are really gonna put us in the position to be a major player in that market. Um, and who knows? We have such a quick turnaround of innovation here and what we do by the way we do our business. So starting with the technical account manager's boots on the ground with our clients, when we're there listening to all of their challenges, we're also taking that back, and that drives our innovation that the company so we hear what they need, and that's what we provide. So as things changed, we're going to continue to do that digital transformation, of course, is is making that something that we have to be even quicker about. And I think we're doing a good job >>keeping up well. 19 years and counting, making money. Find back, buying back shares to help everyone else's stock delusion. So not that, but nothing but good success. It's all right. Well, Laurie, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. And again, congratulations on your promotion as well as a terrific event. >>Thank you very much. >>All right. She's Laurie. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube with the quality security conference at the Bellagio and lovely >>Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.