(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCube's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its partners with two live sets on the scene. In addition to two remote studios. And we'll have somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred guests on the program this year at re:Invent. I'm extremely delighted to welcome a very, very special guest. Right now. He served as the director of the NSA under two presidents, and was the first commander of the U.S Cyber Command. He's a Cube alumni, he's founder and co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity. General Keith Alexander. Thanks for joining us today General. >> Thanks, David. It's an honor to be here at re:Invent, you know, with AWS. All that they're doing and all they're making possible for us to defend sector states, companies and nations in cyber. So an honor to be here. >> Well, welcome back to theCube. Let's dive right in. I'd like to know how you would describe the current cyber threat landscape that we face. >> Well, I think it's growing. Well, let's start right out. You know, the good news or the bad news, the bad news is getting worse. We're seeing that. If you think about SolarWinds, you think about the Hafnium attacks on Microsoft. You think about this rapid growth in ransomware. We're seeing criminals and nation states engaging in ways that we've never seen in the past. It's more blatant. They're going after more quickly, they're using cyber as an element of national power. Let's break that down just a little bit. Do you go back to two, July. Xi Jinping, talked about breaking heads in bloodshed when he was referring to the United States and Taiwan. And this has gone hot and cold, that's a red line for him. They will do anything to keep Taiwan from breaking away. And this is a huge existential threat to us into the region. And when this comes up, they're going to use cyber to go after it. Perhaps even more important and closer right now is what's going on with Russia in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. We saw this in 2014, when Russia took over the Crimea. The way they did it, staging troops. They did that in 2008 against Georgia. And now there are, by some reports over a hundred thousand troops on the border of Eastern Ukraine. Some call it an exercise, but that's exactly what they did in Georgia. That's what they did in the Crimea. And in both those cases, they preceded those attacks, those physical attacks with cyber attacks. If you go to 2017, when Russia hit the Ukrainian government with the NotPetya attack that had global repercussions. Russia was responsible for SolarWinds, they have attacked our infrastructure to find out what our government is doing and they continue going. This is getting worse. You know, it's interesting when you think about, so what do you do about something like that? How do we stop that? And the answer is we've got to work together. You know, Its slam commissioner addressed it. The meeting with the president on August 25th. This is a great statement by the CEO and chairman of Southern Company, Tom Fanning. He said this, "the war is being waged on our nation's critical infrastructure in particular, our energy sector, our telecommunications sector and financial sector." The private sector owns and operates 87% of the critical infrastructure in the United States, making collaboration between industry and the federal government imperative too, for these attacks. SO >> General, I want to dig just a little bit on that point that you make for generations, people have understood that the term is 'kinetic war', right? Not everyone has heard that phrase, but for generations we've understood the concept of someone dropping a bomb on a building as being an attack. You've just mentioned that, that a lot of these attacks are directed towards the private sector. The private sector doesn't have an army to respond to those attacks. Number one, that's our government's responsibility. So the question I have is, how seriously are people taking these kinds of threats when compared to the threat of kinetic war? Because my gosh, you can take down the entire electrical grid now. That's not something you can do with a single bomb. What are your, what are your thoughts on that? >> So you're hitting on a key point, a theoretical and an operational point. If you look back, what's the intent of warfare? It's to get the mass of people to give up. The army protects the mass of people in that fight. In cyber, there's no protection. Our critical infrastructure is exposed to our adversaries. That's the problem that we face. And because it's exposed, we have a tremendous vulnerability. So those who wish us harm, imagine the Colonial Pipeline attack an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude bigger. The impact on our country would paralyze much of what we do today. We are not ready for that. That's the issue that Tom Fanning and others have brought up. We don't practice between the public sector and the private sector working together to defend this country. We need to do that. That's the issue that we have to really get our hands around. And when we talk about practice, what do we mean? It means we have to let that federal government, the ones that are going to protect us, see what's going on. There is no radar picture. Now, since we're at re:Invent, the cloud, where AWS and others have done, is create an infrastructure that allows us to build that bridge between the public and private sector and scale it. It's amazing what we can now do. We couldn't do that when I was running Cyber Command. And running Cyber Command, we couldn't see threats on the government. And we couldn't see threats on critical infrastructure. We couldn't see threats on the private sector. And so it all went and all the government did was say, after the fact you've been attacked. That's not helpful. >> So >> It's like they dropped a bomb. We didn't know. >> Yeah, so what does IronNet doing to kind of create this radar capability? >> So, well, thanks. That's a great question because there's four things that you really got to do. First. You've got to be able to detect the SolarWinds type attacks, which we did. You've got to have a hunt platform that can see what it is. You've got to be able to use machine learning and AI to really cut down the number of events. And the most important you need to be able to anonymize and share that into the cloud and see where those attacks are going to create that radar picture. So behavioral analytics, then you use signature based as well, but you need those sets of analytics to really see what's going on. Machine learning, AI, a hunt platform, and cloud. And then analytics in the cloud to see what's going on, creates that air traffic control, picture radar, picture for cyber. That's what we're doing. You see, I think that's the important part. And that's why we really value the partnership with AWS. They've been a partner with us for six years, helping us build through that. You can see what we can do in the cloud. We could never do in hardware alone. Just imagine trying to push out equipment and then do that for hundreds of companies. It's not viable. So SaaS, what we are as a SaaS company, you can now do that at scale, and you can push this out and we can create, we can defend this nation in cyber if we work together. And that's the thing, you know, I really, had a great time in the military. One of the things I learned in the military, you need to train how you're going to fight. They're really good at that. We did that in the eighties, and you can see what happened in 1990 in the Gulf war. We need to now do that between the public and private sector. We have to have those training. We need to continuously uplift our capabilities. And that's where the cloud and all these other things make that possible. That's the future of cybersecurity. You know, it's interesting David, our country developed the internet. We're the ones that pioneered that. We ought to be the first to secure. >> Seems to make sense. And when you talk about collective defense in this private public partnership, that needs to happen, you get examples of some folks in private industry and what they're doing, but, but talk a little bit more about, maybe what isn't happening yet. What do we need to do? I don't want you to necessarily get political and start making budgetary suggestions, but unless you want to, but what, but where do you see, where do we really need to push forward from a public perspective in order to make these connections? And then how is that connection actually happen? This isn't someone from the IronNet security service desk, getting on a red phone and calling the White House, how are the actual connections made? >> So it has to be, the connections have to be just like we do radar. You know, when you think about radars across our nation or radar operator doesn't call up one of the towers and say, you've got an aircraft coming at you at such and such a speed. I hope you can distinguish between those two aircraft and make sure they don't bump into each other. They get a picture and they get a way of tracking it. And multiple people can see that radar picture at a speed. And that's how we do air traffic control safety. We need the same thing in cyber, where the government has a picture. The private sector has a picture and they can see what's going on. The private sector's role is I'm going to do everything I can, you know, and this is where the energy sector, I use that quote from Tom Fanning, because what they're saying is, "it's our job to keep the grid up." And they're putting the resources to do it. So they're actually jumping on that in a great way. And what they're saying is "we'll share that with the government", both the DHS and DOD. Now we have to have that same picture created for DHS and DOD. I think one of the things that we're doing is we're pioneering the building of that picture. So that's what we do. We build the picture to bring people together. So think of that is that's the capability. Everybody's going to own a piece of that, and everybody's going to be operating in it. But if you can share that picture, what you can begin to do is say, I've got an attack coming against company A. Company A now sees what it has to do. It can get fellow companies to help them defend, collective defense, knowledge sharing, crowdsourcing. At the same time, the government can see that attack going on and say, "my job is to stop that." If it's DHS, I could see what I have to do. Within the country, DOD can say, "my job is to shoot the archers." How do we go do what we're authorized to do under rules of engagement? So now you have a way of the government and the private sector working together to create that picture. Then we train them and we train them. We should never have had an event like SolarWinds happen in the future. We got to get out in front. And if we do that, think of the downstream consequences, not only can we detect who's doing it, we can hold them accountable and make them pay a price. Right now. It's pretty free. They get in, pap, that didn't work. They get away free. That didn't work, we get away free. Or we broke in, we got, what? 18,000 companies in 30,000 companies. No consequences. In the future there should be consequences. >> And in addition to the idea of consequences, you know, in the tech sector, we have this concept of a co-op petition, where we're often cooperating and competing. The adversaries from, U.S perspective are also great partners, trading partners. So in a sense, it sounds like what you're doing is also kind of adhering to the old adage that, that good fences make for great neighbors. If we all know that our respective infrastructures are secure, we can sort of get on with the honest business of being partners, because you want to make the cost of cyber war too expensive. Is that, is that a fair statement? >> Yes. And I would take that analogy and bend it slightly to the following. Today every company defends itself. So you take 90 companies with 10 people, each doing everything they can to defend themselves. Imagine in the world we trying to build, those 90 companies work together. You have now 900 people working together for the collective defense. If you're in the C-suite or the board of those companies, which would rather have? 900 help new security or 10? This isn't hard. And so what we say is, yes. That neighborhood watch program for cyber has tremendous value. And beyond neighborhood watch, I can also share collaboration because, I might not have the best people in every area of cyber, but in those 900, there will be, and we can share knowledge crowdsource. So it's actually let's work together. I would call it Americans working together to defend America. That's what we need to do. And the states we going to have a similar thing what they're doing, and that's how we'll work this together. >> Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. General Alexander it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on to theCube as part of our 2021 AWS re:Invent coverage. Are you going to get a chance to spend time during the conference in Las Vegas? So you just flying in, flying out. Any chance? >> Actually yeah. >> It's there, we're still negotiating working that. I've registered, but I just don't know I'm in New York city for two meetings and seeing if I can get to Las Vegas. A lot of friends, you know, Adam Solski >> Yes >> and the entire AWS team. They're amazing. And we really liked this partnership. I'd love to see you there. You're going to be there, David? Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And I look forward to that, so I hope hopefully we get that chance again. Thank you so much, General Alexander, and also thank you to our title sponsor AMD for sponsoring this year's re:Invent. Keep it right here for more action on theCube, you're leader in hybrid tech event coverage, I'm Dave Nicholson for the Cube. Thanks. (upbeat music)

(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)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back. Everyone's Cube Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS. Reinforce Amazon Web sources. First inaugural conference around security. It's not Osama. It's a branded event. Big time ecosystem developing. We have returning here. Cube Alumni Bill Jeff for VP of strategy and the partnerships that Iron Net Cyber Security Company. Welcome back. Thanks. General Keith Alexander, who was on a week and 1/2 ago. And it was public sector summit. Good to see you. Good >> to see you. Thanks for >> having my back, but I want to get into some of the Iran cyber communities. We had General Qi 1000. He was the original commander of the division. So important discussions that have around that. But don't get your take on the event. You guys, you're building a business. The minute cyber involved in public sector. This is commercial private partnership. Public relations coming together. Yeah. Your models are sharing so bringing public and private together important. >> Now that's exactly right. And it's really great to be here with eight of us were really close partner of AWS is we'll work with them our entire back in today. Runs on AWS really need opportunity. Get into the ecosystem, meet some of the folks that are working that we might work with my partner but to deliver a great product, right? And you're seeing a lot of people move to cloud, right? And so you know some of the big announcement that are happening here today. We're willing. We're looking to partner up with eight of us and be a first time provider for some key new Proactiv elves. AWS is launching in their own platform here today. So that's a really neat thing for us to be partnered up with this thing. Awesome organization. I'm doing some of >> the focus areas around reinforcing your party with Amazon shares for specifics. >> Yes. So I don't know whether they announced this capability where they're doing the announcement yesterday or today. So I forget which one so I'll leave that leave that leave that once pursued peace out. But the main thing is, they're announcing couple of new technology plays way our launch party with them on the civility place. So we're gonna be able to do what we were only wanted to do on Prem. We're gonna be able to do in the cloud with AWS in the cloud formation so that we'll deliver the same kind of guy that would deliver on prime customers inside their own cloud environments and their hybrid environment. So it's a it's a it's a sea change for us. The company, a sea change for a is delivering that new capability to their customers and really be able to defend a cloud network the way you would nonpregnant game changer >> described that value, if you would. >> Well, so you know, one of the key things about about a non pregnant where you could do you could look at all the flows coming past you. You look at all the data, look at in real time and develop behavior. Lana looks over. That's what we're doing our own prime customers today in the cloud with his world who looked a lox, right? And now, with the weight of your capability, we're gonna be able to integrate that and do a lot Maur the way we would in a in a in a normal sort of on Prem environment. So you really did love that. Really? Capability of scale >> Wagon is always killed. The predictive analytics, our visibility and what you could do. And too late. Exactly. Right. You guys solve that with this. What are some of the challenges that you see in cloud security that are different than on premise? Because that's the sea, So conversation we've been hearing. Sure, I know on premise. I didn't do it on premises for awhile. What's the difference between the challenge sets, the challenges and the opportunities they provide? >> Well, the opportunities air really neat, right? Because you've got that even they have a shared responsibility model, which is a little different than you officially have it. When it's on Prem, it's all yours essential. You own that responsibility and it is what it is in the cloud. Its share responsible to cloud provider the data holder. Right? But what's really cool about the cloud is you could deliver some really interesting Is that scale you do patch updates simultaneously, all your all your back end all your clients systems, even if depending how your provisioning cloud service is, you could deliver that update in real time. You have to worry about. I got to go to individual systems and update them, and some are updated. Summer passed. Some aren't right. Your servers are packed simultaneously. You take him down, you're bringing back up and they're ready to go, right? That's a really capability that for a sigh. So you're delivering this thing at scale. It's awesome now, So the challenge is right. It's a new environment so that you haven't dealt with before. A lot of times you feel the hybrid environment governed both an on Prem in sanitation and class sensation. Those have to talkto one another, right? And you might think about Well, how do I secure those those connections right now? And I think about spending money over here when I got all seduced to spend up here in the cloud. And that's gonna be a hard thing precisely to figure out, too. And so there are some challenges, but the great thing is, you got a whole ecosystem. Providers were one of them here in the AWS ecosystem. There are a lot here today, and you've got eight of us as a part of self who wants to make sure that they're super secure, but so are yours. Because if you have a problem in their cloud, that's a challenge. Them to market this other people. You talk about >> your story because your way interviews A couple weeks ago, you made a comment. I'm a recovering lawyer, kind of. You know, we all laughed, but you really start out in law, right? >> How did you end up here? Yeah, well, the truth is, I grew up sort of a technology or myself. My first computer is a trash 80 a trs 80 color computer. RadioShack four k of RAM on board, right. We only >> a true TRS 80. Only when I know what you're saying. That >> it was a beautiful system, right? Way stored with sword programs on cassette tapes. Right? And when we operated from four Keita 16 k way were the talk of the Rainbow Computer Club in Santa Monica, California Game changer. It was a game here for 16. Warning in with 60 give onboard. Ram. I mean, this is this is what you gonna do. And so you know, I went from that and I in >> trouble or something, you got to go to law school like you're right >> I mean, you know, look, I mean, you know it. So my dad, that was a chemist, right? So he loved computers, love science. But he also had an unrequited political boners body. He grew up in East Africa, Tanzania. It was always thought that he might be a minister in government. The Socialist came to power. They they had to leave you at the end of the day. And he came to the states and doing chemistry, which is course studies. But he still loved politics. So he raised at NPR. So when I went to college, I studied political science. But I paid my way through college doing computer support, life sciences department at the last moment. And I ran 10 based. He came on climate through ceilings and pulled network cable do punch down blocks, a little bit of fibrous placing. So, you know, I was still a murderer >> writing software in the scythe. >> One major, major air. And that was when when the web first came out and we had links. Don't you remember? That was a text based browser, right? And I remember looking to see him like this is terrible. Who would use http slash I'm going back to go for gophers. Awesome. Well, turns out I was totally wrong about Mosaic and Netscape. After that, it was It was it was all hands on >> deck. You got a great career. Been involved a lot in the confluence of policy politics and tech, which is actually perfect skill set for the challenge we're dealing. So I gotta ask you, what are some of the most important conversations that should be on the table right now? Because there's been a lot of conversations going on around from this technology. I has been around for many decades. This has been a policy problem. It's been a societal problem. But now this really focus on acute focus on a lot of key things. What are some of the most important things that you think should be on the table for techies? For policymakers, for business people, for lawmakers? >> One. I think we've got to figure out how to get really technology knowledge into the hands of policymakers. Right. You see, you watch the Facebook hearings on Capitol Hill. I mean, it was a joke. It was concerning right? I mean, anybody with a technology background to be concerned about what they saw there, and it's not the lawmakers fault. I mean, you know, we've got to empower them with that. And so we got to take technologist, threw it out, how to get them to talk policy and get them up on the hill and in the administration talking to folks, right? And one of the big outcomes, I think, has to come out of that conversation. What do we do about national level cybersecurity, Right, because we assume today that it's the rule. The private sector provides cyber security for their own companies, but in no other circumstance to expect that when it's a nation state attacker, wait. We don't expect Target or Wal Mart or any other company. J. P. Morgan have surface to air missiles on the roofs of their warehouses or their buildings to Vegas Russian bear bombers. Why, that's the job of the government. But when it comes to cyberspace, we expect Private Cummings defending us everything from a script kiddie in his basement to the criminal hacker in Eastern Europe to the nation state, whether Russia, China, Iran or North Korea and these nation states have virtually a limited resource. Your armies did >> sophisticated RND technology, and it's powerful exactly like a nuclear weaponry kind of impact for digital. >> Exactly. And how can we expect prices comes to defend themselves? It's not. It's not a fair fight. And so the government has to have some role. The questions? What role? How did that consist with our values, our principles, right? And how do we ensure that the Internet remains free and open, while still is sure that the president is not is not hampered in doing its job out there. And I love this top way talk about >> a lot, sometimes the future of warfare. Yeah, and that's really what we're talking about. You go back to Stuxnet, which opened Pandora's box 2016 election hack where you had, you know, the Russians trying to control the mean control, the narrative. As you pointed out, that that one video we did control the belief system you control population without firing a shot. 20 twenties gonna be really interesting. And now you see the U. S. Retaliate to Iran in cyberspace, right? Allegedly. And I was saying that we had a conversation with Robert Gates a couple years ago and I asked him. I said, Should we be Maur taking more of an offensive posture? And he said, Well, we have more to lose than the other guys Glasshouse problem? Yeah, What are your thoughts on? >> Look, certainly we rely intimately, inherently on the cyber infrastructure that that sort of is at the core of our economy at the core of the world economy. Increasingly, today, that being said, because it's so important to us all the more reason why we can't let attacks go Unresponded to write. And so if you're being attacked in cyberspace, you have to respond at some level because if you don't, you'll just keep getting punched. It's like the kid on the playground, right? If the bully keeps punching him and nobody does anything, not not the not the school administration, not the kid himself. Well, then the boy's gonna keep doing what he's doing. And so it's not surprising that were being tested by Iran by North Korea, by Russia by China, and they're getting more more aggressive because when we don't punch back, that's gonna happen. Now we don't have to punch back in cyberspace, right? A common sort of fetish about Cyrus is a >> response to the issue is gonna respond to the bully in this case, your eggs. Exactly. Playground Exactly. We'll talk about the Iran. >> So So if I If I if I can't Yeah, the response could be Hey, we could do this. Let them know you could Yes. And it's a your move >> ate well, And this is the key is that it's not just responding, right. So Bob Gates or told you we can't we talk about what we're doing. And even in the latest series of alleged responses to Iran, the reason we keep saying alleged is the U. S has not publicly acknowledged it, but the word has gotten out. Well, of course, it's not a particularly effective deterrence if you do something, but nobody knows you did it right. You gotta let it out that you did it. And frankly, you gotta own it and say, Hey, look, that guy punch me, I punch it back in the teeth. So you better not come after me, right? We don't do that in part because these cables grew up in the intelligence community at N S. A and the like, and we're very sensitive about that But the truth is, you have to know about your highest and capabilities. You could talk about your abilities. You could say, Here are my red lines. If you cross him, I'm gonna punch you back. If you do that, then by the way, you've gotta punch back. They'll let red lines be crossed and then not respond. And then you're gonna talk about some level of capabilities. It can't all be secret. Can't all be classified. Where >> are we in this debate? Me first. Well, you're referring to the Thursday online attack against the intelligence Iranian intelligence community for the tanker and the drone strike that they got together. Drone take down for an arm in our surveillance drones. >> But where are we >> in this debate of having this conversation where the government should protect and serve its people? And that's the role. Because if a army rolled in fiscal army dropped on the shores of Manhattan, I don't think Citibank would be sending their people out the fight. Right? Right. So, like, this is really happening. >> Where are we >> on this? Like, is it just sitting there on the >> table? What's happening? What's amazing about it? Hi. This was getting it going well, that that's a Q. What's been amazing? It's been happening since 2012 2011 right? We know about the Las Vegas Sands attack right by Iran. We know about North Korea's. We know about all these. They're going on here in the United States against private sector companies, not against the government. And there's largely been no response. Now we've seen Congress get more active. Congress just last year passed to pass legislation that gave Cyber command the authority on the president's surgery defenses orders to take action against Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. If certain cyber has happened, that's a good thing, right to give it. I'll be giving the clear authority right, and it appears the president willing to make some steps in that direction, So that's a positive step. Now, on the back end, though, you talk about what we do to harden ourselves, if that's gonna happen, right, and the government isn't ready today to defend the nation, even though the Constitution is about providing for the common defense, and we know that the part of defense for long. For a long time since Secretary Panetta has said that it is our mission to defend the nation, right? But we know they're not fully doing that. How do they empower private sector defense and one of keys That has got to be Look, if you're the intelligence community or the U. S. Government, you're Clinton. Tremendous sense of Dad about what you're seeing in foreign space about what the enemy is doing, what they're preparing for. You have got to share that in real time at machine speed with industry. And if you're not doing that and you're still count on industry to be the first line defense, well, then you're not empowered. That defense. And if you're on a pair of the defense, how do you spend them to defend themselves against the nation? State threats? That's a real cry. So >> much tighter public private relationship. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And it doesn't have to be the government stand in the front lines of the U. S. Internet is, though, is that you could even determine the boundaries of the U. S. Internet. Right? Nobody wants an essay or something out there doing that, but you do want is if you're gonna put the private sector in the in the line of first defense. We gotta empower that defense if you're not doing that than the government isn't doing its job. And so we gonna talk about this for a long time. I worked on that first piece of information sharing legislation with the House chairman, intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger from Maryland, right congressman from both sides of the aisle, working together to get a fresh your decision done that got done in 2015. But that's just a first step. The government's got to be willing to share classified information, scaled speed. We're still not seeing that. Yeah, How >> do people get involved? I mean, like, I'm not a political person. I'm a moderate in the middle. But >> how do I How do people get involved? How does the technology industry not not the >> policy budgets and the top that goes on the top tech companies, how to tech workers or people who love Tad and our patriots and or want freedom get involved? What's the best approach? >> Well, that's a great question. I think part of is learning how to talk policy. How do we get in front policymakers? Right. And we're I run. I run a think tank on the side at the National Institute at George Mason University's Anton Scalia Law School Way have a program funded by the Hewlett Foundation who were bringing in technologists about 25 of them. Actually. Our next our second event. This Siri's is gonna be in Chicago this weekend. We're trained these technologies, these air data scientists, engineers and, like talk Paul's right. These are people who said We want to be involved. We just don't know how to get involved And so we're training him up. That's a small program. There's a great program called Tech Congress, also funded by the U. A. Foundation that places technologists in policy positions in Congress. That's really cool. There's a lot of work going on, but those are small things, right. We need to do this, its scale. And so you know, what I would say is that their technology out there want to get involved, reach out to us, let us know well with our partners to help you get your information and dad about what's going on. Get your voice heard there. A lot of organizations to that wanna get technologies involved. That's another opportunity to get in. Get in the building is a >> story that we want to help tell on be involved in David. I feel passion about this. Is a date a problem? So there's some real tech goodness in there. Absolutely. People like to solve hard problems, right? I mean, we got a couple days of them. You've got a big heart problems. It's also for all the people out there who are Dev Ops Cloud people who like to work on solving heart problems. >> We got a lot >> of them. Let's do it. So what's going on? Iron? Give us the update Could plug for the company. Keith Alexander found a great guy great guests having on the Cube. That would give the quick thanks >> so much. So, you know, way have done two rounds of funding about 110,000,000. All in so excited. We have partners like Kleiner Perkins Forge point C five all supporting us. And now it's all about We just got a new co CEO in Bill Welshman. See Scaler and duo. So he grew Z scaler. $1,000,000,000 valuation he came in to do Oh, you know, they always had a great great exit. Also, we got him. We got Sean Foster in from from From Industry also. So Bill and Sean came together. We're now making this business move more rapidly. We're moving to the mid market. We're moving to a cloud platform or aggressively and so exciting times and iron it. We're coming toe big and small companies near you. We've got the capability. We're bringing advanced, persistent defense to bear on his heart problems that were threat analytics. I collected defence. That's the key to our operation. We're excited >> to doing it. I call N S A is a service, but that's not politically correct. But this is the Cube, so >> Well, look, if you're not, if you want to defensive scale, right, you want to do that. You know, ECE knows how to do that key down here at the forefront of that when he was in >> the government. Well, you guys are certainly on the cutting edge, riding that wave of common societal change technology impact for good, for defence, for just betterment, not make making a quick buck. Well, you know, look, it's a good business model by the way to be in that business. >> I mean, It's on our business cards. And John Xander means it. Our business. I'd say the Michigan T knows that he really means that, right? Rather private sector. We're looking to help companies to do the right thing and protect the nation, right? You know, I protect themselves >> better. Well, our missions to turn the lights on. Get those voices out there. Thanks for coming on. Sharing the lights. Keep covers here. Day one of two days of coverage. Eight of us reinforce here in Boston. Stay with us for more Day one after this short break.

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to our nation's capital. You're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host Dave Vallante. Happy to welcome to the program Matt Olsen, who is the co-founder, president, and chief revenue officer of IronNet cybersecurity, thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, great to be here, Stu. Thanks. >> So, obviously, public sector, we've been talking a lot about the cyber, as it were. As a co-founder, always one of the first, give us the why of the company. Why was it founded and a little bit of background. >> Sure, you know, we were founded, I guess out of some frustration. A number of us, including our CEO, Keith Alexander, who was formerly the director of NSA, we came out of the government. And the frustration was, that what we saw happening to companies, big companies, small companies, and the government was getting hit with cyber attacks, you know, consistently and increasingly sophisticated and disruptive, even destructive cyber attacks. So we left the government around the same time, a number of us, and we decided, can we start a company to really take on these threats? What can we do to develop a technology based on the threat landscape that really takes cyber security to the next level? So our mission has always been to protect companies and governments from these types of attacks that are hitting us all the time. >> Yeah, so there's no shortage of security experts inside the government, especially NSA. Actually, I remember Dave and I had talked to, there was a little company called Squirrel that came out of the NSA a little bit later. Oh, what do you know? AWS acquired them last year. So bring us insight a little bit, you know, what's the offering that IronNet has? How do you differentiate yourself in the marketplace? >> Sure, and you're absolutely right. There is a lot of expertise in places like NSA, where I formally worked and a bunch of us formally worked. The offering basically is, network traffic analytics. So we look at the network traffic inside large companies and, right down to the PCAP, so we're looking at the actual network traffic and running analytics. And what that means is not signature-based, but behavioral analytics. Looking for those indicators of malicious activity that we then can alert the SOC operators in these companies that this is something they need to pay attention to right away. Of course the problem always with this area is false positives. You know, how do you make sure that the alerts you're giving to these operators really mean something? So we've done a lot of work to draw down those false positives so that we're giving them alerts that are actionable and meaningful in the context of, you know, a very difficult threat landscape. So that's the basic offering. >> So what's underneath the covers? I mean, what's the secret sauce? Are you using machine intelligence? Share with us. >> Yeah, sure, I think the secret sauce is really a combination of two things. It's analytics algorithms that our data scientists develop. We've got some world-class folks that came out of places like the Defense Research Agency and universities that develop the analytics, the algorithms, but we combine those, that math with real life operators, people who themselves were on the offense at one point, right? They were working to, you know, break into other networks. They were the hackers who understand how the adversary operates like nobody else does. Combining the mathematics, the analytics with real life operators, that I'd say, you know, Dave, is the secret sauce because those are how we develop the analytics and the expert system to produce the alerts and draw down those false positives. >> Yeah, it was interesting. Last week, we were at Cisco Live, talking a lot about networking, and one of the biggest things for networking people is a lot of the network that they own, they don't actually own it anymore. It's in Amazon, it's in, you know, I've got my SAF stuff, public clouds, all that I'm dealing with. So, you know, where do you sit, are you mostly focused on public clouds like AWS or, you know, where in the network? >> So its a great question because there's clearly a movement, right, from on PRAM solutions to cloud solutions. AWS is part of that. So we're partners with AWS. So we've developed our analytics to run in AWS as one of our key cloud providers. So, we, with some of our customers, we're all on PRAM, we're in their data center. These are companies that want us there inside their perimeter, right? But then, with others, we have the ability to have sensors in their network but then do all the analytics, all the backend work in AWS, in the cloud environment. And that makes a lot of sense for many companies, especially when you talk about companies that are a little smaller maybe or, you know, we're not talking about the biggest companies. So they do, a lot of their applications are running in the cloud, so that's been a key transition for us as we've developed our product. >> Matt, what would you say are the biggest threats to organizations that they should be aware of? >> Yeah, you know, the biggest threats are the obvious ones in some ways, but there's no doubt that the nation-states that are carrying out attacks, whether we're talking about China or Iran or North Korea or Russia, are increasingly active and are especially dangerous in a volatile geopolitical landscape like we face today. So we're concerned in working with our customers to make sure that we're taking on the level of threat that we see from nation-states. And that's something, I think, at IronNet we understand particularly well, given that we were operating at that nation-state level when we were all in government. Of course, the most pervasive problem is the criminals. And you see that in all manner of hacks in cyber attacks, that the most common type of attack, including ransomware are occurring at the hands of criminals. >> So rewarding. But, your behavioral analytics can help with that problem. What about, like, the weaponization of social media? I mean, what do you make of that? And, I don't know, is there an answer to that that you can help with? >> You know, the way that social media has been used, you know, for example in the election in 2016, it's obviously a problem that we all are concerned about as citizens. And part of that is, I think there's a combination of the government working together with the private sector, in particular, the social media companies, to come up with better ways to take on that problem to make sure that people who are using those platforms are actually people, and not bots, not Russian trolls. We need to do an education campaign for American citizens, who are coming into this election cycle that were, you know, better prepared for what we saw happen in 2016. I mean, it's a big effort and, you know, I'm not sure, to be honest, that as a country we've totally come to grips with the nature of that problem. >> Yeah, I think you're right. We're just trying to get our heads around it. I interviewed Robert Gates one time and I asked him this question, and I've asked other security practitioners, and I get all kinds of different responses. He said, I want to tell you what he said and then maybe you can respond. I'm paraphrasing, of course, for Dr. Gates. He said we have to be really careful. I was asking him offense or defense, you know. Should we, we probably have some of the best security people in the world, we could go on offense, is that the future of warfare? He said we have to be really careful because we have a lot to lose as well in critical infrastructure. Others have said, no, we should go on the offense to flex our muscles. What do you think the right posture is there? >> You know, I think that's a great point, Dave. There clearly is a balance. I mean, it begins with defense, right. It begins with hardening our defenses, having the right people with the right experience and the right expertise in place to protect our networks because, you know, the best offense really is a good defense and protecting our networks. But we do need to have the capability, and we do have the capability to take offensive action when warranted. One of the challenges, I think, in this space is that we haven't necessarily developed the rules of engagement. You know, under what circumstances should the United States government take action on offense in cyber? You know, we saw this in going after ISIS. You know, going after some of their capability as a terrorist group, targeting people in the United States and taking out some of that capability. That's one way I think that we've clearly done the right thing in going on the offense. Harder to say when you have some of the cyber attacks going after a critical infrastructure. What's the right role for the government in going on the offense? I think, again, the first step is a good defense. And one element of a good defense is working better together. Companies working together, as well as companies working in close coordination and cooperation with the government. >> So it's not so much the technology. Obviously the technology is there, but it's the process around that, the collaboration with, whether it's within agencies or organizations. >> I think that's right. I think there's a lot of good technology. We're, our company, we provide a common defense platform for companies to work together. That's what we do at IronNet. And we're doing that with a number of energy companies right now. But the, I think it's getting that policy in place so that companies understand the technology exists to be faster and better working together. How can we then break down whatever barriers there are to sharing information and having that sort of collaborative approach? And we see that happening more and more across the critical infrastructure, whether we're talking finance or healthcare or energy. >> Matt, what's IronNet's relationship with Amazon? Are you part of the market place? How do you go to market together? >> Yeah, we're a registered partner with Amazon. Amazon is our, one of our cloud providers for our, as I mentioned, for where we run our analytics. I also mentioned this common defense platform. We run the correlations that we do for companies working together. That's all done in AWS, in the cloud. We've found Amazon to be a, really an extraordinary partner as an industry leader and a cloud provider. And so we're very close to, and with Amazon, in both going to market but also in developing our product, so it's been a great partnership for us. >> What do you think of the show? I mean, it's insane, isn't it? >> Yeah, it's amazing, right? Just the parking, finding a parking space was incredible. But once I got in. >> We didn't have to park. >> Yeah, once I got in, it's a fantastic show. >> We did have to register. (laughter) >> Likewise. No, congratulations, it's a great show and Amazon has been terrific for us at IronNet. >> Well, we're glad to cover it and we appreciate you joining us, Matt, for this segment. Be back with more coverage here from the AWS Public Sector show. For Dave Vallante, I'm Stu Miniman and thanks again for watching theCUBE.