>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering >>space and cybersecurity. Symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly >>Over On Welcome to this Special virtual conference. The Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly with support from the Cube. I'm John for your host and master of ceremonies. Got a great topic today in this session. Really? The intersection of space and cybersecurity. This topic and this conversation is the cybersecurity workforce development through public and private partnerships. And we've got a great lineup. We have Jeff Armstrong's the president of California Polytechnic State University, also known as Cal Poly Jeffrey. Thanks for jumping on and Bang. Go ahead. The second director of C four s R Division. And he's joining us from the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for the acquisition Sustainment Department of Defense, D O D. And, of course, Steve Jake's executive director, founder, National Security Space Association and managing partner at Bello's. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this session. We got an hour conversation. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>So we got a virtual event here. We've got an hour, have a great conversation and love for you guys do? In opening statement on how you see the development through public and private partnerships around cybersecurity in space, Jeff will start with you. >>Well, thanks very much, John. It's great to be on with all of you. Uh, on behalf Cal Poly Welcome, everyone. Educating the workforce of tomorrow is our mission to Cal Poly. Whether that means traditional undergraduates, master students are increasingly mid career professionals looking toe up, skill or re skill. Our signature pedagogy is learn by doing, which means that our graduates arrive at employers ready Day one with practical skills and experience. We have long thought of ourselves is lucky to be on California's beautiful central Coast. But in recent years, as we have developed closer relationships with Vandenberg Air Force Base, hopefully the future permanent headquarters of the United States Space Command with Vandenberg and other regional partners, we have discovered that our location is even more advantages than we thought. We're just 50 miles away from Vandenberg, a little closer than u C. Santa Barbara, and the base represents the southern border of what we have come to think of as the central coast region. Cal Poly and Vandenberg Air force base have partner to support regional economic development to encourage the development of a commercial spaceport toe advocate for the space Command headquarters coming to Vandenberg and other ventures. These partnerships have been possible because because both parties stand to benefit Vandenberg by securing new streams of revenue, workforce and local supply chain and Cal Poly by helping to grow local jobs for graduates, internship opportunities for students, and research and entrepreneurship opportunities for faculty and staff. Crucially, what's good for Vandenberg Air Force Base and for Cal Poly is also good for the Central Coast and the US, creating new head of household jobs, infrastructure and opportunity. Our goal is that these new jobs bring more diversity and sustainability for the region. This regional economic development has taken on a life of its own, spawning a new nonprofit called Reach, which coordinates development efforts from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the South to camp to Camp Roberts in the North. Another factor that is facilitated our relationship with Vandenberg Air Force Base is that we have some of the same friends. For example, Northrop Grumman has has long been an important defense contractor, an important partner to Cal poly funding scholarships and facilities that have allowed us to stay current with technology in it to attract highly qualified students for whom Cal Poly's costs would otherwise be prohibitive. For almost 20 years north of grimness funded scholarships for Cal Poly students this year, their funding 64 scholarships, some directly in our College of Engineering and most through our Cal Poly Scholars program, Cal Poly Scholars, a support both incoming freshman is transfer students. These air especially important because it allows us to provide additional support and opportunities to a group of students who are mostly first generation, low income and underrepresented and who otherwise might not choose to attend Cal Poly. They also allow us to recruit from partner high schools with large populations of underrepresented minority students, including the Fortune High School in Elk Grove, which we developed a deep and lasting connection. We know that the best work is done by balanced teams that include multiple and diverse perspectives. These scholarships help us achieve that goal, and I'm sure you know Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a very large contract to modernized the U. S. I. C B M Armory with some of the work being done at Vandenberg Air Force Base, thus supporting the local economy and protecting protecting our efforts in space requires partnerships in the digital realm. How Polly is partnered with many private companies, such as AWS. Our partnerships with Amazon Web services has enabled us to train our students with next generation cloud engineering skills, in part through our jointly created digital transformation hub. Another partnership example is among Cal Poly's California Cybersecurity Institute, College of Engineering and the California National Guard. This partnership is focused on preparing a cyber ready workforce by providing faculty and students with a hands on research and learning environment, side by side with military, law enforcement professionals and cyber experts. We also have a long standing partnership with PG and E, most recently focused on workforce development and redevelopment. Many of our graduates do indeed go on to careers in aerospace and defense industry as a rough approximation. More than 4500 Cal Poly graduates list aerospace and defense as their employment sector on linked in, and it's not just our engineers and computer sciences. When I was speaking to our fellow Panelists not too long ago, >>are >>speaking to bang, we learned that Rachel sins, one of our liberal arts arts majors, is working in his office. So shout out to you, Rachel. And then finally, of course, some of our graduates sword extraordinary heights such as Commander Victor Glover, who will be heading to the International space station later this year as I close. All of which is to say that we're deeply committed the workforce, development and redevelopment that we understand the value of public private partnerships and that were eager to find new ways in which to benefit everyone from this further cooperation. So we're committed to the region, the state in the nation and our past efforts in space, cybersecurity and links to our partners at as I indicated, aerospace industry and governmental partners provides a unique position for us to move forward in the interface of space and cybersecurity. Thank you so much, John. >>President, I'm sure thank you very much for the comments and congratulations to Cal Poly for being on the forefront of innovation and really taking a unique progressive. You and wanna tip your hat to you guys over there. Thank you very much for those comments. Appreciate it. Bahng. Department of Defense. Exciting you gotta defend the nation spaces Global. Your opening statement. >>Yes, sir. Thanks, John. Appreciate that day. Thank you, everybody. I'm honored to be this panel along with President Armstrong, Cal Poly in my long longtime friend and colleague Steve Jakes of the National Security Space Association, to discuss a very important topic of cybersecurity workforce development, as President Armstrong alluded to, I'll tell you both of these organizations, Cal Poly and the N S. A have done and continue to do an exceptional job at finding talent, recruiting them in training current and future leaders and technical professionals that we vitally need for our nation's growing space programs. A swell Asare collective National security Earlier today, during Session three high, along with my colleague Chris Hansen discussed space, cyber Security and how the space domain is changing the landscape of future conflicts. I discussed the rapid emergence of commercial space with the proliferations of hundreds, if not thousands, of satellites providing a variety of services, including communications allowing for global Internet connectivity. S one example within the O. D. We continue to look at how we can leverage this opportunity. I'll tell you one of the enabling technologies eyes the use of small satellites, which are inherently cheaper and perhaps more flexible than the traditional bigger systems that we have historically used unemployed for the U. D. Certainly not lost on Me is the fact that Cal Poly Pioneer Cube SATs 2020 some years ago, and they set the standard for the use of these systems today. So they saw the valiant benefit gained way ahead of everybody else, it seems, and Cal Poly's focus on training and education is commendable. I especially impressed by the efforts of another of Steve's I colleague, current CEO Mr Bill Britain, with his high energy push to attract the next generation of innovators. Uh, earlier this year, I had planned on participating in this year's Cyber Innovation Challenge. In June works Cal Poly host California Mill and high school students and challenge them with situations to test their cyber knowledge. I tell you, I wish I had that kind of opportunity when I was a kid. Unfortunately, the pandemic change the plan. Why I truly look forward. Thio feature events such as these Thio participating. Now I want to recognize my good friend Steve Jakes, whom I've known for perhaps too long of a time here over two decades or so, who was in acknowledge space expert and personally, I truly applaud him for having the foresight of years back to form the National Security Space Association to help the entire space enterprise navigate through not only technology but Polly policy issues and challenges and paved the way for operational izing space. Space is our newest horrifying domain. That's not a secret anymore. Uh, and while it is a unique area, it shares a lot of common traits with the other domains such as land, air and sea, obviously all of strategically important to the defense of the United States. In conflict they will need to be. They will all be contested and therefore they all need to be defended. One domain alone will not win future conflicts in a joint operation. We must succeed. All to defending space is critical as critical is defending our other operational domains. Funny space is no longer the sanctuary available only to the government. Increasingly, as I discussed in the previous session, commercial space is taking the lead a lot of different areas, including R and D, A so called new space, so cyber security threat is even more demanding and even more challenging. Three US considers and federal access to and freedom to operate in space vital to advancing security, economic prosperity, prosperity and scientific knowledge of the country. That's making cyberspace an inseparable component. America's financial, social government and political life. We stood up US Space force ah, year ago or so as the newest military service is like the other services. Its mission is to organize, train and equip space forces in order to protect us and allied interest in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force. Imagine combining that US space force with the U. S. Cyber Command to unify the direction of space and cyberspace operation strengthened U D capabilities and integrate and bolster d o d cyber experience. Now, of course, to enable all of this requires had trained and professional cadre of cyber security experts, combining a good mix of policy as well as high technical skill set much like we're seeing in stem, we need to attract more people to this growing field. Now the D. O. D. Is recognized the importance of the cybersecurity workforce, and we have implemented policies to encourage his growth Back in 2013 the deputy secretary of defense signed the D. O d cyberspace workforce strategy to create a comprehensive, well equipped cyber security team to respond to national security concerns. Now this strategy also created a program that encourages collaboration between the D. O. D and private sector employees. We call this the Cyber Information Technology Exchange program or site up. It's an exchange programs, which is very interesting, in which a private sector employees can naturally work for the D. O. D. In a cyber security position that spans across multiple mission critical areas are important to the d. O. D. A key responsibility of cybersecurity community is military leaders on the related threats and cyber security actions we need to have to defeat these threats. We talk about rapid that position, agile business processes and practices to speed up innovation. Likewise, cybersecurity must keep up with this challenge to cyber security. Needs to be right there with the challenges and changes, and this requires exceptional personnel. We need to attract talent investing the people now to grow a robust cybersecurity, workforce, streets, future. I look forward to the panel discussion, John. Thank you. >>Thank you so much bomb for those comments and you know, new challenges and new opportunities and new possibilities and free freedom Operating space. Critical. Thank you for those comments. Looking forward. Toa chatting further. Steve Jakes, executive director of N. S. S. A Europe opening statement. >>Thank you, John. And echoing bangs thanks to Cal Poly for pulling these this important event together and frankly, for allowing the National Security Space Association be a part of it. Likewise, we on behalf the association delighted and honored Thio be on this panel with President Armstrong along with my friend and colleague Bonneau Glue Mahad Something for you all to know about Bomb. He spent the 1st 20 years of his career in the Air Force doing space programs. He then went into industry for several years and then came back into government to serve. Very few people do that. So bang on behalf of the space community, we thank you for your long life long devotion to service to our nation. We really appreciate that and I also echo a bang shot out to that guy Bill Britain, who has been a long time co conspirator of ours for a long time and you're doing great work there in the cyber program at Cal Poly Bill, keep it up. But professor arms trying to keep a close eye on him. Uh, I would like to offer a little extra context to the great comments made by by President Armstrong and bahng. Uh, in our view, the timing of this conference really could not be any better. Um, we all recently reflected again on that tragic 9 11 surprise attack on our homeland. And it's an appropriate time, we think, to take pause while the percentage of you in the audience here weren't even born or babies then For the most of us, it still feels like yesterday. And moreover, a tragedy like 9 11 has taught us a lot to include to be more vigilant, always keep our collective eyes and ears open to include those quote eyes and ears from space, making sure nothing like this ever happens again. So this conference is a key aspect. Protecting our nation requires we work in a cybersecurity environment at all times. But, you know, the fascinating thing about space systems is we can't see him. No, sir, We see Space launches man there's nothing more invigorating than that. But after launch, they become invisible. So what are they really doing up there? What are they doing to enable our quality of life in the United States and in the world? Well, to illustrate, I'd like to paraphrase elements of an article in Forbes magazine by Bonds and my good friend Chuck Beans. Chuck. It's a space guy, actually had Bonds job a fuse in the Pentagon. He is now chairman and chief strategy officer at York Space Systems, and in his spare time he's chairman of the small satellites. Chuck speaks in words that everyone can understand. So I'd like to give you some of his words out of his article. Uh, they're afraid somewhat. So these are Chuck's words. Let's talk about average Joe and playing Jane. Before heading to the airport for a business trip to New York City, Joe checks the weather forecast informed by Noah's weather satellites to see what pack for the trip. He then calls an uber that space app. Everybody uses it matches riders with drivers via GPS to take into the airport, So Joe has lunch of the airport. Unbeknownst to him, his organic lunch is made with the help of precision farming made possible through optimized irrigation and fertilization, with remote spectral sensing coming from space and GPS on the plane, the pilot navigates around weather, aided by GPS and nose weather satellites. And Joe makes his meeting on time to join his New York colleagues in a video call with a key customer in Singapore made possible by telecommunication satellites. Around to his next meeting, Joe receives notice changing the location of the meeting to another to the other side of town. So he calmly tells Syria to adjust the destination, and his satellite guided Google maps redirects him to the new location. That evening, Joe watches the news broadcast via satellite. The report details a meeting among world leaders discussing the developing crisis in Syria. As it turns out, various forms of quote remotely sensed. Information collected from satellites indicate that yet another band, chemical weapon, may have been used on its own people. Before going to bed, Joe decides to call his parents and congratulate them for their wedding anniversary as they cruise across the Atlantic, made possible again by communications satellites and Joe's parents can enjoy the call without even wondering how it happened the next morning. Back home, Joe's wife, Jane, is involved in a car accident. Her vehicle skids off the road. She's knocked unconscious, but because of her satellite equipped on star system, the crash is detected immediately and first responders show up on the scene. In time, Joe receives the news books. An early trip home sends flowers to his wife as he orders another uber to the airport. Over that 24 hours, Joe and Jane used space system applications for nearly every part of their day. Imagine the consequences if at any point they were somehow denied these services, whether they be by natural causes or a foreign hostility. And each of these satellite applications used in this case were initially developed for military purposes and continue to be, but also have remarkable application on our way of life. Just many people just don't know that. So, ladies and gentlemen, now you know, thanks to chuck beans, well, the United States has a proud heritage being the world's leading space faring nation, dating back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. Today we have mature and robust systems operating from space, providing overhead reconnaissance to quote, wash and listen, provide missile warning, communications, positioning, navigation and timing from our GPS system. Much of what you heard in Lieutenant General J. T. Thompson earlier speech. These systems are not only integral to our national security, but also our also to our quality of life is Chuck told us. We simply no longer could live without these systems as a nation and for that matter, as a world. But over the years, adversary like adversaries like China, Russia and other countries have come to realize the value of space systems and are aggressively playing ketchup while also pursuing capabilities that will challenge our systems. As many of you know, in 2000 and seven, China demonstrated it's a set system by actually shooting down is one of its own satellites and has been aggressively developing counter space systems to disrupt hours. So in a heavily congested space environment, our systems are now being contested like never before and will continue to bay well as Bond mentioned, the United States has responded to these changing threats. In addition to adding ways to protect our system, the administration and in Congress recently created the United States Space Force and the operational you United States Space Command, the latter of which you heard President Armstrong and other Californians hope is going to be located. Vandenberg Air Force Base Combined with our intelligence community today, we have focused military and civilian leadership now in space. And that's a very, very good thing. Commence, really. On the industry side, we did create the National Security Space Association devoted solely to supporting the national security Space Enterprise. We're based here in the D C area, but we have arms and legs across the country, and we are loaded with extraordinary talent. In scores of Forman, former government executives, So S s a is joined at the hip with our government customers to serve and to support. We're busy with a multitude of activities underway ranging from a number of thought provoking policy. Papers are recurring space time Webcast supporting Congress's Space Power Caucus and other main serious efforts. Check us out at NSS. A space dot org's One of our strategic priorities in central to today's events is to actively promote and nurture the workforce development. Just like cow calling. We will work with our U. S. Government customers, industry leaders and academia to attract and recruit students to join the space world, whether in government or industry and two assistant mentoring and training as their careers. Progress on that point, we're delighted. Be delighted to be working with Cal Poly as we hopefully will undertake a new pilot program with him very soon. So students stay tuned something I can tell you Space is really cool. While our nation's satellite systems are technical and complex, our nation's government and industry work force is highly diverse, with a combination of engineers, physicists, method and mathematicians, but also with a large non technical expertise as well. Think about how government gets things thes systems designed, manufactured, launching into orbit and operating. They do this via contracts with our aerospace industry, requiring talents across the board from cost estimating cost analysis, budgeting, procurement, legal and many other support. Tasker Integral to the mission. Many thousands of people work in the space workforce tens of billions of dollars every year. This is really cool stuff, no matter what your education background, a great career to be part of. When summary as bang had mentioned Aziz, well, there is a great deal of exciting challenges ahead we will see a new renaissance in space in the years ahead, and in some cases it's already begun. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Richard Branson are in the game, stimulating new ideas in business models, other private investors and start up companies. Space companies are now coming in from all angles. The exponential advancement of technology and microelectronics now allows the potential for a plethora of small SAT systems to possibly replace older satellites the size of a Greyhound bus. It's getting better by the day and central to this conference, cybersecurity is paramount to our nation's critical infrastructure in space. So once again, thanks very much, and I look forward to the further conversation. >>Steve, thank you very much. Space is cool. It's relevant. But it's important, as you pointed out, and you're awesome story about how it impacts our life every day. So I really appreciate that great story. I'm glad you took the time Thio share that you forgot the part about the drone coming over in the crime scene and, you know, mapping it out for you. But that would add that to the story later. Great stuff. My first question is let's get into the conversations because I think this is super important. President Armstrong like you to talk about some of the points that was teased out by Bang and Steve. One in particular is the comment around how military research was important in developing all these capabilities, which is impacting all of our lives. Through that story. It was the military research that has enabled a generation and generation of value for consumers. This is kind of this workforce conversation. There are opportunities now with with research and grants, and this is, ah, funding of innovation that it's highly accelerate. It's happening very quickly. Can you comment on how research and the partnerships to get that funding into the universities is critical? >>Yeah, I really appreciate that And appreciate the comments of my colleagues on it really boils down to me to partnerships, public private partnerships. You mentioned Northrop Grumman, but we have partnerships with Lockie Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Space six JPL, also member of organization called Business Higher Education Forum, which brings together university presidents and CEOs of companies. There's been focused on cybersecurity and data science, and I hope that we can spill into cybersecurity in space but those partnerships in the past have really brought a lot forward at Cal Poly Aziz mentioned we've been involved with Cube set. Uh, we've have some secure work and we want to plan to do more of that in the future. Uh, those partnerships are essential not only for getting the r and d done, but also the students, the faculty, whether masters or undergraduate, can be involved with that work. Uh, they get that real life experience, whether it's on campus or virtually now during Covic or at the location with the partner, whether it may be governmental or our industry. Uh, and then they're even better equipped, uh, to hit the ground running. And of course, we'd love to see even more of our students graduate with clearance so that they could do some of that a secure work as well. So these partnerships are absolutely critical, and it's also in the context of trying to bring the best and the brightest and all demographics of California and the US into this field, uh, to really be successful. So these partnerships are essential, and our goal is to grow them just like I know other colleagues and C. S u and the U C are planning to dio, >>you know, just as my age I've seen I grew up in the eighties, in college and during that systems generation and that the generation before me, they really kind of pioneered the space that spawned the computer revolution. I mean, you look at these key inflection points in our lives. They were really funded through these kinds of real deep research. Bond talk about that because, you know, we're living in an age of cloud. And Bezos was mentioned. Elon Musk. Sir Richard Branson. You got new ideas coming in from the outside. You have an accelerated clock now on terms of the innovation cycles, and so you got to react differently. You guys have programs to go outside >>of >>the Defense Department. How important is this? Because the workforce that air in schools and our folks re skilling are out there and you've been on both sides of the table. So share your thoughts. >>No, thanks, John. Thanks for the opportunity responded. And that's what you hit on the notes back in the eighties, R and D in space especially, was dominated by my government funding. Uh, contracts and so on. But things have changed. As Steve pointed out, A lot of these commercial entities funded by billionaires are coming out of the woodwork funding R and D. So they're taking the lead. So what we can do within the deal, the in government is truly take advantage of the work they've done on. Uh, since they're they're, you know, paving the way to new new approaches and new way of doing things. And I think we can We could certainly learn from that. And leverage off of that saves us money from an R and D standpoint while benefiting from from the product that they deliver, you know, within the O D Talking about workforce development Way have prioritized we have policies now to attract and retain talent. We need I I had the folks do some research and and looks like from a cybersecurity workforce standpoint. A recent study done, I think, last year in 2019 found that the cybersecurity workforce gap in the U. S. Is nearing half a million people, even though it is a growing industry. So the pipeline needs to be strengthened off getting people through, you know, starting young and through college, like assess a professor Armstrong indicated, because we're gonna need them to be in place. Uh, you know, in a period of about maybe a decade or so, Uh, on top of that, of course, is the continuing issue we have with the gap with with stamps students, we can't afford not to have expertise in place to support all the things we're doing within the with the not only deal with the but the commercial side as well. Thank you. >>How's the gap? Get? Get filled. I mean, this is the this is again. You got cybersecurity. I mean, with space. It's a whole another kind of surface area, if you will, in early surface area. But it is. It is an I o t. Device if you think about it. But it does have the same challenges. That's kind of current and and progressive with cybersecurity. Where's the gap Get filled, Steve Or President Armstrong? I mean, how do you solve the problem and address this gap in the workforce? What is some solutions and what approaches do we need to put in place? >>Steve, go ahead. I'll follow up. >>Okay. Thanks. I'll let you correct. May, uh, it's a really good question, and it's the way I would. The way I would approach it is to focus on it holistically and to acknowledge it up front. And it comes with our teaching, etcetera across the board and from from an industry perspective, I mean, we see it. We've gotta have secure systems with everything we do and promoting this and getting students at early ages and mentoring them and throwing internships at them. Eyes is so paramount to the whole the whole cycle, and and that's kind of and it really takes focused attention. And we continue to use the word focus from an NSS, a perspective. We know the challenges that are out there. There are such talented people in the workforce on the government side, but not nearly enough of them. And likewise on industry side. We could use Maura's well, but when you get down to it, you know we can connect dots. You know that the the aspect That's a Professor Armstrong talked about earlier toe where you continue to work partnerships as much as you possibly can. We hope to be a part of that. That network at that ecosystem the will of taking common objectives and working together to kind of make these things happen and to bring the power not just of one or two companies, but our our entire membership to help out >>President >>Trump. Yeah, I would. I would also add it again. It's back to partnerships that I talked about earlier. One of our partners is high schools and schools fortune Margaret Fortune, who worked in a couple of, uh, administrations in California across party lines and education. Their fifth graders all visit Cal Poly and visit our learned by doing lab and you, you've got to get students interested in stem at a early age. We also need the partnerships, the scholarships, the financial aid so the students can graduate with minimal to no debt to really hit the ground running. And that's exacerbated and really stress. Now, with this covert induced recession, California supports higher education at a higher rate than most states in the nation. But that is that has dropped this year or reasons. We all understand, uh, due to Kobe, and so our partnerships, our creativity on making sure that we help those that need the most help financially uh, that's really key, because the gaps air huge eyes. My colleagues indicated, you know, half of half a million jobs and you need to look at the the students that are in the pipeline. We've got to enhance that. Uh, it's the in the placement rates are amazing. Once the students get to a place like Cal Poly or some of our other amazing CSU and UC campuses, uh, placement rates are like 94%. >>Many of our >>engineers, they have jobs lined up a year before they graduate. So it's just gonna take key partnerships working together. Uh, and that continued partnership with government, local, of course, our state of CSU on partners like we have here today, both Stephen Bang So partnerships the thing >>e could add, you know, the collaboration with universities one that we, uh, put a lot of emphasis, and it may not be well known fact, but as an example of national security agencies, uh, National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber, the Fast works with over 270 colleges and universities across the United States to educate its 45 future cyber first responders as an example, so that Zatz vibrant and healthy and something that we ought Teoh Teik, banjo >>off. Well, I got the brain trust here on this topic. I want to get your thoughts on this one point. I'd like to define what is a public private partnership because the theme that's coming out of the symposium is the script has been flipped. It's a modern error. Things air accelerated get you got security. So you get all these things kind of happen is a modern approach and you're seeing a digital transformation play out all over the world in business. Andi in the public sector. So >>what is what >>is a modern public private partnership? What does it look like today? Because people are learning differently, Covert has pointed out, which was that we're seeing right now. How people the progressions of knowledge and learning truth. It's all changing. How do you guys view the modern version of public private partnership and some some examples and improve points? Can you can you guys share that? We'll start with the Professor Armstrong. >>Yeah. A zai indicated earlier. We've had on guy could give other examples, but Northup Grumman, uh, they helped us with cyber lab. Many years ago. That is maintained, uh, directly the software, the connection outside its its own unit so that students can learn the hack, they can learn to penetrate defenses, and I know that that has already had some considerations of space. But that's a benefit to both parties. So a good public private partnership has benefits to both entities. Uh, in the common factor for universities with a lot of these partnerships is the is the talent, the talent that is, that is needed, what we've been working on for years of the, you know, that undergraduate or master's or PhD programs. But now it's also spilling into Skilling and re Skilling. As you know, Jobs. Uh, you know, folks were in jobs today that didn't exist two years, three years, five years ago. But it also spills into other aspects that can expand even mawr. We're very fortunate. We have land, there's opportunities. We have one tech part project. We're expanding our tech park. I think we'll see opportunities for that, and it'll it'll be adjusted thio, due to the virtual world that we're all learning more and more about it, which we were in before Cove it. But I also think that that person to person is going to be important. Um, I wanna make sure that I'm driving across the bridge. Or or that that satellites being launched by the engineer that's had at least some in person training, uh, to do that and that experience, especially as a first time freshman coming on a campus, getting that experience expanding and as adult. And we're gonna need those public private partnerships in order to continue to fund those at a level that is at the excellence we need for these stem and engineering fields. >>It's interesting People in technology can work together in these partnerships in a new way. Bank Steve Reaction Thio the modern version of what a public, successful private partnership looks like. >>If I could jump in John, I think, you know, historically, Dodi's has have had, ah, high bar thio, uh, to overcome, if you will, in terms of getting rapid pulling in your company. This is the fault, if you will and not rely heavily in are the usual suspects of vendors and like and I think the deal is done a good job over the last couple of years off trying to reduce the burden on working with us. You know, the Air Force. I think they're pioneering this idea around pitch days where companies come in, do a two hour pitch and immediately notified of a wooden award without having to wait a long time. Thio get feedback on on the quality of the product and so on. So I think we're trying to do our best. Thio strengthen that partnership with companies outside the main group of people that we typically use. >>Steve, any reaction? Comment to add? >>Yeah, I would add a couple of these air. Very excellent thoughts. Uh, it zits about taking a little gamble by coming out of your comfort zone. You know, the world that Bond and Bond lives in and I used to live in in the past has been quite structured. It's really about we know what the threat is. We need to go fix it, will design it says we go make it happen, we'll fly it. Um, life is so much more complicated than that. And so it's it's really to me. I mean, you take you take an example of the pitch days of bond talks about I think I think taking a gamble by attempting to just do a lot of pilot programs, uh, work the trust factor between government folks and the industry folks in academia. Because we are all in this together in a lot of ways, for example. I mean, we just sent the paper to the White House of their requests about, you know, what would we do from a workforce development perspective? And we hope Thio embellish on this over time once the the initiative matures. But we have a piece of it, for example, is the thing we call clear for success getting back Thio Uh, President Armstrong's comments at the collegiate level. You know, high, high, high quality folks are in high demand. So why don't we put together a program they grabbed kids in their their underclass years identifies folks that are interested in doing something like this. Get them scholarships. Um, um, I have a job waiting for them that their contract ID for before they graduate, and when they graduate, they walk with S C I clearance. We believe that could be done so, and that's an example of ways in which the public private partnerships can happen to where you now have a talented kid ready to go on Day one. We think those kind of things can happen. It just gets back down to being focused on specific initiatives, give them giving them a chance and run as many pilot programs as you can like these days. >>That's a great point, E. President. >>I just want to jump in and echo both the bank and Steve's comments. But Steve, that you know your point of, you know, our graduates. We consider them ready Day one. Well, they need to be ready Day one and ready to go secure. We totally support that and and love to follow up offline with you on that. That's that's exciting, uh, and needed very much needed mawr of it. Some of it's happening, but way certainly have been thinking a lot about that and making some plans, >>and that's a great example of good Segway. My next question. This kind of reimagining sees work flows, eyes kind of breaking down the old the old way and bringing in kind of a new way accelerated all kind of new things. There are creative ways to address this workforce issue, and this is the next topic. How can we employ new creative solutions? Because, let's face it, you know, it's not the days of get your engineering degree and and go interview for a job and then get slotted in and get the intern. You know the programs you get you particularly through the system. This is this is multiple disciplines. Cybersecurity points at that. You could be smart and math and have, ah, degree in anthropology and even the best cyber talents on the planet. So this is a new new world. What are some creative approaches that >>you know, we're >>in the workforce >>is quite good, John. One of the things I think that za challenge to us is you know, we got somehow we got me working for with the government, sexy, right? The part of the challenge we have is attracting the right right level of skill sets and personnel. But, you know, we're competing oftentimes with the commercial side, the gaming industry as examples of a big deal. And those are the same talents. We need to support a lot of programs we have in the U. D. So somehow we have to do a better job to Steve's point off, making the work within the U. D within the government something that they would be interested early on. So I tracked him early. I kind of talked about Cal Poly's, uh, challenge program that they were gonna have in June inviting high school kid. We're excited about the whole idea of space and cyber security, and so on those air something. So I think we have to do it. Continue to do what were the course the next several years. >>Awesome. Any other creative approaches that you guys see working or might be on idea, or just a kind of stoked the ideation out their internship. So obviously internships are known, but like there's gotta be new ways. >>I think you can take what Steve was talking about earlier getting students in high school, uh, and aligning them sometimes. Uh, that intern first internship, not just between the freshman sophomore year, but before they inter cal poly per se. And they're they're involved s So I think that's, uh, absolutely key. Getting them involved many other ways. Um, we have an example of of up Skilling a redeveloped work redevelopment here in the Central Coast. PG and e Diablo nuclear plant as going to decommission in around 2020 24. And so we have a ongoing partnership toe work on reposition those employees for for the future. So that's, you know, engineering and beyond. Uh, but think about that just in the manner that you were talking about. So the up skilling and re Skilling uh, on I think that's where you know, we were talking about that Purdue University. Other California universities have been dealing with online programs before cove it and now with co vid uh, so many more faculty or were pushed into that area. There's going to be much more going and talk about workforce development and up Skilling and Re Skilling The amount of training and education of our faculty across the country, uh, in in virtual, uh, and delivery has been huge. So there's always a silver linings in the cloud. >>I want to get your guys thoughts on one final question as we in the in the segment. And we've seen on the commercial side with cloud computing on these highly accelerated environments where you know, SAS business model subscription. That's on the business side. But >>one of The >>things that's clear in this trend is technology, and people work together and technology augments the people components. So I'd love to get your thoughts as we look at the world now we're living in co vid um, Cal Poly. You guys have remote learning Right now. It's a infancy. It's a whole new disruption, if you will, but also an opportunity to enable new ways to collaborate, Right? So if you look at people and technology, can you guys share your view and vision on how communities can be developed? How these digital technologies and people can work together faster to get to the truth or make a discovery higher to build the workforce? These air opportunities? How do you guys view this new digital transformation? >>Well, I think there's there's a huge opportunities and just what we're doing with this symposium. We're filming this on one day, and it's going to stream live, and then the three of us, the four of us, can participate and chat with participants while it's going on. That's amazing. And I appreciate you, John, you bringing that to this this symposium, I think there's more and more that we can do from a Cal poly perspective with our pedagogy. So you know, linked to learn by doing in person will always be important to us. But we see virtual. We see partnerships like this can expand and enhance our ability and minimize the in person time, decrease the time to degree enhanced graduation rate, eliminate opportunity gaps or students that don't have the same advantages. S so I think the technological aspect of this is tremendous. Then on the up Skilling and Re Skilling, where employees air all over, they can be reached virtually then maybe they come to a location or really advanced technology allows them to get hands on virtually, or they come to that location and get it in a hybrid format. Eso I'm I'm very excited about the future and what we can do, and it's gonna be different with every university with every partnership. It's one. Size does not fit all. >>It's so many possibilities. Bond. I could almost imagine a social network that has a verified, you know, secure clearance. I can jump in, have a little cloak of secrecy and collaborate with the d o. D. Possibly in the future. But >>these are the >>kind of kind of crazy ideas that are needed. Are your thoughts on this whole digital transformation cross policy? >>I think technology is gonna be revolutionary here, John. You know, we're focusing lately on what we call digital engineering to quicken the pace off, delivering capability to warfighter. As an example, I think a I machine language all that's gonna have a major play and how we operate in the future. We're embracing five G technologies writing ability Thio zero latency or I o t More automation off the supply chain. That sort of thing, I think, uh, the future ahead of us is is very encouraging. Thing is gonna do a lot for for national defense on certainly the security of the country. >>Steve, your final thoughts. Space systems are systems, and they're connected to other systems that are connected to people. Your thoughts on this digital transformation opportunity >>Such a great question in such a fun, great challenge ahead of us. Um echoing are my colleague's sentiments. I would add to it. You know, a lot of this has I think we should do some focusing on campaigning so that people can feel comfortable to include the Congress to do things a little bit differently. Um, you know, we're not attuned to doing things fast. Uh, but the dramatic You know, the way technology is just going like crazy right now. I think it ties back Thio hoping Thio, convince some of our senior leaders on what I call both sides of the Potomac River that it's worth taking these gamble. We do need to take some of these things very way. And I'm very confident, confident and excited and comfortable. They're just gonna be a great time ahead and all for the better. >>You know, e talk about D. C. Because I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not a political person, but I always say less lawyers, more techies in Congress and Senate. So I was getting job when I say that. Sorry. Presidential. Go ahead. >>Yeah, I know. Just one other point. Uh, and and Steve's alluded to this in bonded as well. I mean, we've got to be less risk averse in these partnerships. That doesn't mean reckless, but we have to be less risk averse. And I would also I have a zoo. You talk about technology. I have to reflect on something that happened in, uh, you both talked a bit about Bill Britton and his impact on Cal Poly and what we're doing. But we were faced a few years ago of replacing a traditional data a data warehouse, data storage data center, and we partner with a W S. And thank goodness we had that in progress on it enhanced our bandwidth on our campus before Cove. It hit on with this partnership with the digital transformation hub. So there is a great example where, uh, we we had that going. That's not something we could have started. Oh, covitz hit. Let's flip that switch. And so we have to be proactive on. We also have thio not be risk averse and do some things differently. Eyes that that is really salvage the experience for for students. Right now, as things are flowing, well, we only have about 12% of our courses in person. Uh, those essential courses, uh, and just grateful for those partnerships that have talked about today. >>Yeah, and it's a shining example of how being agile, continuous operations, these air themes that expand into space and the next workforce needs to be built. Gentlemen, thank you. very much for sharing your insights. I know. Bang, You're gonna go into the defense side of space and your other sessions. Thank you, gentlemen, for your time for great session. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. >>I'm John Furry with the Cube here in Palo Alto, California Covering and hosting with Cal Poly The Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's The Cube, covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, hosted by Cal Poly. >> Everyone, welcome to this special virtual conference, the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly with support from The Cube. I'm John Furey, your host and master of ceremony's got a great topic today, and this session is really the intersection of space and cybersecurity. This topic, and this conversation is a cybersecurity workforce development through public and private partnerships. And we've got a great lineup, we've Jeff Armstrong is the president of California Polytechnic State University, also known as Cal Poly. Jeffrey, thanks for jumping on and Bong Gumahad. The second, Director of C4ISR Division, and he's joining us from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for the acquisition and sustainment of Department of Defense, DOD, and of course Steve Jacques is Executive Director, founder National Security Space Association, and managing partner at Velos. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this session, we've got an hour of conversation, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So we've got a virtual event here, we've got an hour to have a great conversation, I'd love for you guys to do an opening statement on how you see the development through public and private partnerships around cybersecurity and space, Jeff, we'll start with you. >> Well, thanks very much, John, it's great to be on with all of you. On behalf of Cal Poly, welcome everyone. Educating the workforce of tomorrow is our mission at Cal Poly, whether that means traditional undergraduates, masters students, or increasingly, mid-career professionals looking to upskill or re-skill. Our signature pedagogy is learn by doing, which means that our graduates arrive at employers, ready day one with practical skills and experience. We have long thought of ourselves as lucky to be on California's beautiful central coast, but in recent years, as we've developed closer relationships with Vandenberg Air Force Base, hopefully the future permanent headquarters of the United States Space Command with Vandenberg and other regional partners, We have discovered that our location is even more advantageous than we thought. We're just 50 miles away from Vandenberg, a little closer than UC Santa Barbara and the base represents the Southern border of what we have come to think of as the central coast region. Cal Poly and Vandenberg Air Force Base have partnered to support regional economic development, to encourage the development of a commercial space port, to advocate for the space command headquarters coming to Vandenberg and other ventures. These partnerships have been possible because both parties stand to benefit. Vandenberg, by securing new streams of revenue, workforce, and local supply chain and Cal Poly by helping to grow local jobs for graduates, internship opportunities for students and research and entrepreneurship opportunities for faculty and staff. Crucially, what's good for Vandenberg Air Force Base and for Cal Poly is also good for the central coast and the U.S., creating new head of household jobs, infrastructure, and opportunity. Our goal is that these new jobs bring more diversity and sustainability for the region. This regional economic development has taken on a life of its own, spawning a new nonprofit called REACH which coordinates development efforts from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the South to Camp Roberts in the North. Another factor that has facilitated our relationship with Vandenberg Air Force Base is that we have some of the same friends. For example, Northrop Grumman has as long been an important defense contractor and an important partner to Cal Poly, funding scholarships in facilities that have allowed us to stay current with technology in it to attract highly qualified students for whom Cal Poly's costs would otherwise be prohibitive. For almost 20 years, Northrop Grumman has funded scholarships for Cal Poly students. This year, they're funding 64 scholarships, some directly in our College of Engineering and most through our Cal Poly Scholars Program. Cal Poly scholars support both incoming freshmen and transfer students. These are especially important, 'cause it allows us to provide additional support and opportunities to a group of students who are mostly first generation, low income and underrepresented, and who otherwise might not choose to attend Cal Poly. They also allow us to recruit from partner high schools with large populations of underrepresented minority students, including the Fortune High School in Elk Grove, which we developed a deep and lasting connection. We know that the best work is done by balanced teams that include multiple and diverse perspectives. These scholarships help us achieve that goal and I'm sure you know Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a very large contract to modernize the U.S. ICBM armory with some of the work being done at Vandenberg Air Force Base, thus supporting the local economy and protecting... Protecting our efforts in space requires partnerships in the digital realm. Cal Poly has partnered with many private companies such as AWS. Our partnerships with Amazon Web Services has enabled us to train our students with next generation cloud engineering skills, in part, through our jointly created digital transformation hub. Another partnership example is among Cal Poly's California Cyber Security Institute College of Engineering and the California National Guard. This partnership is focused on preparing a cyber-ready workforce, by providing faculty and students with a hands on research and learning environment side by side with military law enforcement professionals and cyber experts. We also have a long standing partnership with PG&E most recently focused on workforce development and redevelopment. Many of our graduates do indeed go on to careers in aerospace and defense industry. As a rough approximation, more than 4,500 Cal Poly graduates list aerospace or defense as their employment sector on LinkedIn. And it's not just our engineers in computer sciences. When I was speaking to our fellow panelists not too long ago, speaking to Bong, we learned that Rachel Sims, one of our liberal arts majors is working in his office, so shout out to you, Rachel. And then finally, of course, some of our graduates soar to extraordinary heights, such as Commander Victor Glover, who will be heading to the International Space Station later this year. As I close, all of which is to say that we're deeply committed to workforce development and redevelopment, that we understand the value of public-private partnerships, and that we're eager to find new ways in which to benefit everyone from this further cooperation. So we're committed to the region, the state and the nation, in our past efforts in space, cyber security and links to our partners at, as I indicated, aerospace industry and governmental partners provides a unique position for us to move forward in the interface of space and cyber security. Thank you so much, John. >> President Armstrong, thank you very much for the comments and congratulations to Cal Poly for being on the forefront of innovation and really taking a unique, progressive view and want to tip a hat to you guys over there, thank you very much for those comments, appreciate it. Bong, Department of Defense. Exciting, you've got to defend the nation, space is global, your opening statement. >> Yes, sir, thanks John, appreciate that. Thank you everybody, I'm honored to be in this panel along with Preston Armstrong of Cal Poly and my longtime friend and colleague Steve Jacques of the National Security Space Association to discuss a very important topic of a cybersecurity workforce development as President Armstrong alluded to. I'll tell you, both of these organizations, Cal Poly and the NSSA have done and continue to do an exceptional job at finding talent, recruiting them and training current and future leaders and technical professionals that we vitally need for our nation's growing space programs, as well as our collective national security. Earlier today, during session three, I, along with my colleague, Chris Samson discussed space cyber security and how the space domain is changing the landscape of future conflicts. I discussed the rapid emergence of commercial space with the proliferation of hundreds, if not thousands of satellites, providing a variety of services including communications, allowing for global internet connectivity, as one example. Within DOD, we continued to look at how we can leverage this opportunity. I'll tell you, one of the enabling technologies, is the use of small satellites, which are inherently cheaper and perhaps more flexible than the traditional bigger systems that we have historically used and employed for DOD. Certainly not lost on me is the fact that Cal Poly pioneered CubeSats 28, 27 years ago, and they set a standard for the use of these systems today. So they saw the value and benefit gained way ahead of everybody else it seems. And Cal Poly's focus on training and education is commendable. I'm especially impressed by the efforts of another of Steven's colleague, the current CIO, Mr. Bill Britton, with his high energy push to attract the next generation of innovators. Earlier this year, I had planned on participating in this year's cyber innovation challenge in June, Oops, Cal Poly hosts California middle, and high school students, and challenge them with situations to test their cyber knowledge. I tell you, I wish I had that kind of opportunity when I was a kid, unfortunately, the pandemic changed the plan, but I truly look forward to future events such as these, to participate in. Now, I want to recognize my good friend, Steve Jacques, whom I've known for perhaps too long of a time here, over two decades or so, who was an acknowledged space expert and personally I've truly applaud him for having the foresight a few years back to form the National Security Space Association to help the entire space enterprise navigate through not only technology, but policy issues and challenges and paved the way for operationalizing space. Space, it certainly was fortifying domain, it's not a secret anymore, and while it is a unique area, it shares a lot of common traits with the other domains, such as land, air, and sea, obviously all are strategically important to the defense of the United States. In conflict, they will all be contested and therefore they all need to be defended. One domain alone will not win future conflicts, and in a joint operation, we must succeed in all. So defending space is critical, as critical as to defending our other operational domains. Funny, space is the only sanctuary available only to the government. Increasingly as I discussed in a previous session, commercial space is taking the lead in a lot of different areas, including R&D, the so-called new space. So cybersecurity threat is even more demanding and even more challenging. The U.S. considers and futhered access to and freedom to operate in space, vital to advancing security, economic prosperity and scientific knowledge of the country, thus making cyberspace an inseparable component of America's financial, social government and political life. We stood up US Space Force a year ago or so as the newest military service. Like the other services, its mission is to organize, train and equip space forces in order to protect U.S. and allied interest in space and to provide spacecape builders who joined force. Imagine combining that U.S. Space Force with the U.S. Cyber Command to unify the direction of the space and cyberspace operation, strengthen DOD capabilities and integrate and bolster a DOD cyber experience. Now, of course, to enable all of this requires a trained and professional cadre of cyber security experts, combining a good mix of policy, as well as a high technical skill set. Much like we're seeing in STEM, we need to attract more people to this growing field. Now, the DOD has recognized the importance to the cybersecurity workforce, and we have implemented policies to encourage its growth. Back in 2013, the Deputy Secretary of Defense signed a DOD Cyberspace Workforce Strategy, to create a comprehensive, well-equipped cyber security team to respond to national security concerns. Now, this strategy also created a program that encourages collaboration between the DOD and private sector employees. We call this the Cyber Information Technology Exchange program, or CITE that it's an exchange program, which is very interesting in which a private sector employee can naturally work for the DOD in a cyber security position that spans across multiple mission critical areas, important to the DOD. A key responsibility of the cyber security community is military leaders, unrelated threats, and the cyber security actions we need to have to defeat these threats. We talked about rapid acquisition, agile business processes and practices to speed up innovation, likewise, cyber security must keep up with this challenge. So cyber security needs to be right there with the challenges and changes, and this requires exceptional personnel. We need to attract talent, invest in the people now to grow a robust cybersecurity workforce for the future. I look forward to the panel discussion, John, thank you. >> Thank you so much, Bob for those comments and, you know, new challenges or new opportunities and new possibilities and freedom to operate in space is critical, thank you for those comments, looking forward to chatting further. Steve Jacques, Executive Director of NSSA, you're up, opening statement. >> Thank you, John and echoing Bongs, thanks to Cal Poly for pulling this important event together and frankly, for allowing the National Security Space Association be a part of it. Likewise, on behalf of the association, I'm delighted and honored to be on this panel of President Armstrong, along with my friend and colleague, Bong Gumahad. Something for you all to know about Bong, he spent the first 20 years of his career in the Air Force doing space programs. He then went into industry for several years and then came back into government to serve, very few people do that. So Bong, on behalf of the space community, we thank you for your lifelong devotion to service to our nation, we really appreciate that. And I also echo a Bong shout out to that guy, Bill Britton. who's been a long time co-conspirator of ours for a long time, and you're doing great work there in the cyber program at Cal Poly, Bill, keep it up. But Professor Armstrong, keep a close eye on him. (laughter) I would like to offer a little extra context to the great comments made by President Armstrong and Bong. And in our view, the timing of this conference really could not be any better. We all recently reflected again on that tragic 9/11 surprise attack on our homeland and it's an appropriate time we think to take pause. While a percentage of you in the audience here weren't even born or were babies then, for the most of us, it still feels like yesterday. And moreover, a tragedy like 9/11 has taught us a lot to include, to be more vigilant, always keep our collective eyes and ears open, to include those "eyes and ears from space," making sure nothing like this ever happens again. So this conference is a key aspect, protecting our nation requires we work in a cyber secure environment at all times. But you know, the fascinating thing about space systems is we can't see 'em. Now sure, we see space launches, man, there's nothing more invigorating than that. But after launch they become invisible, so what are they really doing up there? What are they doing to enable our quality of life in the United States and in the world? Well to illustrate, I'd like to paraphrase elements of an article in Forbes magazine, by Bongs and my good friend, Chuck Beames, Chuck is a space guy, actually had Bongs job a few years in the Pentagon. He's now Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at York Space Systems and in his spare time, he's Chairman of the Small Satellites. Chuck speaks in words that everyone can understand, so I'd like to give you some of his words out of his article, paraphrase somewhat, so these are Chuck's words. "Let's talk about average Joe and plain Jane. "Before heading to the airport for a business trip "to New York city, Joe checks the weather forecast, "informed by NOAA's weather satellites, "to see what to pack for the trip. "He then calls an Uber, that space app everybody uses, "it matches riders with drivers via GPS, "to take him to the airport. "So Joe has launched in the airport, "unbeknownst to him, his organic lunch is made "with the help of precision farming "made possible to optimize the irrigation and fertilization "with remote spectral sensing coming from space and GPS. "On the plane, the pilot navigates around weather, "aided by GPS and NOAA's weather satellites "and Joe makes his meeting on time "to join his New York colleagues in a video call "with a key customer in Singapore, "made possible by telecommunication satellites. "En route to his next meeting, "Joe receives notice changing the location of the meeting "to the other side of town. "So he calmly tells Siri to adjust the destination "and his satellite-guided Google maps redirect him "to the new location. "That evening, Joe watches the news broadcast via satellite, "report details of meeting among world leaders, "discussing the developing crisis in Syria. "As it turns out various forms of "'remotely sensed information' collected from satellites "indicate that yet another banned chemical weapon "may have been used on its own people. "Before going to bed, Joe decides to call his parents "and congratulate them for their wedding anniversary "as they cruise across the Atlantic, "made possible again by communication satellites "and Joe's parents can enjoy the call "without even wondering how it happened. "The next morning back home, "Joe's wife, Jane is involved in a car accident. "Her vehicle skids off the road, she's knocked unconscious, "but because of her satellite equipped OnStar system, "the crash is detected immediately, "and first responders show up on the scene in time. "Joe receives the news, books an early trip home, "sends flowers to his wife "as he orders another Uber to the airport. "Over that 24 hours, "Joe and Jane used space system applications "for nearly every part of their day. "Imagine the consequences if at any point "they were somehow denied these services, "whether they be by natural causes or a foreign hostility. "In each of these satellite applications used in this case, "were initially developed for military purposes "and continued to be, but also have remarkable application "on our way of life, just many people just don't know that." So ladies and gentlemen, now you know, thanks to Chuck Beames. Well, the United States has a proud heritage of being the world's leading space-faring nation. Dating back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, today, we have mature and robust systems operating from space, providing overhead reconnaissance to "watch and listen," provide missile warning, communications, positioning, navigation, and timing from our GPS system, much of which you heard in Lieutenant General JT Thomson's earlier speech. These systems are not only integral to our national security, but also to our quality of life. As Chuck told us, we simply no longer can live without these systems as a nation and for that matter, as a world. But over the years, adversaries like China, Russia and other countries have come to realize the value of space systems and are aggressively playing catch up while also pursuing capabilities that will challenge our systems. As many of you know, in 2007, China demonstrated its ASAT system by actually shooting down one of its own satellites and has been aggressively developing counterspace systems to disrupt ours. So in a heavily congested space environment, our systems are now being contested like never before and will continue to be. Well, as a Bong mentioned, the United States have responded to these changing threats. In addition to adding ways to protect our system, the administration and the Congress recently created the United States Space Force and the operational United States Space Command, the latter of which you heard President Armstrong and other Californians hope is going to be located at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Combined with our intelligence community, today we have focused military and civilian leadership now in space, and that's a very, very good thing. Commensurately on the industry side, we did create the National Security Space Association, devoted solely to supporting the National Security Space Enterprise. We're based here in the DC area, but we have arms and legs across the country and we are loaded with extraordinary talent in scores of former government executives. So NSSA is joined at the hip with our government customers to serve and to support. We're busy with a multitude of activities underway, ranging from a number of thought-provoking policy papers, our recurring spacetime webcasts, supporting Congress's space power caucus, and other main serious efforts. Check us out at nssaspace.org. One of our strategic priorities and central to today's events is to actively promote and nurture the workforce development, just like Cal-Poly. We will work with our U.S. government customers, industry leaders, and academia to attract and recruit students to join the space world, whether in government or industry, and to assist in mentoring and training as their careers progress. On that point, we're delighted to be working with Cal Poly as we hopefully will undertake a new pilot program with them very soon. So students stay tuned, something I can tell you, space is really cool. While our nation's satellite systems are technical and complex, our nation's government and industry workforce is highly diverse, with a combination of engineers, physicists and mathematicians, but also with a large non-technical expertise as well. Think about how government gets these systems designed, manufactured, launching into orbit and operating. They do this via contracts with our aerospace industry, requiring talents across the board, from cost estimating, cost analysis, budgeting, procurement, legal, and many other support tasks that are integral to the mission. Many thousands of people work in the space workforce, tens of billions of dollars every year. This is really cool stuff and no matter what your education background, a great career to be part of. In summary, as Bong had mentioned as well, there's a great deal of exciting challenges ahead. We will see a new renaissance in space in the years ahead and in some cases it's already begun. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson, are in the game, stimulating new ideas and business models. Other private investors and startup companies, space companies are now coming in from all angles. The exponential advancement of technology and micro electronics now allows a potential for a plethora of small sat systems to possibly replace older satellites, the size of a Greyhound bus. It's getting better by the day and central to this conference, cybersecurity is paramount to our nation's critical infrastructure in space. So once again, thanks very much and I look forward to the further conversation. >> Steve, thank you very much. Space is cool, it's relevant, but it's important as you pointed out in your awesome story about how it impacts our life every day so I really appreciate that great story I'm glad you took the time to share that. You forgot the part about the drone coming over in the crime scene and, you know, mapping it out for you, but we'll add that to the story later, great stuff. My first question is, let's get into the conversations, because I think this is super important. President Armstrong, I'd like you to talk about some of the points that was teased out by Bong and Steve. One in particular is the comment around how military research was important in developing all these capabilities, which is impacting all of our lives through that story. It was the military research that has enabled a generation and generation of value for consumers. This is kind of this workforce conversation, there are opportunities now with research and grants, and this is a funding of innovation that is highly accelerated, it's happening very quickly. Can you comment on how research and the partnerships to get that funding into the universities is critical? >> Yeah, I really appreciate that and appreciate the comments of my colleagues. And it really boils down to me to partnerships, public-private partnerships, you have mentioned Northrop Grumman, but we have partnerships with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Space X, JPL, also member of an organization called Business Higher Education Forum, which brings together university presidents and CEOs of companies. There's been focused on cybersecurity and data science and I hope that we can spill into cybersecurity and space. But those partnerships in the past have really brought a lot forward. At Cal Poly, as mentioned, we've been involved with CubeSat, we've have some secure work, and we want to plan to do more of that in the future. Those partnerships are essential, not only for getting the R&D done, but also the students, the faculty, whether they're master's or undergraduate can be involved with that work, they get that real life experience, whether it's on campus or virtually now during COVID or at the location with the partner, whether it may be governmental or industry, and then they're even better equipped to hit the ground running. And of course we'd love to see more of our students graduate with clearance so that they could do some of that secure work as well. So these partnerships are absolutely critical and it's also in the context of trying to bring the best and the brightest in all demographics of California and the U.S. into this field, to really be successful. So these partnerships are essential and our goal is to grow them just like I know our other colleagues in the CSU and the UC are planning to do. >> You know, just as my age I've seen, I grew up in the eighties and in college and they're in that system's generation and the generation before me, they really kind of pioneered the space that spawned the computer revolution. I mean, you look at these key inflection points in our lives, they were really funded through these kinds of real deep research. Bong, talk about that because, you know, we're living in an age of cloud and Bezos was mentioned, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson, you got new ideas coming in from the outside, you have an accelerated clock now in terms of the innovation cycles and so you got to react differently, you guys have programs to go outside of the defense department, how important is this because the workforce that are in schools and/or folks re-skilling are out there and you've been on both sides of the table, so share your thoughts. >> No, thanks Johnny, thanks for the opportunity to respond to, and that's what, you know, you hit on the nose back in the 80's, R&D and space especially was dominated by government funding, contracts and so on, but things have changed as Steve pointed out, allow these commercial entities funded by billionaires are coming out of the woodwork, funding R&D so they're taking the lead, so what we can do within the DOD in government is truly take advantage of the work they've done. And since they're, you know, paving the way to new approaches and new way of doing things and I think we can certainly learn from that and leverage off of that, saves us money from an R&D standpoint, while benefiting from the product that they deliver. You know, within DOD, talking about workforce development, you know, we have prioritized and we have policies now to attract and retain the talent we need. I had the folks do some research and it looks like from a cybersecurity or workforce standpoint, a recent study done, I think last year in 2019, found that the cyber security workforce gap in U.S. is nearing half a million people, even though it is a growing industry. So the pipeline needs to be strengthened, getting people through, you know, starting young and through college, like Professor Armstrong indicated because we're going to need them to be in place, you know, in a period of about maybe a decade or so. On top of that, of course, is the continuing issue we have with the gap with STEM students. We can't afford not have expertise in place to support all the things we're doing within DoD, not only DoD but the commercial side as well, thank you. >> How's the gap get filled, I mean, this is, again, you've got cybersecurity, I mean, with space it's a whole other kind of surface area if you will, it's not really surface area, but it is an IOT device if you think about it, but it does have the same challenges, that's kind of current and progressive with cybersecurity. Where's the gap get filled, Steve or President Armstrong, I mean, how do you solve the problem and address this gap in the workforce? What are some solutions and what approaches do we need to put in place? >> Steve, go ahead., I'll follow up. >> Okay, thanks, I'll let you correct me. (laughter) It's a really good question, and the way I would approach it is to focus on it holistically and to acknowledge it upfront and it comes with our teaching, et cetera, across the board. And from an industry perspective, I mean, we see it, we've got to have secure systems in everything we do, and promoting this and getting students at early ages and mentoring them and throwing internships at them is so paramount to the whole cycle. And that's kind of, it really takes a focused attention and we continue to use the word focus from an NSSA perspective. We know the challenges that are out there. There are such talented people in the workforce, on the government side, but not nearly enough of them and likewise on the industry side, we could use more as well, but when you get down to it, you know, we can connect dots, you know, the aspects that Professor Armstrong talked about earlier to where you continue to work partnerships as much as you possibly can. We hope to be a part of that network, that ecosystem if you will, of taking common objectives and working together to kind of make these things happen and to bring the power, not just of one or two companies, but of our entire membership thereabout. >> President Armstrong-- >> Yeah, I would also add it again, it's back to the partnerships that I talked about earlier, one of our partners is high schools and schools Fortune, Margaret Fortune, who worked in a couple of administrations in California across party lines and education, their fifth graders all visit Cal Poly, and visit our learned-by-doing lab. And you've got to get students interested in STEM at an early age. We also need the partnerships, the scholarships, the financial aid, so the students can graduate with minimal to no debt to really hit the ground running and that's exacerbated and really stress now with this COVID induced recession. California supports higher education at a higher rate than most states in the nation, but that has brought this year for reasons all understand due to COVID. And so our partnerships, our creativity, and making sure that we help those that need the most help financially, that's really key because the gaps are huge. As my colleagues indicated, you know, half a million jobs and I need you to look at the students that are in the pipeline, we've got to enhance that. And the placement rates are amazing once the students get to a place like Cal Poly or some of our other amazing CSU and UC campuses, placement rates are like 94%. Many of our engineers, they have jobs lined up a year before they graduate. So it's just going to take a key partnerships working together and that continued partnership with government local, of course, our state, the CSU, and partners like we have here today, both Steve and Bong so partnerships is the thing. >> You know, that's a great point-- >> I could add, >> Okay go ahead. >> All right, you know, the collaboration with universities is one that we put on lot of emphasis here, and it may not be well known fact, but just an example of national security, the AUC is a national centers of academic excellence in cyber defense works with over 270 colleges and universities across the United States to educate and certify future cyber first responders as an example. So that's vibrant and healthy and something that we ought to take advantage of. >> Well, I got the brain trust here on this topic. I want to get your thoughts on this one point, 'cause I'd like to define, you know, what is a public-private partnership because the theme that's coming out of the symposium is the script has been flipped, it's a modern era, things are accelerated, you've got security, so you've got all of these things kind of happenning it's a modern approach and you're seeing a digital transformation play out all over the world in business and in the public sector. So what is a modern public-private partnership and what does it look like today because people are learning differently. COVID has pointed out, which is that we're seeing right now, how people, the progressions of knowledge and learning, truth, it's all changing. How do you guys view the modern version of public-private partnership and some examples and some proof points, can you guys share that? We'll start with you, Professor Armstrong. >> Yeah, as I indicated earlier, we've had, and I could give other examples, but Northrop Grumman, they helped us with a cyber lab many years ago that is maintained directly, the software, the connection outside it's its own unit so the students can learn to hack, they can learn to penetrate defenses and I know that that has already had some considerations of space, but that's a benefit to both parties. So a good public-private partnership has benefits to both entities and the common factor for universities with a lot of these partnerships is the talent. The talent that is needed, what we've been working on for years of, you know, the undergraduate or master's or PhD programs, but now it's also spilling into upskilling and reskilling, as jobs, you know, folks who are in jobs today that didn't exist two years, three years, five years ago, but it also spills into other aspects that can expand even more. We're very fortunate we have land, there's opportunities, we have ONE Tech project. We are expanding our tech park, I think we'll see opportunities for that and it'll be adjusted due to the virtual world that we're all learning more and more about it, which we were in before COVID. But I also think that that person to person is going to be important, I want to make sure that I'm driving across a bridge or that satellite's being launched by the engineer that's had at least some in person training to do that in that experience, especially as a first time freshman coming on campus, getting that experience, expanding it as an adult, and we're going to need those public-private partnerships in order to continue to fund those at a level that is at the excellence we need for these STEM and engineering fields. >> It's interesting people and technology can work together and these partnerships are the new way. Bongs too with reaction to the modern version of what a public successful private partnership looks like. >> If I could jump in John, I think, you know, historically DOD's had a high bar to overcome if you will, in terms of getting rapid... pulling in new companies, miss the fall if you will, and not rely heavily on the usual suspects, of vendors and the like, and I think the DOD has done a good job over the last couple of years of trying to reduce that burden and working with us, you know, the Air Force, I think they're pioneering this idea around pitch days, where companies come in, do a two-hour pitch and immediately notified of, you know, of an a award, without having to wait a long time to get feedback on the quality of the product and so on. So I think we're trying to do our best to strengthen that partnership with companies outside of the main group of people that we typically use. >> Steve, any reaction, any comment to add? >> Yeah, I would add a couple and these are very excellent thoughts. It's about taking a little gamble by coming out of your comfort zone, you know, the world that Bong and I, Bong lives in and I used to live in the past, has been quite structured. It's really about, we know what the threat is, we need to go fix it, we'll design as if as we go make it happen, we'll fly it. Life is so much more complicated than that and so it's really, to me, I mean, you take an example of the pitch days of Bong talks about, I think taking a gamble by attempting to just do a lot of pilot programs, work the trust factor between government folks and the industry folks and academia, because we are all in this together in a lot of ways. For example, I mean, we just sent a paper to the white house at their request about, you know, what would we do from a workforce development perspective and we hope to embellish on this over time once the initiative matures, but we have a piece of it for example, is a thing we call "clear for success," getting back to president Armstrong's comments so at a collegiate level, you know, high, high, high quality folks are in high demand. So why don't we put together a program that grabs kids in their underclass years, identifies folks that are interested in doing something like this, get them scholarships, have a job waiting for them that they're contracted for before they graduate, and when they graduate, they walk with an SCI clearance. We believe that can be done, so that's an example of ways in which public-private partnerships can happen to where you now have a talented kid ready to go on day one. We think those kinds of things can happen, it just gets back down to being focused on specific initiatives, giving them a chance and run as many pilot programs as you can, like pitch days. >> That's a great point, it's a good segue. Go ahead, President Armstrong. >> I just want to jump in and echo both the Bong and Steve's comments, but Steve that, you know, your point of, you know our graduates, we consider them ready day one, well they need to be ready day one and ready to go secure. We totally support that and love to follow up offline with you on that. That's exciting and needed, very much needed more of it, some of it's happening, but we certainly have been thinking a lot about that and making some plans. >> And that's a great example, a good segue. My next question is kind of re-imagining these workflows is kind of breaking down the old way and bringing in kind of the new way, accelerate all kinds of new things. There are creative ways to address this workforce issue and this is the next topic, how can we employ new creative solutions because let's face it, you know, it's not the days of get your engineering degree and go interview for a job and then get slotted in and get the intern, you know, the programs and you'd matriculate through the system. This is multiple disciplines, cybersecurity points at that. You could be smart in math and have a degree in anthropology and be one of the best cyber talents on the planet. So this is a new, new world, what are some creative approaches that's going to work for you? >> Alright, good job, one of the things, I think that's a challenge to us is, you know, somehow we got me working for, with the government, sexy right? You know, part of the challenge we have is attracting the right level of skill sets and personnel but, you know, we're competing, oftentimes, with the commercial side, the gaming industry as examples is a big deal. And those are the same talents we need to support a lot of the programs that we have in DOD. So somehow we have do a better job to Steve's point about making the work within DOD, within the government, something that they would be interested early on. So attract them early, you know, I could not talk about Cal Poly's challenge program that they were going to have in June inviting high school kids really excited about the whole idea of space and cyber security and so on. Those are some of the things that I think we have to do and continue to do over the course of the next several years. >> Awesome, any other creative approaches that you guys see working or might be an idea, or just to kind of stoke the ideation out there? Internships, obviously internships are known, but like, there's got to be new ways. >> Alright, I think you can take what Steve was talking about earlier, getting students in high school and aligning them sometimes at first internship, not just between the freshman and sophomore year, but before they enter Cal Poly per se and they're involved. So I think that's absolutely key, getting them involved in many other ways. We have an example of upskilling or work redevelopment here in the central coast, PG&E Diablo nuclear plant that is going to decommission in around 2024. And so we have a ongoing partnership to work and reposition those employees for the future. So that's, you know, engineering and beyond but think about that just in the manner that you were talking about. So the upskilling and reskilling, and I think that's where, you know, we were talking about that Purdue University, other California universities have been dealing with online programs before COVID, and now with COVID so many more Faculty were pushed into that area, there's going to be a much more going and talk about workforce development in upskilling and reskilling, the amount of training and education of our faculty across the country in virtual and delivery has been huge. So there's always a silver linings in the cloud. >> I want to get your guys' thoughts on one final question as we end the segment, and we've seen on the commercial side with cloud computing on these highly accelerated environments where, you know, SAS business model subscription, and that's on the business side, but one of the things that's clear in this trend is technology and people work together and technology augments the people components. So I'd love to get your thoughts as we look at a world now, we're living in COVID, and Cal Poly, you guys have remote learning right now, it's at the infancy, it's a whole new disruption, if you will, but also an opportunity enable new ways to encollaborate, So if you look at people and technology, can you guys share your view and vision on how communities can be developed, how these digital technologies and people can work together faster to get to the truth or make a discovery, hire, develop the workforce, these are opportunities, how do you guys view this new digital transformation? >> Well, I think there's huge opportunities and just what we're doing with this symposium, we're filming this on Monday and it's going to stream live and then the three of us, the four of us can participate and chat with participants while it's going on. That's amazing and I appreciate you, John, you bringing that to this symposium. I think there's more and more that we can do. From a Cal Poly perspective, with our pedagogy so, you know, linked to learn by doing in-person will always be important to us, but we see virtual, we see partnerships like this, can expand and enhance our ability and minimize the in-person time, decrease the time to degree, enhance graduation rate, eliminate opportunity gaps for students that don't have the same advantages. So I think the technological aspect of this is tremendous. Then on the upskilling and reskilling, where employees are all over, they can re be reached virtually, and then maybe they come to a location or really advanced technology allows them to get hands on virtually, or they come to that location and get it in a hybrid format. So I'm very excited about the future and what we can do, and it's going to be different with every university, with every partnership. It's one size does not fit all, There's so many possibilities, Bong, I can almost imagine that social network that has a verified, you know, secure clearance. I can jump in, and have a little cloak of secrecy and collaborate with the DOD possibly in the future. But these are the kind of crazy ideas that are needed, your thoughts on this whole digital transformation cross-pollination. >> I think technology is going to be revolutionary here, John, you know, we're focusing lately on what we call visual engineering to quicken the pace of the delivery capability to warfighter as an example, I think AI, Machine Language, all that's going to have a major play in how we operate in the future. We're embracing 5G technologies, and the ability for zero latency, more IOT, more automation of the supply chain, that sort of thing, I think the future ahead of us is very encouraging, I think it's going to do a lot for national defense, and certainly the security of the country. >> Steve, your final thoughts, space systems are systems, and they're connected to other systems that are connected to people, your thoughts on this digital transformation opportunity. >> Such a great question and such a fun, great challenge ahead of us. Echoing my colleagues sentiments, I would add to it, you know, a lot of this has, I think we should do some focusing on campaigning so that people can feel comfortable to include the Congress to do things a little bit differently. You know, we're not attuned to doing things fast, but the dramatic, you know, the way technology is just going like crazy right now, I think it ties back to, hoping to convince some of our senior leaders and what I call both sides of the Potomac river, that it's worth taking this gamble, we do need to take some of these things you know, in a very proactive way. And I'm very confident and excited and comfortable that this is going to be a great time ahead and all for the better. >> You know, I always think of myself when I talk about DC 'cause I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a political person, but I always say less lawyers, more techies than in Congress and Senate, so (laughter)I always get in trouble when I say that. Sorry, President Armstrong, go ahead. >> Yeah, no, just one other point and Steve's alluded to this and Bong did as well, I mean, we've got to be less risk averse in these partnerships, that doesn't mean reckless, but we have to be less risk averse. And also, as you talk about technology, I have to reflect on something that happened and you both talked a bit about Bill Britton and his impact on Cal Poly and what we're doing. But we were faced a few years ago of replacing traditional data, a data warehouse, data storage, data center and we partnered with AWS and thank goodness, we had that in progress and it enhanced our bandwidth on our campus before COVID hit, and with this partnership with the digital transformation hub, so there's a great example where we had that going. That's not something we could have started, "Oh COVID hit, let's flip that switch." And so we have to be proactive and we also have to not be risk-averse and do some things differently. That has really salvaged the experience for our students right now, as things are flowing well. We only have about 12% of our courses in person, those essential courses and I'm just grateful for those partnerships that I have talked about today. >> And it's a shining example of how being agile, continuous operations, these are themes that expand the space and the next workforce needs to be built. Gentlemen, thank you very much for sharing your insights, I know Bong, you're going to go into the defense side of space in your other sessions. Thank you gentlemen, for your time, for a great session, I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you all. I'm John Furey with The Cube here in Palo Alto, California covering and hosting with Cal Poly, the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, thanks for watching. (bright atmospheric music)

(energetic funk music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you remote from our Boston-area studio in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and really happy to welcome to the program, actually, from down the road from where I'm sitting, but testing our coast-to-coast live-to-air remote capabilities, of course, everybody is working from home or things like that, Rob Strechay, CUBE alumni and friend of the program. Rob, it's great to see you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me on. Really glad to help you guys out and get on here and talk about what's goin' on, 'cause this remote thing is definitely going to be the wave for the next month or two, at least. >> Yeah, so, Rob, you spend a lot of your time talking to companies about strategic planning and the first thing for you is, in the industry, sometimes we talk about these black swan events, the things that, you know, we had our plans in place, a lot of companies either had their 2020 sales kickoffs or were getting ready for them, and all of a sudden, basically, everything that you were planning for, let's stop and re-evaluate, because coronavirus stuff is hitting, economic conditions globally are being impacted. What's the first thing that you tell people when you're advising when something completely unexpected and far-reaching, that we might not have full information on, hits? >> Yeah, I think there is, it's a great way to target and say, "Okay, where can I trim the fat, "but at the same time, where do I not "want to over-rotate or panic?" And I think that's a big piece of it, is that you don't want to go and panic too much and say, "Hey, we have to throw everything out." I think there's an opportunity, and there's definitely opportunities, but if you're looking at the different verticals that are being hit by this, if you look at things like healthcare, we have HIMSS that's supposed to be going on this week that was canceled, and all of the medical professionals and IT professionals at those hospitals are pretty much on lockdown. So if you're selling into that vertical, maybe then it is time to panic a little bit, or find another vertical, or understand how you go cross-vertical, in a way. So you have to evaluate what's going on, but don't panic, don't over-react to these types of events. >> So, Rob, you've worked with a lot of companies that provide disaster recovery. In the IT space, it's, "How do I deal with a failure?" One of the things that I know a lot of companies look at is when things go wrong, when there is some natural disaster or, like what we're having today, is, "Do I jump in and say, 'Hey, we can offer things'?" You see a lot of the companies that are providing remote services, take your Google, Microsoft, Zooms, are, "Hey, here's a free tier that you're able to use," but how much do you jump on this as a marketer, or how much do you just say, "Hey, we're here for you, "if there's anything we can do to help there," but you don't want to be seen as ambulance chasing or trying to profit off of some widespread disasters? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly it. The ambulance chasing part, you have to use a little common sense when you're going into these, and I think that goes a long way. You don't want to be seen as ambulance chasing, and, for instance, some of the small- to medium-size companies I've been watching in the tech and talking to some of their teams, they're putting out information, saying, "Hey, we're still up." If they're shipping hardware, "Hey, we're "still within our lead times. "We've built out enough capacity prior to this "and we'll be able to ship within 14 days of an order." So, reassuring their customers that they can get the kit out to them. At the same time, they're saying, "Hey, here is "what we're seeing from our customers, "that, if you're having trouble even once we do "ship it, you don't have somebody on site "to take it in, so we can offer services "to help you with that. So, helping them do staff augmentation or do things in a different manner, I see that as not the ambulance chasing aspect of it. I think if you're marketing into it, it's a little tough when you say, "Hey, well, "I'm the best remote desktop thing going, "and everybody can work from home," and trying to say, "And by the way, you have to buy into this "particular tier to get your entire company going." I think, again, you can look at, how do you share, maybe, the pain or share a loss leader going in, and look to build that. If you have confidence in your product, you'll get them on board, and they'll continue to do this, and they'll continue to move forward with it, because, like you said, I don't think anybody was necessarily prepared for a quarantine of an entire country, like Italy, or something of that nature. >> Yeah, the remote work is definitely a very hot topic. That doesn't necessarily mean that today is the day to start the 5,000-person virtual desktop project. >> Exactly. >> Because we know how long these things have a lead time. Rob, I want to ask you, actually, when you talk to customers, you've spent a lot of time in your career talking to customers, one of the buzzwords we've had in the industry is digital transformation. One of the big outcomes of digital transformation is to be able to react and move fast and be more agile. So I just wanted to get your take on what you're hearing from customers, where, of course, it's a spectrum, but what they're doing, and is this something that they should they should put on hold, is it something is going to help them prepare for things that they weren't necessarily thinking about? >> I think it's the latter, right? I think you're really, I would push in on digital transformation at this point in time, because you're not going to know what's going to break until you get into these situations, and I would say that we've seen a couple in the financial industry as we've gone through the volatility in the markets where they've pushed in on digital transformation, or there are some startups that have really pushed in on doing things in a new way from the traditional financial services companies, and they've found out, hey, stuff is breaking, and they're going to pay some fines to the SEC. And some of the traditional ones that have their digital transformation projects, they've bumped into this same exact thing, where they were having outages. So it's not just the new startups, it's some of the older, more established players that are finding out that, hey, you don't know until you get into that war, you don't know until you engage that enemy, per se, as that black swan event, what's going to break. So push in, I would almost double down on it, and say, "Listen, this is going to be "the way that helps us smooth these out. "As we can distribute things out, "we don't have, necessarily, one data center "where everybody has to go to, "and now that entire county is locked down, "or there's the National Guard surrounding it "and you can't get to it." >> Yeah, Rob, I'm wondering if you have any commentary on just the general dispersion of the workforce. You've worked for a variety of sizes of company, you've been a remote worker, you've worked for companies where you're far separated from the headquarters. Any kind of tips or recommendations from your background that you'd have for people and today? >> Yeah, I think, again, for the people who haven't done it before, it is an adjustment. You actually find that you work more hours being at home than you would in a natural, an office. I think that also, how do you keep your sanity when you're really distant from people, and how do you keep that connection and that culture? I definitely think that these solutions, like Teams and Slack and what have you, and Zoom and Webex, have come a long way to help connect people, and I think it's really leveraging those tools around you to have that connection. And I think that we've seen some of the announcements of people about putting out guidelines of, "Hey, here's how we have a remote workforce." And I've seen, actually, more, and it's been a trend out on the West Coast for a little while, where their engineering teams, the dev teams, are very diverse and very disparate because you can't find everybody in the Valley anymore. So how, maybe some of the people are in Washington, maybe they're in Oregon, and California, you have some on the East Coast, or even over in the Ukraine, for instance. Trying to create events to bring everybody together, doing more outreach as an executive to the entire company, becomes critical because sharing of that information is what people want to understand. They want to feel connected back into what's going on at what they perceive as corporate. >> Yeah, so some great commentary there, Rob. Yeah, absolutely, we've seen plenty of the software companies out there that have not only tooling, but best practices on how to do this, as well as, through social media, I've seen a lot of blog posts, things on Twitter and the like, yeah, and some things that you don't think about as much. I'm not regularly a remote worker, but, right, make sure you take time to eat, make sure you've blocked out the hours that you're going to have meals with family. And something I always noticed is, "Oh my gosh, I might spend an entire day "like this on conference calls (Rob laughs) "or sitting and working," as opposed to, if you're in the office, you get up, you walk around, you talk to some people, and it's like, you need to make sure you stretch (laughs) a little bit-- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Because otherwise, you can end up sitting for eight hours, and that's really not good. >> Rob: (laughs) Yeah, definitely need those mental breaks. >> Yeah, all right, Rob, I want to give you the final word. What's, let's kind of put beyond some of the things that are right in front of us right now, give you kind of an open technology space. What's interesting you out in the market here in the early parts of 2020? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot of very interesting things going on with AI, and I think people are finally starting to get past the hype of "AI this, AI that" and trying to look at what the use cases are behind AI, and how that's really going to help reinvent some of the technology that we have used. I kind of always say that everything old is new again. But I think there's going to be some great new tech coming out that will help enable these types of digital transformations, and I see a lot of new companies approaching AI and not just saying, "Hey, I'm an AI company," but, "Here's the use case that I'm really fulfilling." And I think that's showing some of the maturity, I think that's going to help as this artificial intelligence or machine learning really starts to push in and help people become more operationally efficient, so maybe then we can start to realize some more of cloud, and more of this, "Hey, I had this data center, "now I am moving everything to the cloud," versus, "Well, I'm going to move it, "but I'm going to lift and shift, "and I still have the operational legacy." >> Yeah, absolutely. If I can do a little compare and contrast, back in the big-data world, everybody used to always complain that we had the best minds in our business working on how we could optimize people clicking on an ad, (Rob laughs) and when I look at AI, there's a lot of tech for good out there, there's amazing outcomes, there's things that it can really be transformational. All right, Rob, I know that you've been doing a little bit more writing, you're posting on LinkedIn some of your strategy. If people want to learn more and keep an eye on what you're doing, what would you recommend? >> Yeah, I would say go onto my Twitter feed, @RealStrech, and-or go to my LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me there. It's Rob Strechay, you can find me there pretty easily. There's not many Strechays in the world. So feel free to connect with me and view my articles there, and really, this has been a lot of fun. >> All right, well, always good to get two boys from Parsippany, New Jersey, to get together, talk about technology, and share it with the community. Rob, great to catch up with you. >> Thanks, Stu, take care. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, everybody, and thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (energetic funk music)

>> from the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering Cooper inspired 2019. Brought to You by Cooper. >> Welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin on the ground at Koopa Inspired 19 from Las Vegas. Very excited to welcome one of Cooper's spend centers from the USO acquaintance, senior director of procurement and contract management. Hey, welcome. >> Thank you. I'm glad to be here. >> Yeah, so this is one of the things that I really appreciate it with. All of the tech conference is that we go to on the Q, which is many, Many a year is when vendors like Cooper really share their success is through the voices and the stories of their successful customers. You got called out yesterday during general session today. There's a big cardboard cutout of you behind us there. But one of the things also that I find intriguing is looking at older organizations, and USO is 77 years young. We think of older organizations challenging Thio maneuver that in this digital era and really be able to transform the business so that you could d'oh, what the mission of the U. S. It was, which is to help men and women in our U. S. Armed forces from the time that they enter to the time that they transition back to civilian life. Talked a little bit about us. So what your role is in for cumin and then we'll talk about how you're achieving these great things. >> Well, I've been with us for four years, almost four years. When I first interviewed for this position with my boss, the VP controller, I asked her if they had a secure to pay solution. She said No again when I was hired for this position, My, you know, my goal was to get the organization automated. They were processing everything by paper. All the requisitioning was being processed by paper. It would take for seven seven 10 days. It's for a requisition to be approved because it would literally be something printed out and move from desk to desk, desk on approvals and on the back end for invoicing would occur the same filling out a cover sheet. Everything was printed out, processed manually, so that was kind of my first project when I started and my position was new, procurement had been under the director of canning operation. So, um came. It was just a small piece of it. So they made a decision After he left to create my position on DSO I. Again. That was my goal initially when I started. So So it was going through an R P process, looking, looking our requirements and then selecting vendor gets the best value to the USO, which was Coop up. And Cooper is what I think we all love about. It is it's so customizable, and the USO has a lot of, ah, a lot of different requirements in our barbecue elements. From, you know, we've entertainment tours to our programs, care packages we send out to the military. Our operations are USO Center's construction projects, our development campaigns for on line and direct mail. So there are a lot of different requirements. I really work with each department and kind of setting up those requirements, and Cooper was able to do that for us. We were able to customize a lot of it, But for us, the innovation part is really thinking outside the box because >> tough to do 77 year old organization, right, especially one that has paper everywhere. You guys air now 90.4% paper. Yes, with Cooper, that's a massive Yes, it's cultural change. It's a >> huge and it took again. Another thing. When I interviewed Waas, I interviewed with the CFO as well and I said If you don't support me, I will not be successful. So they have been very supportive. My supervisor, the CFO, the entire organization CEO. It's been extreme. He loves Cooper, so loves the app in improving a breathing invoices requisitions. So it was really that that communication, the socialization training because it was a huge cultural shift and some were embraced it. It was a little tougher for others moving. But eventually you move in line because that is, you know, that's the new process for us as an organization. So it's it's become very successful. We're moving towards new modules contracts, Clm expends sourcing. So we're really expanding the group A picture at us. Oh, >> so what would you say before you came on board when there was so much paper floating around everywhere? You can imagine the security risk of all these, you know, personal information or what have you lying around on someone's desk? What waas The percent, if you could guess visibility into where the U. S. I was spending money prior to bringing on Cooper versus what is it today? >> Uh, extremely small percentage would have been a very small. I mean, we just had a you know, we operate on our European system. Is Great Plains pretty clunky? Not, You know, it's It's hard to see the visibility. Now. It's 100% visibility. We see all of all of the requisitioning occurring overseas. You know, we have centers all over the world, and they all have access to Cooper now because they have to submit requisitions through Cooper. And so we now have 100% visibility. And for our reporting, you know, able to pull all that information and we've got controls in place gave us the ability to put some controls in place and our approval work flows and making sure that contracts were reviewed before budgets air approved, etcetera. A lot of those things were able to set those controls in place in >> that control. Word that you bring up is spot on. We've been talking about that for the last couple of days, and it's the same when we were talking with Suzie Orman earlier, who was one of the key nodes. And when she talks about personal finance, it's sort of the same thing. We all as individuals, whether we're consumers, you know, in our personal lives, buying whenever we want from anything dot com to being buyers or managers of even lines of business. Within whatever company we work for. We need to have that picture that control and control is really that kind of accountability and that awareness. Are we managing everything appropriately? Are there other parts of the business that are doing the same thing that there may be getting the same service is at a better price, and we're we should know that right, but without having that visibility will be able to control of this process is it's an inhibitor to any business being able to transform digitally and be competitive and right to really get back to your core >> mission. Exactly. And that's what's helping you know us with the control way are a 501 c three. So we need tohave that visibility on dhe. Make sure that our donor dollars are being spent wisely, and this enabled enables us to do that enables toe have that that total visibility and making sure those controls are in place. >> Actually, speaking of donor dollars, has this actually been a facilitator of actually being able to increase donations? Because the donors now have this much easier transaction process that can imagine that would be a positive impact there. >> Well, I mean that this is more for our procurements. Mean, Coop is kind of more for our actual procurement. What it does do is it does create process savings and avoidance savings, which we can reinvest in, you know, in our program. Right. So that's where we're seeing it. That's where Steve always seeing it. We've communicated that to him, and then we're also able to provide arse CFO with reporting tools. So we create. We pull all this information from Cooper through reports, and there were able to create a spreadsheet, and he can see how we spend is an organization. You know how we spend in commodities, How where are unbudgeted, you know, kind of get a total of much I budgeted we have for for a specific period of time. So we're able to see all this kind of information. He conceal this in kind of information on one spreadsheet that we created through all the reports that way >> in Crete. >> So I want to get your perspectives on the changing role of the chief procurement officer and the chief financial officer. You know, now they have the opportunity to leverage technology, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to be able to get that visibility and that control, but also be former strategic and really drive top line bought online for their business. Your perspective on this the last few years alone and how were you able to help a 77 year old organization like us so embraced the opportunities that these emerging technologies can deliver? >> Well, I think one key is as because our our organization is all over the world. And then there are centers that could be, you know, roll. And they, you know, they it's the whole vendor presence and the amount of vendors that we as an organization, do bring on. And some of them it's totally understandable where some of them they do need to bring on based on, you know, their availability. But what I'm trying to do, what Cooper has helped me try to do with Cooper advantages to try to leverage our volume organizational volume that was not occurring previously. I think people were just, you know, when the new defender they brought it on because we have a lot of events, you know, supplies for the centers, et cetera. So really trying to, strategically, as an organization to be able to work with the region's on where can we find synergies to kind of consolidating leverage our values for Henderson with Cooper work, we've been able to do that. We can see the span where it's occurring, kind of all the duplications that are occurring. So that's where I'm seeing a bit opportunity and trying to work. >> One of the coolest things about what you guys are doing in procurement with Cooper is this is affecting human lives. Give us a little bit of an overview of what you guys were able to facilitate with Hurricane hearty. Wish struck Houston just about two years ago. I loved that story that >> those kind of those spur of the moment emergency type requisitions that we get and were able to those get processed a lot quicker when when we have group as opposed to previously the way they had processed. It was very labor intensive manually, verbally instead of being able to see it in. You know what's great about the requisitioning piece of it is the comments kind of audit that people can see in all the conversations. So those types of requests that are considered emergencies, they can go a lot sooner on so we can get those service's or the goods out to to that particular project. So that's what we're able to do with that. That particular one is well, being able to support the National Guard and during the Hurricane Harvey >> and accelerate things that really based on the data that you can see, I really need to have acceleration on all the action. >> I mean distant just to our programs team. They support the care packages that we send to the military. Now that we have coop in place, we use 1/3 party fulfillment center. When they receive the product, the receipts are automatically fed into Cooper and applied against the purchase orders, and then they're approved a lot quicker, So then they can receive kicked, tip the product and ship it out overseas because we get. These are based on requests. The military bases have requested to have this particular product being sent over. So this turns the process is cut in half to get the care packages out to the millet. >> That's awesome. Getting care packages to the troops 50% Bastard is outstanding. Last question for you, Rick. Some of the things that Cooper has announced in the last day and 1/2 what excites you about the direction that this company is going in >> for me? The constant changing, I mean, and I was not in the military, so I'm way moved around a lot. I was when I was growing up. I adopt to change a very quickly, but understands some people don't write quickly, but it's bettering themselves, finding the operative, listening to the customer and really making those enhancements based on customer feedback. And I think it helps with the community intelligence that we talk with, you know, with the communities and find out. What are you doing? How how are you doing this? Because a lot of companies will say, Well, I have specific requirements and a lot of them are pretty similar. If people talk, you know, community talks. So that's kind of that's I like getting together and again meeting other, you know, people, customers. And so it's Yeah, it's pretty exciting. >> I like what? How tender this morning, you know, showed the word community and said, Really, it's communication and unity, and you just articulated that beautifully. Listen to the customers. Get the synergies from them. That's why we should. Any software business should be developing right soccer. So thank you so much for joining me on the Cube today, sharing the big impact that you guys are making at the USO charity. Near and dear to my heart. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much >> for your acquaintance. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Cooper inspired 19. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is Commvault GO, and you are watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program, this is a user conference, so we love digging in with the users. I've got David Mccurdy, who's the CTO from the great state of Colorado. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here. It's a great event, I'm happy to be here. We're here to evangelize the great work Colorado's been doing, with Commvault, and just in general. >> Alright great, so we're from Chicago, Boston, and Colorado, Denver. So we're not going to talk football, but tell us a little bit about, you know, you're CTO, love talking to the CTOs. What's your technology charter? Give us a little bit of the thumbnail, as to kind of, you know, what divisions you support, how many people you have, that sort of thing. >> Yeah, so the way the state's set up is I work underneath the Governor. We're an office of the Governor, so it's actually the Governor's Office of Information Technology. We support all the traditional branches of government, that people think of, in terms of agencies, like the Department of Health and Human Services, Medicaid, Department of Corrections, DMV, Department of Revenue. So all the big agencies all fall under our department. And then about 800 of the 900 staff inside of OIT report to me directly. And that's all the infrastructure and application stacks, all the strategy. Chief Data office, Chief Transformation office. A lot of responsibility, lots of fun, lots of long weekends, but it's been a good row for the last four years. >> David before we dig into some of the data protection stuff, I love, you talk about innovation. You talk about technology transformation. First of all, IT in general, and government specifically, often get, you know, labeled with the, oh well they do things the old way, and they've got no budgets, and they never make any changes. I've had some great case studies. I've talked with people in roles like yours, so give us a little bit of, what's it like to be working under state government this day and age, with 2018, with technology. >> It's very exciting. It's very exciting to work for Colorado specifically. I don't know if it translates to all other states. I've talked to other CIOs and CTOs around the country, but we have a very supportive governor. He just announced his campaign to run for president, maybe, we'll see how that goes. But outside of that, he's very innovative. He took a business trip to Israel, came back, and set up a cyber security lab in the state, because he thinks there's a major need for more cyber security and those disciplines. In Colorado, today, we're running negative 14% unemployment for security jobs, so it's just, huge opportunity. Outside of that, my boss, Suma Nallapati, is state CIO. Right underneath him, is all about innovation. How can we make Colorado number one in everything we do. And that's really the goal. What the governor said, the way he talks about technology, he wants technology to be elegant. That's not word you hear a lot. But when you think about that and apply it to technology, there's a very specific outcome you're trying to get out of that. >> Alright, well David, at this show, we're all talking about data. And everybody's, you know, it's what can I do with my data? And how do I make sure that things don't get wrong? Well, anybody that's been in the IT for a while is, Murphy's Law sometimes does play out. So you've actually had a couple of experiences. Some good things you've learned, but some challenges that you had, maybe share with us what happened. >> Yeah, I mean one of the things I'm here to talk about is we kicked off an initiative called Backup Colorado. And what it was is, it was consolidating all the backup and recovery services for all those agencies I just named, plus some more, right. Monster project, monster task. It was all born out of a major data failure the state had. We were a fairly new organization. We were immature. We were still running things in a siloed environment. Most of the country, most large organizations have gone down the IT consolidation path. We were a few years down the road, and we got hit with a major data loss event. And it was specific to marijuana data, which makes some people smile, some people frown, but it's a very interesting topic. It wasn't interesting to lose customer data though. I don't care if you're a private organization, or a public organization, this was real data loss. And it highlighted the need for a focused approach to solving those problems. So we went about just kind of transforming the whole space. First, put a proposal on the table. Going to the general assembly. Going to the Governor saying, this is what we need to do. They signed off on it, and then we implemented it, right. We got tens if not hundreds of people together around the state. We coordinated agencies. We got people on board that didn't want to be on board. They liked the silo approach. They liked their agencies doing their own thing. But you can't do anything right 16 different ways. You don't have to do it one way, but it can't be 16. But we took a standardized approach, and we worked with Commvault as our partner to deploy a complete backup and recovery system for the state. Highly successful project. Rolled out, standardized. Everything you could want. While we're doing that, we are completely changing our application and infrastructure stacks. We are consolidating all of our servers into three data centers in the state. We're bursting into the cloud. We're replatforming on software, the service. You know, all those. I'm responsible for each one of those stacks. My guidance was just go and change the world, right. In a very non-senile way, we went out there, and we were like, how can we do this thoughtfully. How can we do it, but push, blaze new trails, that type of thing. And the story that I've been sharing is, we got to see the end results of that. What kicked it off, was a public disaster, but the state was hit with a ransomware attack. Very targeted, very coordinated. They hit one of our larger agencies. We had good security in place, but there's always stuff that can happen, as you've kind of eluded to. And because of this project, because of the team coordinated effort, because of the technology, because of the stuff we were leveraging, we were able to bring that agency back whole. Which a lot of organizations cannot say. A lot of the technologies cannot say, with as many systems that were impacted for the time period they were, to bring that agency back whole, and actually have the executive director of that agency, doing very similar conversations as we're doing now. How can dots around the country, roll out a plan very similar to this? >> Well David, people process technology, you guys are changing processes, you're changing technology, extremely disruptive. Talk about the impact on your people. What mindset, or what changes did you have to make organization wide. 800 people was a lot of people to get in line. What did you start, what did you do? What was successful, well not so much. >> Well first I had to get my customers on board, right. And compelling events helped bring customers on board. I don't think that's the best way of doing it, but always leverage a compelling event. In this case, we had a compelling event. We had the onus from our executive branch and a legislative branch. So we had the hammer if we needed it to get it done. The team actually came together. We ran a very successful RFP. We baked off competitors in the space. And it was a beautiful thing to see all my server engineers, all my desktop guys, all my database guys and gals comin' in and working together to make this project happen. I didn't have to sell them on it. They came to me and said, we think this is the best technology stack for the state. When I recognized, when I heard them, they all got on board and we were able to roll it out. And so I think it was that team approach, not top down, but you know, let's all come together and find the right thing for the state. I think that was why it was so successful. It was a team approach, and we had executive buy in, we were able to get it done. >> You talked about how Commvault helped with that transition, 16 different backup products, if the state was like any other organization, there's at least 15, 16 different backup products, people like what they use. And transitioning to something new requires training, support. How did Commvault help you guys in that transition? >> You know, they were a great partner, all the way through the RFP process, to bringing it in and doing training. We have a big thing at the state, the technology stack, we do luncheon learns, so there's lots of training. Commvault brought a lot of resources. We had engineers specifically assigned from Commvault to help with the project, the roll out, and then the transition. So a very effective partner, in terms of helping us along the way. It never helps to have that kind of hammer, as I said before, to push it forward. I really couldn't have asked for anything more. I spoke a little bit about this the other day. When we had this compelling event with the ransomware this year, I picked up the phone, and I got an answer right away. And I said we're going to need you once again. And they showed up. Commvault showed up. The great thing was, we didn't need them, right. My engineers had an effective turnover and training. They got the initial alerts before anybody did, before any of our security groups, anybody, Commvault detected this ransomware really before any of my tool suites because of the way it came into our organization. Which was kind of cool. But just in general, a great partnership. They were there all the way through the recovery of CDOT as support for our team. Really weren't needed just because of the effective transition. >> That's an interesting point. You talk about, you would think it would be the security tool that would be alerting you. Commvault and companies like it, sit in an interesting position. You've got data, you've got metadata. That surprise you that that was the tool that helped alert you in the first? >> Shocked me, shocked me, right. I mean we spent a lot of money building stacks of tools to protect the state, and very effective tools. There's nothing against those tool suites specifically. We were actually rolling out another tool that week that ultimately would've prevented it. That being said, stuff happens and the way this ransomware came in, bypassed that visibility. But Commvault, looking at our backups every night, taking differentials of 'em, saw encrypted files on disk, sent out an alert. The teams knew exactly what to do. Got executives on the phone. Got security ops on the phone. And it kicked off from there, so yeah, shocked, you know, happy that we caught it. Not the way I would have wanted, but that's why you've got layers of security. That's why you've got layers of teams to support each other. >> So specifies, outside of the support capability that Commvault provided and one, helping you guys get alerted to the event, and then the support reacting to the event, talk to us. What did they take to recover from the event? Was this a multi-month thing? Multi-week, multi-hour? How did you guys recover and how much did you recover? >> It took us a little over a month to recover. It's actually a great conversation maybe for another time. But building a structure in an open attack. Like when you have a coordinated resources from other countries, trying to do the United States, or the state of Colorado harm, the first thing you're going to do is make sure they're outside of your environment. So for about the first two weeks, we had everybody from the National Guard to the Defense Department there, helping us evaluate the situation. Getting it to a place where we felt comfortable bringing the department back up. Once we reached that point, and there is never a clear line in the sand. There's a role for the CIO and the CTO in that place to say, hey, now's time we've done everything we can and then we've very methodically started bringing desktops online and servers online. And Commvault played a huge role in that as well as some other vendors. But, in all, we restored about 192 servers. Some were infected, some weren't, but just from a sensibility stake, we wanted to go back to clean backups, clean restores, a place where the customer felt comfortable. We were able to do it in a way that there was no data loss to the customer or at least manage data loss. Meaning, in some cases, their systems, they wanted to go really back on, because their data didn't change very much in there. My biggest pinpoint in this whole process is, I want to bring that department up much faster, right. There's two sides that you're looking at: How do you protect the department in the short term? And how do you protect them in the long term? So I had to look at both sides of it. Very interesting experience. Don't wish it on anybody. >> David, last thing I want to ask is, the role of data, how do you, inside the state of Colorado, look at the role of data and the changing role of data? And if you look at Commvault, they are really expanding where they play. They're playing in multi-cloud. They've got artificial intelligence helping them. They're helping with governance and compliance. How do you see them lined up? Where do you see your relationship going with them in the future? >> Well, obviously, I like to stay with partners that take care of me, so there's obviously an affinity there, in terms of how they've helped the state in the last year. The data is really two parts, the agencies data, and then the resident, and the customers of the state of Colorado's data, right. So you first got to look at who owns and who is the steward of the data. And as IT for the state, our role is protecting that data, both in the short and long term. But as it becomes more and more of an asset, and we all know data is an asset today, it's almost the most critical asset. So protecting it is just as important as how you're going to innovate with it. So we are very excited about how we're going to be leveraging data in the future. Some of the issues we're talking about, the Department of Transportation wants to take their data for Road X and change how people drive. You know, very similar as to how you may use Waze and stuff like that. The DOTs around the country want to take that data and leverage it all over the place. So you're not only taking an asset that was leveraged for a very different purpose 10 years ago and completely transforming industries, you're doing that all across state government, right. The impetus, the need for protecting it, using it, I'm very excited with where they're going and how they look at data, Commvault specifically. I had a great conversation with our CTO last year about, I'm storing all this data on FASTDISK anyway. Why can't I use this as a data lake? How can I get metadata for your customers? How can I take this in places where maybe the founders of this company didn't even envision 20 years ago. It's very exciting how they're looking at the technology and where they can take it. AI is one of my focus areas for the year. I'm going to listen to everybody's pitch and I'm going to choose the right ones, because I do think it's transformative. If they can do it correctly and ultimately lessen the burden on IT, that's what we're looking for, right. That's what AI should bring to the table, is the ability for IT to do more with less. So that's what we're looking for and I'm excited what they're going to do with it. >> Alright, well David Mccarthy, we really appreciate you joining us, sharing your story. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Commvault GO in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE. >> David: Thank you. (lively tech music)