>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube. Covering Servicenow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by Servicenow. >> Welcome back to Orlando everybody this is the Cube the leader in live tech coverage, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, and we are here for our fifth year at Knowledge this is Knowledge 17, Sean Convery's here he's the general manager of the security business unit at Servicenow, an area that I'm very excited about Shawn. Welcome back to the Cube, it's good to see you again. >> It's great to be here, thanks for having me. >> So let's see you guys launched last year at RSA we talked in depth at Servicenow Knowledge about what you guys were doing. You quoted a stat the other day which I thought was pretty substantial at the financial analyst meeting, 1.1 million job shortfall in cyber. That is huge. That's the problem that you're trying to address. >> Well it's unbelievable, I was- you know we were just doing the keynote earlier this morning and I was recounting, most people in security get in it because they have some, you know desire to save the world right? To to- they watched a movie, they read a book, they're really excited and motivated to come in- >> What's was yours, was it comic book, was it- >> It was, uh, War Games with Matthew Broderick, I was 10 years old which totally dates me, movie came out in '83 so nobody has to look it up. (laughing) And you know I was just, you know blown away by this idea of using technology and being able to change things and the trouble is analysts show up to work and they don't have that experience, and nobody's expected, but they're not even close right? They wind up being told okay here's all this potential phishing email, we'd like you to spend 20 minutes on each one trying to figure out if it actually is phishing. And there's 600 messages. So tell me when you're done and I'll give you the next 600 messages. And so it's not motivating >> Not as sexy as War Games. >> It's not as sexy as War Games exactly. And then the CICO's say, well I can't even afford the people who are well trained. So I hire people right out of school, it takes me six months to train them, they're productive for six months, and then they leave for double their salary. So you wind up with a, sort of a 50 percent productivity rate out of you new hires, and it's just, it's just a recipe for for the past right? You know, we need to think more about how we, how we change things. >> So let's sort of remind our audience in terms of security, you're not building firewalls, you're not, you know competing with a lot of the brand name securities like MacAfee or FireEye, or Palo Alto networks, you're complementing them. Talk about where you fit in the security ecosystem. >> Sure. So if you boil down the entire security market, you can really think about protection and detection as the main two areas, so protection think of a firewall, an antivirus, something that stops something bad, and think of detection as uh, I'm going to flag potentially bad things that I think are bad but I'm not to certain that I want to absolutely stop them. And so what that does is it creates a queue of behavior that needs to be analyzed today by humans, right? So this is where the entire SIM market and everything else was created to aggregate all those alerts. So once you've got the alerts, you know awesome, but you've got to sort of walk thought them and process them. So what Servicenow has focused on is the response category. And visualization, aggregation is nice, but will be much better is to provide folks the mechanism to actually respond to what's happening. Both from a vulnerability standpoint, and from an incidence standpoint. And this is really where Servicenow's expertise shines because we know workflow, we know automation, we know about system of action, right? So that's our pedigree and IT frankly is several years ahead of where the security industry is right now until we can leverage that body of expertise not just with Servicenow, but with now all of our partners to help accelerate the transformation for security team. >> So I got to cut right to the chase. So last year we talked about- and of course every time we get a briefing for instance from a security vendor, where- we're given a stat that is on average it takes 200 sometimes you've seen as high as 300 but let's say 200 days to detect an incident then the answer is so buy our prevention, or our detection solution. >> Yeah. >> I asked you last year and I tweeted out, you know a couple days ago is, has Servicenow affected that? Can you affect- I asked you last year, can you affect that, can you compress that timeframe, you said "we think so." Um what kind of progress have you made? >> Sure so you have to remember about that 200 day stat that that is a industry average across all incidents right? So the Ponemon institute pulls this data together once a year, they survey over 300 companies, and they found that I think it's 206 days is the average right now. And so to identify an- a breach, and then another 75 days to contain it. So together it's nine months, which is a frighteningly long period of time. And so what we wanted to do is measure across all of our productions security operations customers what is their average time to identify and time to contain. So it turns out, it's so small we have to convert it to hours. It's 29 hours to identify, 33 hours to contain, which actually is a 160x improvement in identification, and a 50x improvement in containment. And so we're really excited about that. But you know, frankly, I'm not satisfied. You know, I'm still measuring in hours. Granted we've moved from months to hours, but I want it from hours, to minutes, to seconds, and really, you know we can show how we can do that in minutes today with certain types of attacks. But, there's still the long breaches. >> That's a dramatic reduction, you know I know it's, that 206 whatever it is is an average of averages. >> For sure. >> But the delta between what you're seeing and your customer base is not explainable by, oh well the Servicenow customers just happen to be better at it or lucky year, it's clearly an impact that you're having. >> Well sure, let's be you know as honest as we can be here right? The, you know the people who are adopting security operations are forward thinking security customers so you would expect that they're better, right? And so your- there program should already be more mature than the average program. And if you look across those statistics, like 200 and some days, you know that includes four year long breaches, and it also includes companies that frankly don't pay as much attention to security as they should. But even if you factor all of that out, it's still a massive massive difference. >> So if I looked at the bell curve of your customers versus some of the average in that survey, you'd see, the the shift, the lump would shift way to the left, right? >> Correct. Correct. And, and you know we actually have a customer, Ron Wakely from ANP Financial Services out of Australia, who was just up on stage talking about a 60 percent improvement in his vulnerability and response time. So from identifying the vulnerabilities via Quaales, Rapid 7, Tenable, whoever their scanning vendor is, all the way through IT patching, 60 percent faster, and given that, I think it's something like 80 percent of vulnerabi- or 80 percent of attacks, come from existing vulnerabilities, that's big change. >> So do get- you got to level it when you're measuring things and you change the variable that you're measuring, as opposed to the number, right? That means you're doing a good thing. So to go from, from hours to minutes, is it continuous improvement, or are there some big, you know potential challenges that you can see that if you overcome those challenges, those are going to give you some monumental shifts in the performance. >> I, I think we're ready. I think when we come back next year, the numbers will be even better and this is why, so many of our customers started by saying "I have no process at all, I have manual, you know I'm using spreadsheets, and emails, and notebooks, you know, and trying to manage the security incident when it happens." So let me just get to a system of action, let me get to a common place where I can do all of this investigation. And that's where most of our production customers are so if you look across the ones who gave us the 29 hour and the 33 hour set, that really just getting that benefit from having a place for everybody to work together where we're going, but this is already shipping in our product is the ability to automate the investigation, so back to, back to the, you know, the poor 10 year old who didn't get to save the world, you know, now he gets to say, this entire investigation stage is entirely automated. So if I hand an analyst, for example, an infected server, there's 10 steps they need to do before they even make a decision on anything right? They have to get the network connections, get the running processes, compare them to the processes that should be on the system, look up on a reputation site all the ones that are wrong like all these manual steps. We can automate that entire process so that the analyst gets to make the decision, he's sort of presented the data, here's the report, now decide. The analogy I always use is the, the doctor who's sort of rushing down in an ER show, and somebody hands him an MRI or an X-ray and he's looking at it, you know, through the fluorescent, you know, lights as he's walking and he's like "oh" you know "five millileters of" whatever and "do this" right? >> Right. >> That's the way an analyst wants to work right? They want the data so they can decide. >> I tell you this is the classic way that machines help people do better work right? Which we hear about over and over and over. Let the machines do the machine part, collecting all the shitty boring data, um, and then present you know the data to the person to make the decision. >> Absolutely. >> Probably with recommendations as well right? With some weighted average recommendations >> Yeah and this is where it gets really exciting, because the more we start automating these tasks, you know the human still wants to make the decision but as we grow and grow this industry, one of the benefits of us being in a cloud, is we can start to measure what's happening across all of our customers, so when attack X occurs, this is the behavior that most of our customers follow, so now if you're a new customer, we can just say "in your industry, customers like you tend to do this". >> Right. >> Right? And really excited by what our engineering team is starting to put together. >> Do you have a formal, or at some point maybe down the road a formal process where customers can opt in to an aggregation of, you know we're all in this together we're probably going to share our breach data with one another so that we can start to apply a lot more data across properties to come to better resolutions quicker. >> Well we actually announced today something called trusted security circles. So this is a capability to allow all of our customers to share indicators, so when you're investigating an issue, the indicators are something that are called an indicator of compromise, or an IOC, so we can share those indicators between customers, but we can do that in an anonymous way right? And so you know, the analogy I give you is, what do you do when you lose power in your house? Right? You grab the flashlight, you check the breakers, and then you look out the window, because what are you trying to find out? >> Is anybody else out? >> Is anybody else out exactly. So, you can't do that in security, you're all alone, because if you disclose anything, you risk putting your company further in a bad spot right? Cause now it's reputation damage, somebody discloses the information, so now we've been able to allow people to do this anonymously right so it's automatic. I share something with both of you, you only see that I shared if it's relevant, meaning the service now instance found it in your own environment, and then if all three of us are in a trusted circle, when any one of us shares, we know it was one of the three, but we don't know which one. So the company's protected. >> So just anecdotally when I speak to customers, everybody still is spending more on prevention than on detection. And there's a recognition that that has to shift, and it's starting to. Now you're coming in saying, invest in response. Which, remember from our conversation last year is right on I'm super excited about that because I think the recognition must occur at the board room that you are going to get infiltrated it's the response that is going to determine the quality of your security. And you still have to spend on prevention and detection. But as you go to the market, first of all can you affirm or deny that you're seeing that shift from prevention to detection in spending, is it happening sort of fast enough, and then as you go in and advise people to think about spending on responding, what's their reaction? What are you finding is the, are the headwinds and what's the reception like? >> Sure. So you know to answer your first question about protection to detection, I would say that if you look at the mature protection technologies, right they are continuing to innovate, but certainly what you would expect a firewall to do this year, is somewhat what you expected it to do last year. But the detection category really feels like where there's a lot of innovation, right? So you're seeing you know new capabilities on the endpoint side network side, anomol- you're just seeing all sorts of diff- >> Analytics. >> Analytics, absolutely. And so uh, I do see more spent simply because more of these attacks are too, too nasty to stop, right? You sort of have to detect them and do some more analysis before you can make the decision. To your second question about, you know, what's the reception been when we started talking about response. You know, I haven't had a single meeting with a customer where they haven't said, "wow" like "we need that", right? It was very- I've never had anybody go "Well yeah our program is mature, we're fine, we don't need this." Um, the question is always just where do we start? And so we see, you know vulnerability management as one great place to start incident response is another great place to start. We introduced the third way to start, just today as well. We started shipping this new capability called vendor risk management, which actually acknowledges the the, you know we talked about the perimeter list network what five years ago? Something like that, we're saying oh the perimeter's gone, you know, mobile devices, whatever. But there's another perimeter that's been eroding as well, which is the distinction between a corporate network and your vendors and suppliers. And so your vendors and suppliers become massive sources of potential threat if they're not protected. And so the assessment process, you know, there's telcos who have 50,000 vendors. So you think about the exposure of that many companies and the process to figure out, do they have a strong password policy, right? Do they follow the best practices around network security, those kinds of things, we're allowing you to manage that entire process now. >> So you're obviously hunting within the service now customer-based presumably, right? You want to have somebody to have the platform in order to take advantage of your product. >> Sure. >> Um, could you talk about that dynamic, but also other products that you integrate with. What are you getting from the customers, do I do I have this capability- this is who I use for firewall who I use for detection do you integrate them, I'm sure you're getting that a lot. Maybe talk to that. >> Sure sure. So first off, it's important to share that the Servicenow platform as a whole is very easy to integrate with. There's API's throughout the entire system, you know we can very easily parse even emails, we have a lot of customers that you know have an email generated from an alert system, and we can parse out everything in the email and map it right into a structured workflow, so you can kind of move from unstructured email immediately into now it's in service now. But we have 40 vendors that we directly integrate with today and when I was here about a year ago, I think that number was maybe three or two. And so we're up at 40 now, and that really encompasses a lot of the popular products so we can for example, you know, a common use case, we talked about phishing a little bit right? You know, let me process a potential phishing email, pull out the URL, the subject line, all the things that might indicate bad behavior, let me look them up automatically on these public threat sources like Virus Total or Meta Defender, and then if the answer is they don't think it's bad, I can just close the incident right? If they think it's bad, now I can ask the Palo Alto Firewall, are you already blocking this particular URL, and if the Palo Alto Firewall says "yeah I was already blocking it", again you can close the incident. Only the emails that were known to be bad, and your existing perimeter capabilities didn't stop, did you need to involve people. >> I have to ask you, it goes back to the conversation we had with Robert Gates last year, but I felt like Stuxnet was this milestone, where the, the game just got escalated big time. And it went from sort of harmless, sometimes not harmless, really up the level of risk. Because now others, you know the bad guys really dug into what they could do, and it became pretty substantial. I was asking Gates generally about some future warfare in cyber, and he, this is obviously before the whole Russian hacking, but certainly Snowden and Wikileaks and so fourth was around. And he said, "The United States has to be very careful about how it responds. We have maybe many more capabilities but if we show our hand, others are going to see those weapons, and have access to those weapons, cause it's digital." I wonder as a security expert if you could sort of comment on the state of security, the future of that threat generically, or generally. Where do you see that going? >> Well there's a couple of things that come to mind as you're talking. Uh, one is you're right, Stuxnet was an eye opener I think for a lot of people in the industry that that, that these kinds of vulnerabilities are being used for, you know nation state purposes rather than, you know just sort of, uh random bad behavior. So yeah I would go back to what I said earlier and say that, um, we have to take the noise, the mundane off the table. We have to automate that, you're absolutely right. These sort of nation state attackers, if you're at a Global 2000 organization, right your intellectual property is valuable, the data you have about your employees is valuable, right all this information is going to be sought by competitors, by nation states, you have to be able to focus on those kinds of attacks, which back to my kind of War Games analogy, like that's what these people wanted to do, they wanted to find the needle in the haystack, and instead they're focusing on something more basic. And so I think if we can up the game, that changes things. The second, and really interesting thing for me is this challenge around vulnerability, so you talked about Gates saying that he has to be careful sort of how much he tips his hand. I think it was recently disclosed that the NSA had a stockpile of vulnerabilities that they were not disclosing to weaponize themselves. And that's a really paradoxical question right? You know, do you share it so that everybody can be protected including your own people, right? Imagine Acrobat, you find some problem in Acrobat, like well do you use it to exploit the enemy, or do you use it to protect your own environment? >> It's quite a dilemma. >> You- it's a huge dilemma cause you're assuming either they have it or they don't have the same vulnerability and so I'm fascinated by how that whole plays out. Yeah, it's a little frightening. >> And you know, in the land of defense, you think okay United States, you know biggest defense, spends the most money, has the, you know the most, you know, amazing machines whatever. Um, but in cyber, you know you presume that's the case, but you don't really know, I think of high frequency trading, you know, it was a lit of Russian mathmeticians that actually developed that, so clearly other states have, you know smart people that can you know create, you know, dangerous threats. And it's, it's- >> You only have to live once to, that's kind of the defense game. You got to defend them all, you have to bat 1000 on the defense side, or you know, get it and react, from the other guys side, he can just pow pow pow pow pow, you just got to get through once. >> So this is why your strategy of response is such a winner. >> Well this is where it comes back to risk as well right? At the end of the day you're right, you know a determined adversary you know, sorry to break it to everybody at some point is going to be able to find some way to do some damages. The question is how do you quantify the various risks within your organization? How do you focus your energy from a technology perspective, from a people standpoint, on the things that have the most potential to do your organization harm, and then, you know there's just no way people can stop everything unless you, you know unplug. >> And then there's the business. Then there's the business part of it too right? Cause this is like insurance when do you stop buying more insurance, you know? You could always invest more at what point does the investment no longer justify the cost because there's no simple answer. >> Well this is where, uh you know, we talked to chief information security officers all the time who are struggling with the board of directors conversation. How do I actually have an emotional conversation that's not mired in data on how things are going? And today they often have to fall back on stats like you know we process 5 million alerts per day, or we have, you know x number of vulnerabilities. But with security operations what they can do is say things like well my mean time to identify, you know was 42 hours, and this quarter it's 14 hours, and so the dollars you gave me, here's the impact. You know I have 50 critical vulnerabilities last quarter, this quarter I have 70, but only on my mission critical system, so that indicates future need to fund or reprioritize, right? So suddenly now you've got data where you can actually have a meaningful conversation about where things are from a posture prospective. >> These are the assets that we've, you know quantified the value of, these are the ones that were prioritizing the protection on and here's why we came up with that priority, let's look at that and, you know agree. >> Exactly. You know large organizations, I was talking to the CISO of a fortune ten, 50 I guess and he was sharing that it takes 40 percent of their time in incident response is spent tracking down who owns the IP address. 40 percent. So imagine, you spent 40 percent of a, you know 25 hour response time investigating who owns the asset, and then you find out it's a lab system, or it's a spare. You just wasted 40 percent of your time. But if you can instead know, oh this is your finance reporting infrastructure, okay you super high priority, let's focus in on that. So this is where the business service mapping, the CMDB becomes such a differentiator, when it's in the hands of our customers. >> Super important topic Sean Convery, thanks very much for coming back in the cube and, uh great work. Love it. >> It's great to be here, thanks for having me. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be right back with our next guest, this is the Cube, we're live from Servicenow Knowledge 17 in Orlando. We'll be right back.