(bright music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for the award for Best Partner Transformation, Best Cybersecurity Solution. I'm now honored to welcome our next guests, General Keith Alexander, Founder, and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. Welcome to the program gentlemen, delighted to have you here. >> Good to be here. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, I'd like to start with you. Tell us about the collective defense program or platform and why is it winning awards? >> Well, great question and it's great to have Gil here because it actually started with the energy sector. And the issue that we had is how do we protect the grid? The energy sector CEOs came together with me and several others and said, how do we protect this grid together? Because we can't defend it each by ourselves. We've got to defend it together. And so the strategy that IronNet is using is to go beyond what the conventional way of sharing information known as signature-based solutions to behavioral-based so that we can see the events that are happening, the unknown unknowns, share those among companies and among both small and large in a way that helps us defend because we can anonymize that data. We can also share it with the government. The government can see a tax on our country. That's the future, we believe, of cybersecurity and that collective defense is critical for our energy sector and for all the companies within it. >> Terrific. Well, Gil, I'd like to shift to you. As the CEO of the largest state public power utility in the United States, why do you think it's so important now to have a collective defense approach for utility companies? >> Well, the utility sector lied with the financial sector as number one targets by our adversaries and you can't really solve cybersecurity in silos. We, NYPA, my company, New York Power Authority alone cannot be the only one and other companies doing this in silos. So what's really going to be able to be effective if all of the utilities and even other sectors, financial sectors, telecom sectors cooperate in this collective defense situation. And as we transform the grid, the grid is getting transformed and decentralized. We'll have more electric cars, smart appliances. The grid is going to be more distributed with solar and batteries charging stations. So the threat surface and the threat points will be expanding significantly and it is critical that we address that issue collectively. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, with collective defense, what industries and business models are you now disrupting? >> Well, we're doing the energy sector, obviously. Now the defense industrial base, the healthcare sector, as well as international partners along the way. And we have a group of what we call technical and other companies that we also deal with and a series of partner companies, because no company alone can solve this problem, no cybersecurity company alone. So partners like Amazon and others partner with us to help bring this vision to life. >> Terrific. Well, staying with you, what role does data and cloud scale now play in solving these security threats that face the businesses, but also nations? >> That's a great question. Because without the cloud, bringing collective security together is very difficult. But with the cloud, we can move all this information into the cloud. We can correlate and show attacks that are going on against different companies. They can see that company A, B, C or D, it's anonymized, is being hit with the same thing. And the government, we can share that with the government. They can see a tax on critical infrastructure, energy, finance, healthcare, the defense industrial base or the government. In doing that, what we quickly see is a radar picture for cyber. That's what we're trying to build. That's where everybody's coming together. Imagine a future where attacks are coming against our country can be seen at network speed and the same for our allies and sharing that between our nation and our allies begins to broaden that picture, broaden our defensive base and provide insights for companies like NYPA and others. >> Terrific. Well, now Gil, I'd like to move it back to you. If you could describe the utility landscape and the unique threats that both large ones and small ones are facing in terms of cybersecurity and the risks, the populous that live there. >> Well, the power grid is an amazing machine, but it is controlled electronically and more and more digitally. So as I mentioned before, as we transform this grid to be a cleaner grid, to be more of an integrated energy network with solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations and wind farms, the threat is going to be multiple from a cyber perspective. Now we have many smaller utilities. There are towns and cities and villages that own their poles and wires. They're called municipal utilities, rural cooperative systems, and they are not as sophisticated and well-resourced as a company like the New York Power Authority or our investor on utilities across the nation. But as the saying goes, we're only as strong as our weakest link. And so we need- >> Terrific. >> we need to address the issues of our smaller utilities as well. >> Yeah, terrific. Do you see a potential for more collaboration between the larger utilities and the smaller ones? What do you see as the next phase of defense? >> Well, in fact, General Alexander's company, IronNet and NYPA are working together to help bring in the 51 smaller utilities here in New York in their collective defense tool, the IronDefense or the IronDome as we call it here in New York. We had a meeting the other day, where even thinking about bringing in critical state agencies and authorities. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and other relevant critical infrastructure state agencies to be in this cloud and to be in this radar of cybersecurity. And the beauty of what IronNet is bringing to this arrangement is they're trying to develop a product that can be scalable and affordable by those smaller utilities. I think that's important because if we can achieve that, then we can replicate this across the country where you have a lot of smaller utilities and rural cooperative systems. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, Gil, staying with you. I'd love to learn more about what was the solution that worked so well for you? >> In cybersecurity, you need public-private partnerships. So we have private companies like IronNet that we're partnering with and others, but also partnering with state and federal government because they have a lot of resources. So the key to all of this is bringing all of that information together and being able to react, the General mentioned, network speed, we call it machine speed, has to be quick and we need to protect and or isolate and be able to recover it and be resilient. So that's the beauty of this solution that we're currently developing here in New York. >> Terrific. Well, thank you for those points. Shifting back to General Alexander. With your depth of experience in the defense sector, in your view, how can we stay in front of the attacks, mitigate them, and then respond to them before any damage is done? >> So having run our nations, the offense. I know that the offense has the upper hand almost entirely because every company and every agency defends itself as an isolated entity. Think about 50 mid-sized companies, each with 10 people, they're all defending themselves and they depend on that defense individually and they're being attacked individually. Now take those 50 companies and their 10 people each and put them together and collect the defense where they share information, they share knowledge. This is the way to get out in front of the offense, the attackers that you just asked about. And when people start working together, that knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing is a solution for the future because it allows us to work together where now you have a unified approach between the public and private sectors that can share information and defend each of the sectors together. That is the future of cybersecurity. What makes it possible is the cloud, by being able to share this information into the cloud and move it around the cloud. So what Amazon has done with AWS has exactly that. It gives us the platform that allows us to now share that information and to go at network speed and share it with the government in an anonymized way. I believe that will change radically how we think about cybersecurity. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, you mention data sharing, but how is it now a common tactic to get the best out of the data? And now, how is it sharing data among companies accelerated or changed over the past year? And what does it look like going forward when we think about moving out of the pandemic? >> So first, this issue of sharing data, there's two types of data. One about the known threats. So sharing that everybody knows because they use a signature-based system and a set of rules. That shared and that's the common approach to it. We need to go beyond that and share the unknown. And the way to share the unknown is with behavioral analytics. Detect behaviors out there that are anonymous or anomalous, are suspicious and are malicious and share those and get an understanding for what's going on in company A and see if there's correlations in B, C and D that give you insights to suspicious activity. Like solar winds, recognizes solar winds at 18,000 companies, each defending themselves. None of them were able to recognize that. Using our tools, we did recognize it in three of our companies. So what you can begin to see is a platform that can now expand and work at network speed to defend against these types of attacks. But you have to be able to see that information, the unknown unknowns, and quickly bring people together to understand what that means. Is this bad? Is this suspicious? What do I need to know about this? And if I can share that information anonymized with the government, they can reach in and say, this is bad. You need to do something about it. And we'll take the responsibility from here to block that from hitting our nation or hitting our allies. I think that's the key part about cybersecurity for the future. >> Terrific. General Alexander, ransomware of course, is the hottest topic at the moment. What do you see as the solution to that growing threat? >> So I think, a couple things on ransomware. First, doing what we're talking about here to detect the phishing and the other ways they get in is an advanced way. So protect yourself like that. But I think we have to go beyond, we have to attribute who's doing it, where they're doing it from and hold them accountable. So helping provide that information to our government as it's going on and going after these guys, making them pay a price is part of the future. It's too easy today. Look at what happened with the DarkSide and others. They hit Colonial Pipeline and they said, oh, we're not going to do that anymore. Then they hit a company in Japan and prior to that, they hit a company in Norway. So they're attacking and they pretty much operate at will. Now, let's indict some of them, hold them accountable, get other governments to come in on this. That's the way we stop it. And that requires us to work together, both the public and private sector. It means having these advanced tools, but also that public and private partnership. And I think we have to change the rhetoric. The first approach everybody takes is, Colonial, why did you let this happen? They're a victim. If they were hit with missiles, we wouldn't be asking that, but these were nation state like actors going after them. So now our government and the private sector have to work together and we need to change that to say, they're victim, and we're going to go after the guys that did this as a nation and with our allies. I think that's the way to solve it. >> Yeah. Well, terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. Gil, I'd also like to ask you some key questions and of course, certainly people today have a lot of concerns about security, but also about data sharing. How are you addressing those concerns? >> Well, data governance is critical for a utility like the New York Power Authority. A few years ago, we declared that we aspire to be the first end-to-end digital utility. And so by definition, protecting the data of our system, our industrial controls, and the data of our customers are paramount to us. So data governance, considering data or treating data as an asset, like a physical asset is very, very important. So we in our cybersecurity, plans that is a top priority for us. >> Yeah. And Gil thinking about industry 4.0, how has the surface area changed with Cloud and IoT? >> Well, it's grown significantly. At the power authority, we're installing sensors and smart meters at our power plants, at our substations and transmission lines, so that we can monitor them real time, all the time, know their health, know their status. Our customers we're monitoring about 15 to 20,000 state and local government buildings across our states. So just imagine the amount of data that we're streaming real time, all the time into our integrated smart operations center. So it's increasing and it will only increase with 5G, with quantum computing. This is just going to increase and we need to be prepared and integrate cyber into every part of what we do from beginning to end of our processes. >> Yeah. And to both of you actually, as we see industry 4.0 develop even further, are you more concerned about malign actors developing more sophistication? What steps can we take to really be ahead of them? Let's start with General Alexander. >> So, I think the key differentiator and what the energy sector is doing, the approach to cybersecurity is led by CEOs. So you bring CEOs like Gil Quiniones in, you've got other CEOs that are actually bringing together forums to talk about cybersecurity. It is CEO led. That the first part. And then the second part is how do we train and work together, that collective defense. How do we actually do this? I think that's another one that NYPA is leading with West Point in the Army Cyber Institute. How can we start to bring this training session together and train to defend ourselves? This is an area where we can uplift our people that are working in this process, our cyber analysts if you will at the security operations center level. By training them, giving them hard tests and continuing to go. That approach will uplift our cybersecurity and our cyber defense to the point where we can now stop these types of attacks. So I think CEO led, bring in companies that give us the good and bad about our products. We'd like to hear the good, we need to hear the bad, and we needed to improve that, and then how do we train and work together. I think that's part of that solution to the future. >> And Gil, what are your thoughts as we embrace industry 4.0? Are you worried that this malign actors are going to build up their own sophistication and strategy in terms of data breaches and cyber attacks against our utility systems? What can we do to really step up our game? >> Well, as the General said, the good thing with the energy sector is that on the foundational level, we're the only sector with mandatory regulatory requirements that we need to meet. So we are regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to meet certain standards in cyber and critical infrastructure. But as the General said, the good thing with the utility is by design, just like storms, we're used to working with each other. So this is just an extension of that storm restoration and other areas where we work all the time together. So we are naturally working together when it comes to to cyber. We work very closely with our federal government partners, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy and the National Labs. The National Labs have a lot of expertise. And with the private sector, like great companies like IronNet, NYPA, we stood up an excellence, center of excellence with private partners like IronNet and Siemens and others to start really advancing the art of the possible and the technology innovation in this area. And as the governor mentioned, we partnered with West Point because just like any sporting or just any sport, actual exercises of the red team, green team, and doing that constantly, tabletop exercises, and having others try and breach your walls. Those are good exercises to really be ready against the adversaries. >> Yeah. Terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. General Alexander, now I'd like to ask you this question. Can you share the innovation strategy as the world moves out of the pandemic? Are we seeing new threats, new realities? >> Well, I think, it's not just coming out of the pandemic, but the pandemic actually brought a lot of people into video teleconferences like we are right here. So more people are working from home. You add in the 5G that Gil talked about that gives you a huge attack surface. You're thinking now about instead of a hundred devices per square kilometer up to a million devices. And so you're increasing the attack surface. Everything is changing. So as we come out of the pandemic, people are going to work more from home. You're going to have this attack surface that's going on, it's growing, it's changing, it's challenging. We have to be really good about now, how we trained together, how we think about this new area and we have to continue to innovate, not only what are the cyber tools that we need for the IT side, the internet and the OT side, operational technology. So those kinds of issues are facing all of us and it's a constantly changing environment. So that's where that education, that training, that communication, working between companies, the customers, the NYPA's and the IronNet's and others and then working with the government to make sure that we're all in sync. It's going to grow and is growing at an increased rate exponentially. >> Terrific. Thank you for that. Now, Gil, same question for you. As a result of this pandemic, do you see any kind of new realities emerging? What is your position? >> Well, as the General said, most likely, many companies will be having this hybrid setup. And for company's life like mine, I'm thinking about, okay, how many employees do I have that can access our industrial controls in our power plants, in our substations, and transmission system remotely? And what will that mean from a risk perspective, but even on the IT side, our business information technology. You mentioned about the Colonial Pipeline type situation. How do we now really make sure that our cyber hygiene of our employees is always up-to-date and that we're always vigilant from potential entry whether it's through phishing or other techniques that our adversaries are using. Those are the kinds of things that keep myself like a CEO of a utility up at night. >> Yeah. Well, shifting gears a bit, this question for General Alexander. How come supply chain is such an issue? >> Well, the supply chain, of course, for a company like NYPA, you have hundreds or thousands of companies that you work with. Each of them have different ways of communicating with your company. And in those communications, you now get threats. If they get infected and they reach out to you, they're normally considered okay to talk to, but at the same time that threat could come in. So you have both suppliers that help you do your job. And smaller companies that Gil has, he's got the 47 munis and four co-ops out there, 51, that he's got to deal with and then all the state agencies. So his ecosystem has all these different companies that are part of his larger network. And when you think about that larger network, the issue becomes, how am I going to defend that? And I think, as Gil mentioned earlier, if we put them all together and we operate and train together and we defend together, then we know that we're doing the best we can, especially for those smaller companies, the munis and co-ops that don't have the people and a security ops centers and other things to defend them. But working together, we can help defend them collectively. >> Terrific. And I'd also like to ask you a bit more on IronDefense. You spoke about its behavioral capabilities, it's behavioral detection techniques, excuse me. How is it really different from the rest of the competitive landscape? What sets it apart from traditional cybersecurity tools? >> So traditional cybersecurity tools use what we call a signature-based system. Think of that as a barcode for the threat. It's a specific barcode. We use that barcode to identify the threat at the firewall or at the endpoint. Those are known threats. We can stop those and we do a really good job. We share those indicators of compromise in those barcodes, in the rules that we have, Suricata rules and others, those go out. The issue becomes, what about the things we don't know about? And to detect those, you need behavioral analytics. Behavioral analytics are a little bit noisier. So you want to collect all the data and anomalies with behavioral analytics using an expert system to sort them out and then use collected defense to share knowledge and actually look across those. And the great thing about behavioral analytics is you can detect all of the anomalies. You can share very quickly and you can operate at network speed. So that's going to be the future where you start to share that, and that becomes the engine if you will for the future radar picture for cybersecurity. You add in, as we have already machine learning and AI, artificial intelligence, people talk about that, but in this case, it's a clustering algorithms about all those events and the ways of looking at it that allow you to up that speed, up your confidence in and whether it's malicious, suspicious or benign and share that. I think that is part of that future that we're talking about. You've got to have that and the government can come in and say, you missed something. Here's something you should be concerned about. And up the call from suspicious to malicious that gives everybody in the nation and our allies insights, okay, that's bad. Let's defend against it. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, how does the type of technology address the President's May 2021 executive order on cybersecurity as you mentioned the government? >> So there's two parts of that. And I think one of the things that I liked about the executive order is it talked about, in the first page, the public-private partnership. That's the key. We got to partner together. And the other thing it went into that was really key is how do we now bring in the IT infrastructure, what our company does with the OT companies like Dragos, how do we work together for the collective defense for the energy sector and other key parts. So I think it is hit two key parts. It also goes on about what you do about the supply chain for software were all needed, but that's a little bit outside what we're talking about here today. The real key is how we work together between the public and private sector. And I think it did a good job in that area. >> Terrific. Well, thank you so much for your insights and to you as well, Gil, really lovely to have you both on this program. That was General Keith Alexander, Founder and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, the President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. That's all for this session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host for theCUBE, Natalie Erlich. Stay with us for more coverage. (bright music)

>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting without leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier, host theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California, and doing a remote interview in our quarantine studio where we're getting the stories out there and sharing the content during the time of crisis when we're sheltering in place, as we get through this and get through the other side of the new normal. It's not necessarily normal, but it'll certainly create some normalcy around some of the new work at home, but also cybersecurity, I want to bring in a special guest who's going to talk with me about the impact of COVID-19 on cybersecurity, work at home, work in general, and also businesses practices. So, welcome Bill Welsh, who's the CEO of IronNet, who has taken over the helm run of the operations with General Keith Alexander, CUBE alumni as well, former NSA and former Cyber Command who's now leading a new innovative company called IronNet, which is deploying something really clever, but also something really realistic around cybersecurity so, Bill, thanks for joining me. >> Hey John, thanks for being with you. >> So, obviously, the COVID-19 crisis has created, essentially, a lot of exposure to the real world and, in general, around what it's like to work at home. Obviously, the economy's are crippled. This is an invisible threat. I've been chirping on Twitter and saying we've been fighting a digital war for a long time. There's been, the Internet has provided nation states the opportunity to attack folks using other mechanisms, open source and others, but if you look at this COVID-19, whether it's a bio weapon or not, it has crippled the country in the United States and caused crippling around the world, but it's just a threat and causing disruption, this is almost like a nuke, if you will, digital nuke. This is changing the game. You guys are in the cyber intelligence, cybersecurity area, what's your take on all of this and what are you hearing? >> Well I agree with you, John, I think that this is the invisible enemy, and as you know, right now with that going on, there's going to be adversaries that are going to take advantage of it. You see right now in some of the nation states where they're looking at opportunities to use this, to go after other countries, maybe just to test and see what their vulnerabilities are. You're seeing some activity overseas with nation states where they're looking at some of the military incursions, they're thinking about possible weaknesses with this invisible enemy. You know, it's affecting us in so many ways, whether it's economic, financial, our healthcare system, our supply chains, whether it's our, the supplies and groceries that we get to our people, so these are all challenging times that the adversaries are not going to just sit back and say oh well, you're in a crisis right now, we'll wait for the crisis to be alieved, we are now going to take advantage of it. >> And certainly the death toll is also the human impact as well, this is real world. This is something that we can have a longer conversation on, the time when we get more data in, and we'll certainly want to track this new, kind of digital warfare kind of paradigm, whether it's bio and or packets in cybersecurity, but the real impact has been this at scale exposure of problems and opportunities. For instance, IT folks were telling me that they underprovisioned their VPN access, now it's 100% everyone's at home. That's a disruption, that's not a hurricane, that's not a flood, this is now a new distraction to their operations. Other folks are seeing more hacks and more surface area, more threats from the old side getting hit. This has certainly impacted the cyber, but also people's anxiety at home. How are you guys looking at this, what are you guys doing, what's going on IronNet right now around cyber and COVID-19. >> Yeah, and what we're seeing right now is that our customers are seeing increasing awareness of their employees to understand what is going on around them and one of the things that we formed the company was the ability to assist enterprises of all sizes to collectively defend against threats that target their industries. We believe that collective defense is our collective responsibility. And it can't be just about technology, it's about some of the IT systems you talked about, being able to leverage them together. When I look at our top energy companies that we partner with, these individuals have great operators, but when you think about it, they have operators just for their company. What we're able to do within our environment, in our Iron Dome, is bring all that in together. We bring the human element and the IT element in order to help them solve positive outcomes for their industries. >> I want to dig into that because I think one of the things that I'm seeing coming out of this trend, post-pandemic is going to be the real emphasis on community. You're seeing people realizing through, whether it's doing Zoomification or Cubification, doing CUBE interviews and zooming and talking, I think you're going to see this element of I could do better, I can contribute either to society or to the collective at whole, and I think this collective idea you guys have with Iron Dome is very relevant because I think people are going to say wow, if I contribute, we might not have this kind of crisis again. This is something that's new, you guys have been on this collective thing with Iron Dome for a long time. I think this is pretty clever and I think it's going to be very relevant. Can you explain the Iron Dome collective, intelligence paradigm in the vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. And just to back up a little bit, what I will tell you is that we observed, as far as the problem statement, was that cyber is an element of national power, and people are using it to achieve their political, economic, and military objectives and now what you're seeing is are there other ways, cause while this COVID-19 may or may not have been anything as far as a bio-weapon, now others will see, well here's a way to bring down a country or an economy or something like that. We're also seeing that the cyber attacks are getting more and more destructive, whether it's WannaCry or NotPetya, we're also seeing the toolkits being more advanced, we're seeing how slow the response is by their cyber tools, so what we've looked at is we said wait, stop defending in isolation. That's what enterprises have been doing, they've been defending in isolation, no sharing, no collective intelligence as I would call it. And what we've been able to do is bring the power of those people to come together to collectively defend when something happens. So instead of having one security operation center defending a company, you can bring five or six or seven to defend the entire energy grid, this is one example. And over in Asia, we have the same thing. We have one of our largest customers over there, they have 450 companies, so if you think about it, 450 companies times the number of stock operators that they have in the security operation centers, you can think about the magnitude that we can bring the bearer of the arms, the warriors, to attack this crisis. >> So you're getting more efficiency, more acute response than before, so you got speed. So what you're saying is the collective intelligence provides what value? Speed, quality-- Yeah, it's at cloud scale, network speed, you get the benefit of all these operators, individuals that have incredible backgrounds in offensive and defensive operator experience including the people that we have, and then our partnership with either national governments or international governments that are allies, to make sure that we're sharing that collective intelligence so they can take action because what we're doing is we're making sure that we analyze the traffic, we're bringing the advanced analytics, we're bringing the expert systems, and we're bringing the experts to there, both at a technology level and also a personnel level. >> You know, General Alexander, one of the architects behind the vision here, who's obviously got a background in the military, NSA, Cyber Command, et cetera, uses the analogy of an airport radar, and I think that's a great metaphor because you need to have real-time communications on anything going on in as telemetry to what's landing or approaching or almost like landing that airplane, so he uses that metaphor and he says if there's no communication but it lags, you don't have it. He was using that example. Do you guys still use that example or can you explain further this metaphor? >> Absolutely, and I think another example that we have seen some of our customers really, in our prospects and partners really embrace is this concept of an immersive visualization, almost gaming environment. You look at what is happening now where people have the opportunity, even at home because of COVID-19, my teenage boys are spending way too much time probably on Call of Duty and Fortnite and that, but apply that same logic to cyber. Apply that logic to where you could have multiple players, multiple individuals, you can invite people in, you can invite others that might have subject matter expertise, you might be able to go and invite some of the IT partners that you have whether it's other companies to come in that are partners of yours, to help solve a problem and make it visualized, immersive, and in a gaming environment, and that is what we're doing in our Iron Dome. >> I think that's compelling and I've always loved the vision of abstracting away gaming to real world problems because it's very efficient, those kids are great, and the new Call of Duty came out so everyone's-- >> And they're also the next generation, they're the next generation of individuals that are going to be taking over security for us. So this is a great in mind... Cause this is something they already know, something they're already practicing, and something they're experts at and if you look at how the military is advancing, they've gone from having these great fighter pilots to putting people in charge of drones. It's the same thing with us is that possibility of having a cyber avatar go and fight that initiative is going to be something that we're doing. >> I think you guys are really rethinking security and this brings up my next topic I want to get your thoughts on is this crisis of COVID-19 has really highlighted old and new, and it's really kind of exposed again, at scale because it's an at scale problem, everyone's been forced to shelter in place and it exposes everything from deliveries to food to all the services and you can see what's important, what's not in life and it exposes kind of the old and new. So you have a lot of old antiquated, outdated systems and you have new emerging ones. How do you see those two sides of the street, old and new, what's emerging, what's your vision on what you think will be important post-pandemic? >> Well, I think the first thing is the individuals that are really the human element. So one, we have to make sure that individuals at home are, have all the things that they require in order to be successful and drive great outcomes, because I believe that the days of going into an office and sitting into a cube is yes, that is the old norm, but the new norm is individuals who either at home or on a plane, on a train, on a bus, or wherever they might be, practicing and being a part of it. So I think that the one thing we have to get our arms around is the ability to invite people into this experience no matter where they are and meet them where they are, so that's number one. Number two is making sure that those networks are available and that they're high speed, right? That we are making sure that they're not being used necessarily for streaming of Netflix, but being able to solve the cyber attacks. So there might be segmentation, there might be, as you said, this collective intelligent sharing that'll go across these entities. >> You know, it's interesting, Bill, you're bringing up something that we've been riffing on and I want to just expose that to you and kind of think out loud here. You're mentioning the convergence of physical, hybrid, 100% virtual as it kind of comes together. And then community and collective intelligence, we just talked about that, certainly relevant, you can see more movement on that side and more innovation. But the other thing that comes out of the woodwork and I want to get your thoughts on this is the old IoT Edge, Internet of things. Because if you think about that convergence of operational technologies and Internet technologies, ID, you now have that world's been going on for awhile, so obviously, you got to have telemetry on physical devices, you got to bring it in IT, so as you guys have this Iron Dome, collective view, hallux of view of things, it's really physical and virtual coming together. The virtualization-- >> It's all the above, it's all the above. The whole concept of IoT and OT and whether it's a device that's sitting in a solar wind panel or whether it's a device that's sitting in your network, it could be the human element, or it could actually be a device, that is where you require that cyber posture, that ability to do analytics on it, the ability to respond. And the ability to collectively see all of it, and that goes to that whole visualization I talked to you about, is being able to see your entire network, you can't protect something if you can't see it, and that's something that we've done across IronDome, and with our customers and prospects and with IronDefense, so it's something that absolutely is part of the things we're seeing in the cyber world. >> I want to get your reaction to some commentary that we've been having, Dave Vellante and myself on the team, and we were talking about how events have been shut down, the physical space, the venues where they have events. Obviously, we go to a lot of events with theCUBE, you know that. So, obviously that's kind of our view, but when you think about Internet of things, you think about collective intelligence with community, whether it's central to gamification or Iron Dome that you're innovating on, as we go through the pandemic, there's going to be a boomerang back, we think, to the importance of the physical space, cause at some point, we're going to get back to the real world, and so, the question is what operational technology, what version of learnings do we get from this shelter in place that gets applied to the physical world? This is the convergence of physical and virtual. We see as a big way, want to get your reaction to that. >> I absolutely agree with you, I think that we're going to learn some incredible lessons in so many different ways whether it's healthcare, financial, but I also, believe that's what you said, is that convergence of physical and virtual will become almost one in the same. We will see individuals that will leverage the physical when they need to and leverage the virtual when they need to. And I think that that's something that we will see more and more of of companies looking at how they actually respond and support their customer base. You know, some might decide to have more individuals in an at-home basis, to support a continuity of operations, some might decide that we're going to have some physical spaces and not others, and then we're going to leverage physical IT and some virtual IT, especially the cloud infrastructures are going to become more and more valuable as we've seen within our IronDome infrastructure. >> You know, we were riffing the other day in the remote interviews, theCUBE is going virtual, and we were joking that Amazon Web Services was really created through the trend of virtualization. I mean, VMware and the whole server virtualization created the opportunity for Amazon to abstract and create value. And we think that this next wave is going to be this pandemic has woken us up to this remote, virtual contribution, and it might create a lot of opportunities, for us, for instance, virtual CUBE, for virtual business. I'm sure you, as the CEO of IronNet, are thinking about how you guys recover post-pandemic, is it going to be a different world, are you going to have a mix of virtual, digital, integrated into your physical, whether it's how you market your products and engage customers to solving technical problems. This is a new management challenge, and it's an opportunity if you get it right, it could be a headwind or a tailwind, depending on how you look at it. So I want to get your thoughts on this virtualization post-pandemic management structure, management philosophy, obviously, dislocation with spacial economics, I get that and I always go to work in the office much but, beyond that, management style, posture, incentives. >> Yes, I think that there's a lot of things unpacked there. I mean, one is it is going to be about a lot of more communication. You know, I will tell you that since we have gone into this quarantine, we're holding weekly all hands, every Friday, all in a virtual environment. I think that the transparency will be even more. You know, one of the things that I'm most encouraged by and inspired by is the productivity. I will tell you, getting access to individuals has gotten easier and easier for us. The ability to get people into this virtual environment. They're not spending hours upon hours on commuting or flying on planes or going different places, and it doesn't mean that that won't be an important element of business, but I think it's going to give time back to individuals to focus on what is the most important priorities for the companies that they're driving. So this is an opportunity, I will tell you, our productivity has increased exponentially. We've seen more and more meetings, where more and more access to very high level individuals, who have said we want to hear what you guys are doing, and they have the time to do it now instead of jumping on a plane and wasting six hours and not being productive. >> It's interesting, it's also a human element too, you can hear babies crying, kids playing, dogs barking, you kind of laugh and chuckle in the old days, but now this is a humanization piece of it, and that should foster real communities, so I think... Obviously, we're going to be watching this virtualization of communities, collective intelligence and congratulations, I think Iron Dome, and iron offense, obviously which is core product, I think your Iron Dome is a paradigm that is super relevant, you guys are visionaries on this and I think it's turning out to be quite the product, so I want to congratulate you on that. Thanks for-- >> Thank you, John. Thanks for your time today and stay safe. >> Bill, thanks for joining us and thanks for your great insights on cyber COVID-19, and we'll follow up more on this trend of bio weaponry and kind of the trajectory of how cyber and scale cloud is going to shape how we defend and take offense in the future on how to defend our country and to make the world a safer place. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE here and our remote interviews in our quarantine studio in Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (lively music)