(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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