>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. Here live at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for theCUBE's three-day exclusive coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier. My co-host, Dave Vellante. Our next guest here is Greg Pepper, head of cloud security architects at Check Point Software Technologies. >> You got it. Good afternoon, gentlemen. >> Welcome, welcome to theCUBE. So, security obviously is big. You're seeing compel all the networks, every company out there is buying security, so there's been a security sprawl. But now you guys have a stock that's trading at a very high, 52-week high. Congratulations. >> Yeah, thank you. You know, some people forget about us. We've been doing this for 24 years, we've been the leaders in this industry for over two decades, but sometimes, we're the best kept secret in the industry. >> Unleash some of those secrets here. I know you guys probably can't go into too much secret sauce as a public company, but what's the software secret? Obviously, relationship with IBM is part of why you're here, but what's the Check Point secret sauce right now? >> I think first and foremost, we've built upon a legacy for the last 20 years. We didn't just acquire technology through acquisition, duct tape and paper clips and call it an architecture for our customers. We've built upon a consistent common platform building on our core strengths. I think the second thing that really differentiates us from some of the other guys you mentioned is our commitment and focus to security first. We are a security company end to end, and everything we do is built off of those tenets. And especially with the growth in security in the data center, its migration to cloud, the industry has kind of come back around to software, and though for a while we delivered hardware appliance to customers, 'cause it was the preferred consumption model, when customers go to the cloud, whether it's SoftLayer, Azure, Amazon, Google, and others, we don't have hardware to bring with you, so you need a software defined security strategy to play in the cloud today. >> What is that software defined security strategy? What's the hottest product that you guys have that's working best? >> Everything we have built on our core competencies of management and the gateways themselves. But these days, it's not enough to just be a firewall vendor, so advanced threat prevention, the ability to both prevent and detect malware from getting on the network, rather than just alerting you that something bad happened. We're providing additional access controls with data awareness. I don't need to plug into the network to tell you people are going to YouTube, Netflix, but what's the information about your organization that's being posted out there? Those are the interesting things that we can help differentiate and alert customers to what's going on. >> So, the perimeter's, with the cloud, all these APIs, microservices coming down the pike with cloud, that's the challenge. I mean, this whole idea of being data and software focused. How do you guys play in that world, and what's this focus there? >> The biggest change is moving away from the traditional management architecture to one that's driven by code. These days especially in the cloud to be agile with dev-ops, you have to have security be able to be deployed, programmed, managed, and monitored all through an API, and this is something over the last few years we've enhanced our products to enable automatic deployment in the cloud providers, automatic management, and also integration with people like IBM QRadar in a highly automated way. >> The big discussion in the last couple years in security has been, hey, it's not enough just to dig a moat around the castle. The queen wants to leave her castle, so we've got to, security's got to be everywhere, it's got to follow the data, and also response is another major focus of discussion, we've got to shift spending there. How has that impacted, first of all, you buy that, second of all, how has that impacted your business and your strategy? >> We definitely do agree, which is why as part of our end to end security strategy, the laptops, the desktops, the mobile devices is an area of increased focus for us. Where really just having the traditional perimeter alone is not adequate. The second thing we started to talk about is the ability to move into the cloud. A lot of the competitive solutions out there don't play as well in the cloud because they're dependent on proprietary hardware. If you're a vendor that has custom ASICs, well, you don't have those ASICs when you go to the cloud. Whereas for us, our software defined security strategy, when we go to Amazon, Azure, SoftLayer, and other cloud providers, 100% of our core capabilities moves along with us. >> Talk that through the value proposition and the customer impact. So, it's more flexibility. Is it lower cost, is it speed, is it better response? >> I believe the primary driver for cloud adoption is agility, not always cost savings, although in some cases that is the case. However, the ability to grow and shrink on demand. In the past, our traditional enterprise customers would consume technology for their max resources. If I'm a large department store, I need to be able to handle Black Friday. Well, that's one week a year that you need that peak utilization. That ability to scale up and scale down is one of the major things driving people to the cloud. Well, security has to have the same model. We have to be able to automatically deploy, scale up for those large-scale events, but then also come back down to an average run-time use to help customers save money. >> How about analytics? How does that play into the security business? >> Yeah, I mean look, the whole reason we exist is to give interesting information for technology to be able to chew on, and the ability to provide the forensic auditing accounting for access controls and for our threat prevention, whether it's on the perimeter, in the cloud, in the core, on mobile and end-point devices, there's a reason after 20 years we've been the lead in the industry is 'cause we provide the best forensics data and integration with all the major leading SIM vendors out there. >> Yeah, the 20-year stair with Check Point. Obviously, the company's evolved a lot since then. Talk about the relationship with IBM, obviously we're here at IBM InterConnect, what are you guys doing with IBM? >> IBM's one of our best partners for over the last two decades. For over 18 years now, they've been a customer, a reseller, and a managed services security partner, so there's multiple organization within IBM that have relationship with Check Point to help secure the corporate assets, customer projects in our managed data centers, or even just purely security managed services. One of the exciting projects that we've been working on that was demonstrated at the security booth was an automated security deployment for the hybrid cloud, where the IBM team worked with us to help take security, automatically roll it out into Amazon and Azure, but also bring it into their MSS environment, their managed security services with zero touch, and they're able to provision, have it managed, monitored, and ready to rock and roll in less than 30 seconds. >> And they were doing that all in software? >> Greg: 100% in software, 100% in code with no human intervention. >> So take us through some of those use cases going forward. As you go talk to customers with IBM or on your own, you write on a lot of white board, I can imagine, so what are some of the white board conversations you're having, 'cause security architecture's one of these, kind of a moving train right now. What are some of the patterns you're seeing right now? >> First and foremost, there's a lot of cloud novice, this is new for all of us. So in the walk-jog-run mentality, we all need to come up with the basic terminology and fundamentals so we can have a more advanced conversation. Once we provide the basic knowledge transfer, the second step is how can you help me lift this legacy application and move it to a cloud-centric application, yet still give me the same levels of security and visibility, 'cause I can't go to the board and tell 'em, "Oh, we screwed up. "We moved to the cloud, and now our apps are not secure." As a matter of fact, for our largest customers, the most critical applications will not move to the cloud unless they have a clearly defined security strategy in place. >> So you lay out those parameters up front, then you kind of walk through it, I'd say crawl, walk, run, then jog. >> Greg: Absolutely. >> However you had it, but I mean, lot of people are kind of crawling, but now also, multi-cloud's a big theme here. So now, you're looking at multiple clouds, and some workloads might make sense for cloud one, two, or three depending on the workloads, but some stay on prem. >> 100%. >> And now you got the true private cloud trend where I'm going to have a cloud-like environment on prem. That's cool, development environment looks the same as the cloud, but I got multiple clouds. How do you guys deal with the multi-cloud and this idea of being consistent on prem and on cloud? >> First and foremost, being a software defined gateway, we have this unique capabilities that's the same on premise, Amazon, Azure, Google, SoftLayer, and others as well. Since we're not dependent upon hardware, we have consistent capabilities across all the clouds. The second thing I want to add is from a management perspective, we've built, excuse me, tight integrations with all the data center and cloud providers, so we're able to trust Amazon, VMware, Cisco, OpenStack, Google, and others and real-time integrate their applications and objects and metadata into our security policies, further tightening the integration and automation capabilities between those cloud providers. >> So, you're actively working with all the clouds to integrate in tightly to manage the security. You become the Switzerland for-- >> Look, we were the first of the major security vendors to both be in Amazon and Azure. We were the first achieve Amazon security competency. We were the first to support basic things like clustering and scale set support, which has been a very common deployment in the cloud as well. We've been in this cloud game for the last seven or eight years now, or as I like to joke, we've cloud up-times longer than some of my competitors have been in business. >> Microsoft was actually down on the cloud. We published a report today on siliconangle.com. Three cloud vendors down in a week. I'll give Amazon a little week there, but it's still, you're still going to see some these bumps in the road, but security, you can't have bumps, you got to be rock solid. >> The thing with today in cloud, whether it's the application, the servers, the storage and securities, you have to anticipate for that total failure situation. Heaven forbid, what happens if an east region went down? Case in point, when Amazon had their storage outage, Netflix was not interrupted at all. Now, other organizations that were only deployed in a single region, we were impacted. This is where, I think from an application architecture, one, we have to think beyond single region, single cloud provider. We have to anticipate the total catastrophic failure and how does our business continuity and disaster recovery work. And then, security has to be an integral portion of that. We can't bolt it on after the fact, it's got to be part of the foundation. >> Greg, great point. And by having software, gives you so much flexibility, I love that hybrid cloud example, but I want to get your thoughts on what you said earlier about lift and shift. That seems to be the parlance of the generation. It used to be rip and replace on the enterprise side, but that's not as easy as it is. To your point, you can't just throw it to the cloud, you might have some gaps. As people look to lift and shift, which I always say is be careful, you got to have some concerns. How do you advise your customers when you say, "Hey, we're lifting and shifting to the cloud." >> For those people, I say don't bother. Right, if I'm going to move the same applications and same products and processes from my private data center to the cloud, why bother? If we're not taking advantage of the agility, elasticity, automation, and all the benefits that clouds has to offer, companies should be building new cloud-ready applications for the cloud. We should not just be lifting our legacy applications and like for like moving them to the cloud, 'cause we're not going to get the benefit in return on investment. >> And it's risky, too, by the way. I would agree with you. So, net new applications, no brainer. If the cloud's available, why not? >> Absolutely. >> Let's go back to the workload. Some clouds have better, like analytics use case is a great cloud, just throw IOT data into Amazon or Azure or Office 365 is Azure, and Amazon gets Kinesis, good stuff, and you've got Bluemix over here. You're starting to see that swim lanes of the different vendors. How do you view the differentiation between the vendors, and how do you advise customers? "Hey Greg, I don't know which cloud to go to. "What's your advice?" >> First and foremost, there's pros and cons to everyone's offering. >> It's kind of like Red Sox, Yankees, you know. It's like trying to-- >> Well, let's stop right there, Yankees for sure. >> Dave: You think? >> Absolutely. >> Dave: You really think? >> Well, maybe not in 2017, but-- >> Who's the Yankees, Microsoft or AWS? >> Microsoft probably the Yankees right now. Then again, from my perspective as a Red Sox fan, I'd say it's a tough call. >> (muttering) is the Yankee-killer. Anywhere, let's... >> Alright, go back. >> We digress. >> What I was I going to make a comment of is look for the adjunct services behind the basics, beyond the basic storage, compute and networking services that everybody has as kind of table stakes. For example, if you're someone who's a very heavy Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint user, you're using their business application suite, well, probably migration to Azure is a more natural transition, right. People who are similarly in the Google environment and using the Google suite of applications, it's a benefit to moving the applications there. And to be honest, people who are purely just into the raw compute horsepower and probably the most mature and largest cloud platform, well, Amazon has probably got a five-year head start on the rest of the guys. So, we try not to sit here and determine which of the three clouds is better, 'cause for us, we play in all of them, and our security footprint has to be consistent across all of them. I'll share with you an anecdotal use case from one of my retail customers is building a commerce platform in AWS. But all the corporate applications are moving to Azure, and separately now, they're looking at Google for other global applications as well. So for them, they're going to be in all three cloud providers, just with different applications finding more natural homes. >> Justin Youngblood was just on. He said, the IBM data said 70% of all organizations, or 70% of the organizations have three or more clouds, infrastructure clouds, right. >> I would believe that. >> Back to the security, I mean, the market's booming. In a way, it's unfortunate that the market's booming is 'cause it's such a huge problem that doesn't end. It's great for you. Each year, we look back at last year and say, okay, we feel more secure, and we don't. So, what's happening in the market? Are we finally going to get a handle on sort of how to deal with this, or is it just always going to be this good guy, bad guy, leap-frogging sort of endless loop? >> The big change these days are the bad guys are pros. This is their full-time job, they're very well funded, trained, and able. >> Dave: And they only have to succeed once. >> And remember, the cost of defense is exponentially higher than the cost of offense. So what it costs my banks and hospitals to secure their environment is 10 to 100-fold over what it costs the bad guys, either in the U.S. or some other nation-state, to attack those environments. I think the biggest challenge that most of our customers face, to be honest, is technology saturation. They've bought every product known to mankind. As I like to joke, for every threat, there's an app for that, and most of our customers have bought all three of them. But then they struggle operationally with the technology, and this is more of a people and a process issue than it is a product issue. There's a lot of great technology out there, ours and other vendors as well, but if it's not implemented and maintained properly, those potentially represent the weakest links. >> And there's new threats emerging, ransomware, for instance, is to your point they're overmanned, and the cost to even compare, or defend against that, but they're already hacked. They'll pay the ransom in bit coin to get their stuff back. >> And look, it's cheaper, quicker, and faster to maybe just whack the system and try and do some forensics clean-up than deploy a next generation end-point to try and detect and mitigate against ransomware, disk encryption, or other bots that may get on the end-points themselves. >> But I almost feel like the mitigation, I mean, you've got to have perimeter security, obviously, and continue to invest in that, but I feel like you're never going to stop somebody from penetrating your organization. What's the status on average, the company's penetrated for 200 and whatever end days before they know? 220, 250, whatever number you want. There's got to be more investment in remediating, responding, managing that complexity. And so, I guess the answer to my earlier question was, well, not any time soon. We're going to have to continue to invest in new approaches, new methodologies to deal with this inundation of data, which isn't going to subside. >> Well, but part of it too is in the past, most of the security controls that companies invested in, they put at the perimeter. So, they're overprotecting on the perimeter, but now, the attacks are coming in through the side door. Spearfishing attempts >> Dave: Or internally. >> They're coming in from laptops or mobile devices that leave the organization and come back in, and since most customers lack internal segmentation, a very small infection becomes a very big problem very quickly. So, a lot of customers now are trying to figure out how do I take what I've done in the perimeter and treat my data center, my campus as untrusted, segment and silo and create smaller fault-isolation domains so that heaven forbid there is a breach or an outbreak, it's contained to a smaller subzone, rather than, look at the Target situation, which came in from an HVAC vendor, moved into a payment system, and then exfiltrated millions of credit card records. >> And, or, and not or, but, and techniques to allow the response to focus on the things that matter, and like you said, organizations, CCOS, are inundated with technology, and they don't know necessarily which threats to go deal with. They've got so much data, and to the extent that they can narrow down those high value threats, that's going to help solve the problem. That's why I was asking the question about analytics before. >> That's where I think the partnership with IBM is so important for us, right, 'cause both what they do with Watson and big data analytics and QRadar as well, it's one thing to just create a bunch of alerts, but for most customers, that's a lot of noise. Give me the interesting bits of information. I don't care about these 10 million alerts over the last week. What are the most critical things that my team needs to address right now? And those are the things that collectively IBM and Check Point help. >> How about the competitive landscape? And you guys are kickin' butt, you're well over a billion, what, $1.7 billion company, roughly? >> A little more, but yeah. >> A little more than that, almost a $20 billion market cap, which you said earlier, John, stocks almost at an all-time high, so obviously compete with Palo Alto. Do you compete with HPE, with ArcSight a little bit? I mean, that acquistion, they sort of, that's-- >> They jettisoned some of their core products that were competitive, like TippingPoint. They've kept some of their ArcSight and other big data analytics, the drive service and storage and services out there. But they're as much a partner as they are a competitor. >> Dave: They are? Okay. >> I mean, I would say the usual competitive suspects, some of the guys you mentioned, some of the big route switch vendors like a Cisco or a Juniper out there. Actually, we're in the end-point mobile space as well, which brings in the Symantec and McAfee and Kaspersky. >> And so, right, okay, so what's your big differentiation? >> I think first and foremost is that we have an enterprise management solution that goes from the mobile to the end-point to the cloud to the network. We do it all through a singular console. We have the most scalable security platform in the marketplace today, and to be honest, we have the best security solution out there, both in terms of the effectiveness as well as the manageability. >> Dave: And you're profitable and you're growing. I'm going to throw that in. >> Greg: We've been profitable since day one. >> Greg, thanks for coming onto theCUBE. We really appreciate, give you the final word on the segment as the outlook going forward. Obviously, all the cloud vendors, you work with them all, all trying to be enterprise-ready. >> Yes. >> And they're all, we're the enterprise cloud. Amazon's now the enterprise cloud, Google was flaunting it at Google Next, they got some work to do. IBM certainly is in the enterprise, Oracle's in the enterprise, Microsoft's in the enterprise. Enterprise readiness and the next few years as security evolves, what are the key table stakes that the cloud guys need to continue to work on, continue to invest in, continue to innovate? >> I think the first thing, and this is across all technology, not just cloud, is that interoperability is the new best of breed. All of our customers are going to have a couple of trusted partners. No one enterprise is single-vendor end to end. But we have to be able to play nicely in the sandox. So, whether it's working with Cisco or McAfee or Microsoft or Symantec, if I don't work well with the other investments my companies and customers have invested in, they're not going to have me around for very long. >> And that's the truth. And multi-cloud, and workloads will fit best, 'cause the SaaS also defines some of these big cloud vendors as well. Microsoft SaaS is Office 365, if you have Microsoft, that's going to be some things for ya. Greg, thanks so much, appreciate it. Great commentary with Check Point Software Technologies, talking security, head of architecture here. Greg Pepper, thanks for joining us. This is theCUBE, more live coverage here, day three coverage from theCUBE after this short break. (electronic keyboard music)