>>mhm. >>With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for Hyper Flex at Cisco at Flash for all number four. Love that on Twitter And Deron Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco Mister Hyper flex at Mr Hyper Flex on Twitter. Thanks, guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and and hyper flex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks, David. >>Thanks. Hi, >>Daryn. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud you gotta have on Prem Connection. Right? So you've got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, but you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud, you need a strong foundation. I'm conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building with hyper convergence in particular hyper flex no to make all that work. They need a good, strong Cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that. To be able to connect that around a Saas offering that looks around simplified operations, gives them optimisation and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren, let's stay with you for a minute when you talk to your customers. What are they thinking these days, when it comes to implementing hyper converged infrastructure in both the the enterprise and and at the edge? What are they trying to achieve? >>So there's many things they're trying to achieve? Probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at in terms of simplicity. How can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyper conversions and storage networking, and we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that, a collapse into hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure. Also about scalability. They don't know the end game, so they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper conversions. Very easy is one of the major factors and benefits of hyper conversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all the way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around. The simplicity model is the management layer ease of management to make it easier for their operations that we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model, deploying out flex also around the time savings. They make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think that we one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements, and the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper converged, especially with edge edges of major key use case for us and what I want. What our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data centre at the edge without a big investment. They don't compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management employment. And we've seen analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deployed hyper conversions. As I said, the savings elements to keep it and again, not always, but obviously those are his studies around about public Cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. We again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers looking for >>Great. Thank you for that, Darrin minutes. We have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >>Yeah, Thanks. Leave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. the first one is a new offer, um, called hyper Flex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Inter site lead and Cisco and decide managed it Hyper flex configurations that we feel are the fastest part to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AM Iraq, U. C s and Iraq. And the third is a new capability that we're introducing that we're calling local contemporaries witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a very nifty capability to optimise for forage environments. So, you know, this leverages the Ciscos ubiquitous presence. Uh, the networking, um, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest hyper flex configuration that we have is, uh it do not configuration, which is primarily used in edge environment. Think of a, you know, a back home in a department store or a oil rig. Or it might even be a smaller data centre, uh, somewhere, uh, on the globe. For these two not configurations. There is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for hyper flex as well. The problem that customers faces where you host this witness it cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, um, sort of upgrade rates. Which note gets to survive, so it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environment. So what we've done is we've taken that witness. We've converted it into a container reform factor and then qualified a very large a slew of Cisco networking products that we have right from S. R. S R. Texas catalyst, industrial routers, even even a raspberry pi that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure or doing any, um, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we're announcing today. >>So I want to ask you about hyper Flex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's global supply chain issues are in the news. Everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that? A little bit more Can can hyper flex express help customers respond to some of these issues. >>Yeah, indeed. The, uh, you know, the primary motivation for hyper Flex Express was indeed, uh, an idea that, you know, one of the folks around my team had, which was to build a set of hyper flex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for something in it for customers, for sales as well as our partners. So, for example, you know, for customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the instal for hyper flex express. These are still hypertext configurations, and you would, at the end of it, get a hyper flex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much much simplifying. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data centre configurations But you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy it with your existing top of rack. Um, we've also, you know, already attract attractive price point for these. And of course, you know these will have better lead times because we made sure that, you know, we are using components that are that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, Uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a settled, risky, friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the deceased as well. >>It's interesting many. So I'm looking at some fresh survey data. More than 70% of the customers that were surveyed this GTR survey again mentioned at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring, uh, server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So so that's encouraging. What about Manisha AMG that's new for hyper flex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, so you know, in the short time that we've had UCS am direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a it's a It's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it and hyper flex. Uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from Day one is that it is. It has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we're going to get the fastest compute together with the fastest storage and this we are hoping that will basically unlock, you know, a unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyper converged experience. >>Yeah, cool. Uh, so, Darren, can >>you can you give us >>an idea as to how hyper flexes is doing in the field? >>Sure, Absolutely So both me and my initial been involved right from the start and before it was called Hyper Flex, and we've had a great journey, and it's very excited to see where we're taking where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they approved the technology and are comfortable with technology. They repeat by for expanding capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an energy perspective, more numbers of science so really good. Endorsement the technology. We get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical applications as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. Uh, and we are the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers think one example, and I apologise for the worldwide audience. But this resonates with the American audiences the Super Bowl. So the sofa like stadium that housed the Super Bowl actually has Cisco hyper Flex running all the management services through from the entire stadium for digital signage. Four K video distribution, and it's complete completely cashless. So if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few notes across a few racks and have 100 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with High Flex where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases were getting involved in very, very excited. >>Come on, Darren. It's Super Bowl NFL. That's a That's international now. And, you know, the NFL >>NFL. It's >>invading London. Of course I see the picture of the real football over your shoulder, But last question for many is give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for hyper flex? >>Yeah, so you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved the type of flicks since the beginning, Uh, but I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for for hyper Flex. One is in. The site is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass management. But we're going to take this beyond the Lifecycle management, which is for hyper flex, which is integrated in winter side today and element management. We're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of a job. Because Interstate really provides us an ideal platform to gather starts from all the clusters across the globe. Do AML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer valued, um, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is you'll see us expand the hyper flex portfolio. Go beyond you see us to third party server platforms, and newer, you see a server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is a checks on X CDs. Experience is another thing that we're able to, uh you know, uh, announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But a check sonic series. We'll have that by the end of this calendar year, and that should unlock with the flexibility of X series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of hyper flex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, that we're locked out previously. And then the last thing is hyper flex leader platform. This is the heart of the offering today, Uh, and you'll see the hyper flex data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, unique distributed architecture primarily where we get our, you know, record breaking performance from you'll see it get faster, more scalable, more resilient. And we'll optimise it for, you know, containerised workloads, meaning it will get granular containerised container granular management capabilities and optimised for public. So those are some things that were the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum and maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay, guys, we got to leave it there and you know many She was talking about the HX on X Series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that, and it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach and we're gonna dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube, your leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>>Welcome back to Vienna on 2021 you're watching the Cube and my name is Dave Volonte. You know, the last 10 years of cloud, they were largely about spinning up virtualized compute infrastructure and accessing cheap and simple object storage and some other things like networking. The cloud was largely though a set of remote resources that simplify deployment and supported the whole spate of native applications that have emerged to power the activity of individuals and businesses the next decade, however, promises to build on the troves of data that live in the cloud, make connections to on premises applications and support new application innovations that are agile, iterative, portable and span resources in all in all the clouds, public clouds, private clouds, cross cloud connections all the way out to the near and far edge. In a linchpin of this new application development model is container platforms and container orchestration, which brings immense scale and capability to technology driven organizations, especially as they have evolved from supporting stateless applications to underpinning mission critical workloads as such containers bring complexities and risks that need to be addressed, not the least of which is protecting the massive amounts of data that are flowing through these systems. And with me to discuss these exciting and challenging trends or Danny Allen, who's the ceo of in and Niraj Tolia, the president at Kasten Bivins gentlemen welcome to the cube. >>Thank you delighted to be here with you Dave. >>Likewise, very excited to be a Dave. >>Okay, so Danny big M and a move. Great little acquisition. You're now seeing others try to make similar moves. Why what did you see in cast in? What was the fit? Why'd you make that move? >>Well, I think you nailed it. Dave's. We've seen an evolution in the infrastructure that's being used over the last two decades. So if you go back 20 years, there was a massive digital transformation to enable users to be self service with digital applications. About 2000 or so, 2010, everything started being virtualized. I know virtualization came along before that but virtualization really started to take off because it gave return on investment and gave flexibility all kinds of benefits. But now we're in a third wave which is built on containers. And the amazing thing about containers is that as you said, it allows you to connect multi cloud, hybrid cloud the edge to the core. And they're designed for the consumption world. If you think about the cloud, you can provision things deep provisions things. That's the way that containers are designed the applications and so because they're designed for a consumption based world because they are designed for portability across all of these different infrastructures, it only made sense for us to invest in the industry's leading provider of data protection for kubernetes. And that of course is costume, >>there's some garage, I mean take us back. I mean, you know, container has been around forever. But then, you know, they started to, you know, hit go mainstream and and and and at first, you know, they were obviously ephemeral, stateless apps, kind of lightweight stuff. But but you at the time you and the team said, okay, these are gonna become more complex microservices. Maybe so micro, but you had to have the vision and you made a bet uh maybe take us back to sort of how you saw that and where where's containers have have come from? >>Sure. So let's rewind the clock right. As you said, containers, old technology in the same way virtualization started with IBM mainframes, right, containers in different forms have been around for a while. But I think when the light bulb went off for me was very early days in 2015 when my engineering team, a previous company started complaining. And the reason they were complaining about different other engineering groups and the reason they were complaining was because the right things, things were coming together sooner. We're identifying things sooner. And that's when I said, this is going to be the next wave of infrastructure. The same way watch a light virtualization revolutionized how people built deployed apps. We saw that with containers and in particular in those days we made that bet on commodities. Right? So we said from first Principles and that's where you know, you had other things like Docker, swarm esos, etcetera and we said community, that's going to be the way to go because it is just so powerful and it is, you know, at the end of the day, what we all do is infrastructure. But what we saw was that containers optimizing for the developer, they were optimizing for the people that really build applications, deliver value to all of their and customers. And that is what made us see that even though the initially we only saw stateless applications state will was going to happen because there's just so much momentum behind it And the writing for us at least was on the wall. And that's how we started off on this journey in 2017. >>What are the unique nuances and differences really in terms of protecting containers from a, from a technical standpoint, what what's different? >>So there are a couple of subtle things. Right again, the jokers, you know, I say, is that I'm a recovering infrastructure person have always worked in infrastructure systems in the past and recovering them. But in this case we really had to flip things around right. I've come at it from the cloud disks volumes. VMS perspective, in this case to do the right thing by the customer needed a clean slate approach of coming out from the application down. So what we look at is what does the application look like? And that means protecting, not just the stuff that sits on disk, what your secrets in networking information, all those hundreds of pieces that make up a cloud native application and that involves scale challenges, work, visualisation challenges for admins, KPI So all of that shifts in a very dramatic way. >>So Danny, I mean typically VM you guys haven't done a ton of acquisitions, uh, you've grown organically. So now you, you, you poppin cast in, what does that mean for you from a platform perspective? You know, IBM has this term blue washing when they buy a company did you green wash cast and how did that all work? And again, what does what does it mean from the, from the platform perspective? >>Well, so our platform is designed for this type of integration and the first type of integration we do with any of our technologies because we do have native technologies, if you think about what we do being back up for AWS for Azure, for G C p, we have backup for Acropolis Hyper Visor. These are all native purpose built solutions for those environments and we integrate with what we call being platform services. And one of the first steps that we do of course is we take the data from those native solutions and send it into the repository and the benefit that you get from that is that you have this portable, self describing format that you can move around the vein platform. And so the platform was already designed for this Now. We already showed this at demon. You saw this on the main stage where we have this integration at a data level but it goes beyond that beam platform services allows us to do not just day one operations, but day two operations. Think about um updating the components of those infrastructures or those software components that also allows reporting. So for example you can report on what is protected, what's not protected. So the platform was already designed for this integration model. But the one thing I want to stress is we will always have that stand alone product for kubernetes for uh you know, for the container world. And the reason for that is the administrator for Kubernetes wants their own purpose build solution. They want it running on kubernetes. They want to protect the uniqueness of their infrastructure. If you think about a lot of the container based systems there, They're using structured data. Non structured data. Sure. But they're also using object based storage. They're using message queues. And so they have their nuances. And we want to maintain that in a stand alone product but integrated back into the Corvin platform. >>So we do these we have a data partner called GTR Enterprise Technology Research. They do these quarterly surveys and and they have this metric called net score is a measure of spending momentum and for the last, I don't know, 8, 10, 12 quarters the big four have been robotic process automation. That's hot space. Cloud obviously is hot and then A I of course. And but containers and container orchestration right up there. Those are the Big four that outshine everything else, even things like security and other infrastructure etcetera. So that's good. I mean you guys skating to the puck back in 2015 rush, you've made some announcements and I'm and I'm wondering sort of how they fit into the trends in the industry. Uh, what what's, what's significant about those announcements and you know, what's new that we need to know about. >>Sure. So let me take that one day. So we've made a couple of big interesting announcement. The most recent one of those was four dot release after casting by women platform, right? We call it kitten and right. We've known rate since a couple of weeks colonial pipeline ransom. Where has been in the news in the US gas prices are being driven up because of that. And that's really what we're seeing from customers where we are >>seeing this >>increase in communities adoption today. We have customers from the world's largest banks all the way to weakly connected cruise ships that one could burn. It is on them. People's data is precious. People are running a large fleet of notes for communities, large number of clusters. So what we said is how do you protect against these malicious attacks that want to lock people out? How do you bring in mutability so that even someone with keys to the kingdom can't go compromise your backups and restores, right? So this echoes a lot of what we hear from customers and what we hear about in the news so well protected that. But we still help through to some of the original vision behind cast. And that is, it's not just saying, hey, I give you ransomware protection. We'll do it in such an easy way. The admin barely notices. This new feature has been turned on if they wanted Do it in a way that gives them choice right. If you're running in a public cloud, if you're running at the edge you have choice of infrastructure available to you and do it in a way that you have 100% automation when you have 100 clusters when you deploy on ships, right, you're not going to be able to have we spoke things. So how do you hook into CHED pipelines and make the job of the admin easier? Is what we focused on in that last >>night. And and that's because you're basically doing this at the point of writing code and it's essentially infrastructure as code. We always talk about, you know, you want to you don't want to bolt on data protection as an afterthought, but that's what we've done forever. Uh This you can't >>so in fact I would say step before that day, right are the most leading customers we work with. Right to light up one of the U. S. Government's largest contractors. Um Hey do this before the first line of code is written right there on the scalp cloud as an example. But with the whole shift left that we all hear the cube talks a lot about. We see at this point where as you bring up infrastructure, you bring up a complete development environment, a complete test environment. And within that you want to deploy security, you want to deploy backup your to deploy protection at day zero before the developer in so it's the first line of cordon. So you protected every step of the journey while trying to bolt it on the sound. Seemingly yes, I stitched together a few pieces of technology but it fundamentally impacts how we're going to build the next generation of secure applications >>Danny, I think I heard you say or announced that this is going to be integrated into Wien backup and replication. Um can you explain what that took? Why? That's important. >>Yeah. So the the timeline on this and when we do integrations from these native solutions into the core platform, typically it begins with the data integration, in other words, the data being collected by the backup tool is sent to a repository and that gives us all the benefits of course of things like instant recovery and leveraging, de doop storage appliances and all of that step to typically is around day to operations, things like pushing out updates to that native solutions. So if you look at what we're doing with the backup for AWS and Azure, we can deploy the components, we can deploy the data proxies and data movers. And then lastly there's also a reporting aspect to this because we want to centralize the visibility for the organization across everywhere. So if your policy says hey I need two weeks of backups and after two weeks and I need weekly backups for X amount of time. This gives you the ability to see and manage across the organization. So what we've demonstrated already is this data level integration between the two platforms and we expect this to continue to go deeper and deeper as we move forward. The interesting thing right now is that the containers team often is different than the standard data center I. T. Team but we are quickly seeing the merge and I think the speed of that merging will also impact how quickly we integrate them within our platform. >>Well I mean obviously you see this for cloud developers and now you're bringing this to any developers and you know, if I'm a developer and I'm living in an insurance company, I've been, you know, writing COBOL code for a while, I want to be signed me up. I want to get trained on this, right? Because it's gonna I'm gonna become more valuable. So this is this is where the industry is headed. You guys talk about modern data protection. I wondered if you could you could paint a picture for us of sort of what what this new world of application development and deployment and and data protection looks like and how it's different from the old world. >>Mhm. So I think that if you mentioned the most important word, which is developer, they come first, they are the decision makers in this environment, the other people that have the most bull and rightly so. Oh, so I think that's the biggest thing at the cultural level that is, developers are saying this is what we want and this is what we need to get the job done, we want to move quickly. So some of the things are let's not slow them down. Let's enable them, let's give them any P I to work with. Right? No. Where in bulk of production, use will be api based versus EY base. Let's transparently integrate into the environment. So therefore protection for security, they need zero lines have changed code. Mm So those are some of the ways we approach things. Now when you go look at the requirements of the developers, they said I have a Ci cd pipeline to integrate into that. I have a development pipeline to integrate into that. I deploy across multiple clouds sometimes. Can you integrate into that and work seamlessly across all those environments? And we see those category of us coming up over and over again from people. >>So the developer rights once and it doesn't have to worry about where it's running. Uh it's got the right security, there are a protection and those policies go with it, so that's that's definitely a different world. Um Okay, last question. Uh maybe you guys could each give your opinion on sort of where we're headed, uh what we can expect from the the acquisition, the the integration, what should we look forward to and what should we pay attention to? >>Well, the one obvious thing that you're going to see is tremendous growth on the company's side and that's because Kubernetes is taking off cloud is taking off um SaAS is taking off and so there's obvious growth there. And one of the things that were clearly doing is um we're leveraging the power of of, you know, a few 1000 sales people to bring this out to market. Um, and so there is emerging of of sales and marketing activities and leveraging that scale. But what you shouldn't expect to see anything different on is this obsessive focus on the product, on quality, on making sure that we're highly differentiated that we have a product that the company that our customers and companies actually need no garage. >>Yeah. So I'll agree with everything down, he said. But a couple of things. Excite me a lot. Dave we've been roughly eight months or so since acquisition and I particularly love how last what in this quarter have gone in terms of how we focuses on solving customer problems. All right. So we'll always have that independent support for a cloud date of customers, but I'm excited about not just working with the broadest side of customers and as we scale the team that's going to happen, but providing a bridge to all the folks that grew up in the virtualization world, right? Grew up in the physical wall of physical service, etcetera and saying, how do we make it easy for you to come over to this new container Ization world? What is the on ramps bridging that gap serving as the on ramp? And we're doing a lot of work there from the product integration and independent product features that just make it easy. Right? And we're already seeing feel very good feedback for that from the field right now. >>I really like your position. I just dropped my quarterly cloud update. I focused, I look at the Big Four, the Big Four last year, spent $100 billion on Capex. And I always say that is a gift to companies like yours because you can be that connection point between the virtualization crowd, the on prem cloud, any cloud. Eventually we'll be, we'll be more than just talking about the Edge will actually be out there, you know, doing real work. Uh, and I just see great times ahead for you guys. So thanks so much for coming on the cube explaining this really exciting new area. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you everybody for watching this day. Volonte for the Cube and our continuous coverage of the mon 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there. >>Mm mm mm

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by >>Cisco We're back. This is Dave Volonte and TK Kia Ninis here he's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK My friend. Good to see you again. >>How are you? >>Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, way saw this thing coming, But we didn't see it coming this way, did we? >>No, I have. No one did, but yeah, it, uh that was right before everything happened. >>Well, it's weird, right? I mean, we were you know, we it was in the back of our minds in January. We said Barcelona hasn't really been hit yet. Looked like it was really isolated in China. But But wow, what a change. And I guess I guess I'd I'd start with that. We're seeing really a secular change in your space and security identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden, these things have exploded as the work from home pivot has occurred on it. It feels like these changes are permanent or semi permanent. What are you seeing out there? >>Yeah, I don't I don't think anybody thinks the world's gonna go back the way it waas. Um, to some degree, it's it's changed forever. Um, you know, I I do a lot of my work remotely on bond. And so, you know, being a remote worker isn't such a big deal for me. But for some, it was, ah, huge impact. And like I said, you know, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on Thea opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah, And when you see that you know that work from home pivot I mean, you know, our estimates are along with a partner GTR. About 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to co vid, and now it's, you know, north to 70% plus and and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge. But people essentially, except expect that to the you know, at least double that 16% you know, going forward and definitely So what is that? What kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and and how? How organizations are approaching security. >>Yeah, I just think from a mindset standpoint, you know what Waas optional? Uh, maybe, uh, last year, eyes no longer optional. And I don't think it's going to go back. I think I think a lot of people have changed the way you know they live and the way they work. Um and they're doing it in ways. Hopefully that, you know, in some cases, yield more productivity again. Um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works Justus Well, for the bad guys. And so that's That's the balance we need to keep. Which is we need Thio be extra diligent on how we go about securing infrastructure, how we go about securing even our our social channels. Because remember all our social channels now our digital so that's has become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember the line you shared with me in the Cube one time. Is it the adversary is highly capable of sort of the phrase that you used And essentially the way you describe it is you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guys, return on investment, you know, increase their cost, increase the numerator. But as as works just from home, Yeah, I'm in my house, you know, by my wife, I and my you know, router with my you know, dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me. Thio, increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? >>Yeah, I mean, it is It is truly when you think when you get into the mind of the adversary and, uh, you know, cybercrime out there, there, honestly, there, like any other business they're trying toe, you know, operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll they'll frankly go find something else to do. Um, and and again, you know, you know, the shift we experience day to day is you know, it's not just our kids are online in school, and our work is online, but all the groceries we order, You know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season Ah, lot more online shopping is going to take place. Eso you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is you know how How do we up our game there so that, um we can go about our business effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary toe operate on take care of their business because it's nasty stuff. I want to >>ask you about automation, you know, generally and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyper scale er's. And of course, they really attacked the I t labor problem. We learned a lot from that, and an I T organizations have applied much of that thinking and the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace that technology scales today. How does that apply to security? And specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it z the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like ai and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand on operate at machine scale. Now. I mean that for for businesses. I mean that for, you know, education and everything else. Now, so are the adversaries, right. So it's expensive for them to operate at human scale, and they are going to machine scale, go into machine scale. A necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines work on your behalf, Have the machines carry your intent. Andi, when you do that, you can do it, uh, safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should. You wanna make sure that, frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's a tricky thing because, you know, when you take the phrase you know, how do we How do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of of securing the automation first. >>Yeah, we talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that you know, the bad guys, the adversaries essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because they're hiding in plain sight. Right there >>is a, um Well, there's they're clever, Given that, you know, there's this phrase that they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and and being detected. You know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then they have, ah, higher degree of evading your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob who's already been credential and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not, you know, marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavioral anomalies and things like that become, ah, Paramount. But also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to minimize their effectiveness. Um, without e mean ideally without human interaction, because you just can you move faster, you move quicker. Andi, I say that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly you're just making their job or effect. >>I wonder if I could talk about the market a little bit. Uh, it's, I mean, security space cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which, by the way, it's just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that It that massive, uh, GDP. But guys, I wonder if you could bring up the the chart. Because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them what you're what, your biggest challenge to say, lack of talent and and so what? This chart shows this is from e T. R R R survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum. On the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence. Pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here I wanted toe put forth to our audience and then get your reaction. So you see Cisco I highlighted in red. Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the on the conference call, and so you can see on the horizontal axis you've got, you know, big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere. But you're right there, Um, in that in that data set and then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. The other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here, and that just adds to the complexity. This is, of course, only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is, how can Cisco help you simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it? You know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions, and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left There it z, I had a customer, you know, Tell me once that you know, I I came to this trade show looking for transportation, and these people are trying toe Selmi car parts. That's the frustration customers have, you know? And I think What Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Because, ultimately that's that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think I think security in general has just year over year been just written with. You need to be an expert. You need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And I think I think those days are behind us. But particularly as as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business. We're not selling to the, you know, T shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about Cloud. People think I put my data in the cloud. I'm safe. But you know, of course, we know it's a shared responsibility model, so I'm interested in your your thoughts on that. Is it really? Is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say no state of security is great in the cloud where, as you know, many of us out there saying, Wow, it z not so great. Eso What are your thoughts on that? That whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think. Cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible? Um, you know, no, no data center required. No, this Dr required, you just get storage. You know, it Z all of those things that are again closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud to is it's really been It's really punctuated the way we go about building systems, um, again, at machine scale. So, you know, before when I write code and I think about what computer is it going to run on? Are you know what servers are gonna Is it gonna run on those? Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire Internet shows up the system, you know, works without fail. And on Wednesday Onley North America shows up, you know, so what? But there's no way you could staff that right. There is just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff. Is, um, it really is the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure is code, and that applies to you know, security is code. That's what you know definite is really all about. I've said many times. I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only that really has figured out. You know that developer angle because it's practical. You're not trying to force your way into developers. But, you know, I wonder if you could you could talk a little bit about that trend. Andi, where you see it going? >>Yeah. No, that is That is truly the trend. Every time I walk into Devon yet, um, the big halls at at Cisco Live it is Cisco as code. Everything about Cisco is being presented through an A P I. It is automation ready, and and frankly, that is that is the love language of the cloud. Um, it's machines. It's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the I think I think necessary maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What? What's also necessary Eyes thio to secure if infrastructure is code. Therefore, um what what secure what security methodologies do we have today that we used to secure code? While we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So when I when I talk about how do you do automation securely, You do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you threat model, you say, You know, Ken, my adversary exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intended to go. Eso all of those practices apply. It's just everything as code these days. >>Today I've often said that security and privacy or sort of two sides of the same coin and I wanna ask you a question and it's really you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco, and companies like companies like Cisco is responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you could help. And of course, this this, you know, Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies air appropriating our data, tell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, etcetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy. And I mean, it's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're, you know, social media user. I love tic tac. I don't care, but but But they sort of laid out This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that? And, you know, can Cisco play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy? I mean, beyond GDP R and California Consumer Privacy Act. Um, what do you think? >>Yeah, um, I'll give you my You know, my humble opinion is you you fix social problems with social tools, you fix technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem. Um, that needs to be rectified. You know, um, we we weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. Just It's just pretty wrong. So, yeah, that that that that serious did really kind of wake up a lot of people. It is. It is. You know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I saw um but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we we overcome it or we we compensate by what number one? Just being aware that is happening. Um, number two. You know how you go about solving it. I think maybe come down Thio an individual or even a community's solution And what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's it's It's almost I think if I could, you know, play back. What I heard is is yeah, technology, Maybe got us into this problem. But technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic A I bought is going to solve this. It's gonna be, you know, society has to really, really take this on. Is your premise good one? >>When I when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to, you know, the text based adventure stuff like muds and moos. I did a talk it at m i t one time and this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social process that we had modeled in our game and this and that, and this guy just gave us the Smackdown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, You know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy that completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared. If somebody can decide in a minute what is good for the community, it two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community, so it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting. You know, you read the Lincoln historians, and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions. But, you know, ultimately, when he acted, he acted with with confidence. So to that point, but So what else you working on these days? That is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience anything. It's really super exciting for you or you. >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, um, trying, trying to make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's Ah general theme making it simpler for the common person to use tools again. You know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity. It's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can drive at human scale and we can do things. That machine scale and kind of working those two together is it's sort of the magic recipe. Um, it's not easy, but but it is. It is fun So that's that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing I wonder if you see it. Just sort of Ah, obviously a heightened organization awareness. But I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, You know, it used to be the SEC ops team in an island. Okay, it's your problem. You know, the CSO cannot report into the to the CEO, because that's like the fox in the hen house. A lot of those structures are are changing, it seems, and becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what do >>you know? It's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums. Everybody knows their role, and you create something that's larger than you know, some of all parts. And so that that analogy, I think is coming to, you know, way saw it. Sort of with Dev ops where, you know, the developer doesn't just throw their quote over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They moved together as a band. And and that's what I think organizations air seeing is that you know why? Why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just. Here's the product. And here's the rest of the business s. Oh, that's that's That's pretty awesome. I think we see a lot of those patterns, particularly for the highly high performance businesses, >>you know, In fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually seeing that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of, uh and I know sometimes you guys, you know, I don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you gotta leadership structure. Now, I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how their connect connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of you know, of silo busters, isn't it? >>Yeah. No. And you, you Almost as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring a band and say, Okay, all you guitar players go over here. All you bass players go over there like what happened to the band s. So that's that's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines moving together, um, and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. >>Well, I was I always, uh, feel better after talking to you. You know? I remember. I remember Art. Coviello used to put out his, uh, his letter every year. And I was reading I get depressed. Yeah, we spend all this money now, we're less secure. But when I talked to you, t k I I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cubits. It's awesome to have you as a guest. >>Right on. I love these. I love these sessions, So thanks. Thanks for inviting me. >>And I miss you. You know, hopefully you know, next year's we could get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird like the sign says >>doing my part. >>All right, T k. Kennedy. Thanks so much for coming in the queue. We we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte. We've right back with our next guest right after this short break.