>>Really excited about this year's data, citizens with so many of you together. Uh, I'm going to talk today about accessible data, because what good is the data. If you can get it into your hands and shop for it, but you can't understand it. Uh, and I'm here today with, uh, bald, really thrilled to be here with Paul. Paul is an award-winning author on all topics data. I think 20 books with 21st on the way over 300 articles, he's been a frequent speaker. He's an expert in future trends. Uh, he's a VP at cognitive systems, uh, over at IBM teachers' data also, um, at the business school and as a champion of diversity initiatives. Paul, thank you for being here, really the conformance, uh, to the session with you. >>Oh, thanks for having me. It's a privilege. >>So let's get started with, uh, our origins and data poll. Um, and I'll start with a little story of my own. So, uh, I trained as an engineer way back when, uh, and, um, in one of the courses we got as an engineer, it was about databases. So we got the stick thick book of CQL and me being in it for the programming. I was like, well, who needs this stuff? And, uh, I wanted to do my part in terms of making data accessible. So essentially I, I was the only book that I sold on. Uh, obviously I learned some hard lessons, uh, later on, as I did a master's in AI after that, and then joined the database research lab at the university that Libra spun off from. Uh, but Hey, we all learned along the way. And, uh, Paula, I'm really curious. Um, when did you awaken first to data? If you will? >>You know, it's really interesting Stan, because I come from the opposite side, an undergrad in economics, uh, with some, uh, information systems research at the higher level. And so I think I was always attuned to what data could do, but I didn't understand how to get at it and the kinds of nuances around it. So then I started this job, a database company, like 27 years ago, and it started there, but I would say the awakening has never stopped because the data game is always changing. Like I look at these epochs that I've been through data. I was a real relational databases thinking third normal form, and then no SQL databases. And then I watch no SQL be about no don't use SQL, then wait a minute. Not only sequel. And today it's really for the data citizens about wait, no, I need SQL. So, um, I think I'm always waking up in data, so I'll call it a continuum if you will. But that was it. It was trying to figure out the technology behind driving analytics in which I took in school. >>Excellent. And I fully agree with you there. Uh, every couple of years they seem to reinvent new stuff and they want to be able to know SQL models. Let me see. I saw those come and go. Uh, obviously, and I think that's, that's a challenge for most people because in a way, data is a very abstract concepts, um, until you get down in the weeds and then it starts to become really, really messy, uh, until you, you know, from that end button extract a certain insights. Um, and as the next thing I want to talk about with you is that challenging organizations, we're hearing a lot about data, being valuable data, being the new oil data, being the new soil, the new gold, uh, data as an asset is being used as a slogan all over. Uh, people are investing a lot in data over multiple decades. Now there's a lot of new data technologies, always, but still, it seems that organizations fundamentally struggle with getting people access to data. What do you think are some of the key challenges that are underlying the struggles that mud, that organizations seem to face when it comes to data? >>Yeah. Listen, Stan, I'll tell you a lot of people I think are stuck on what I call their data, acumen curves, and you know, data is like a gym membership. If you don't use it, you're not going to get any value on it. And that's what I mean by accurate. And so I like to think that you use the analogy of some mud. There's like three layers that are holding a lot of organizations back at first is just the amount of data. Now, I'm not going to give you some stat about how many times I can go to the moon and back with the data regenerate, but I will give you one. I found interesting stat. The average human being in their lifetime will generate a petabyte of data. How much data is that? If that was my apple music playlist, it would be about 2000 years of nonstop music. >>So that's some kind of playlist. And I think what's happening for the first layer of mud is when I first started writing about data warehousing and analytics, I would be like, go find a needle in the haystack. But now it's really finding a needle in a stack of needles. So much data. So little time that's level one of mine. I think the second thing is people are looking for some kind of magic solution, like Cinderella's glass slipper, and you put it on her. She turns into a princess that's for Disney movies, right? And there's nothing magical about it. It is about skill and acumen and up-skilling. And I think if you're familiar with the duper, you recall the Hadoop craze, that's exactly what happened, right? Like people brought all their data together and everyone was going to be able to access it and give insights. >>And it teams said it was pretty successful, but every line of business I ever talked to said it was a complete failure. And the third layer is governance. That's actually where you're going to find some magic. And the problem in governance is every client I talked to is all about least effort to comply. They don't want to violate GDPR or California consumer protection act or whatever governance overlooks, where they do business and governance. When you don't lead me separate to comply and try not to get fine, but as an accelerant to your analytics, and that gets you out of that third layer of mud. So you start to invoke what I call the wisdom of the crowd. Now imagine taking all these different people with intelligence about the business and giving them access and acumen to hypothesize on thousands of ideas that turn into hundreds, we test and maybe dozens that go to production. So those are three layers that I think every organization is facing. >>Well. Um, I definitely follow on all the days, especially the one where people see governance as a, oh, I have to comply to this, which always hurts me a little bit, honestly, because all good governance is about making things easier while also making sure that they're less riskier. Um, but I do want to touch on that Hadoop thing a little bit, uh, because for me in my a decade or more over at Libra, we saw it come as well as go, let's say around 2015 to 2020 issue. So, and it's still around. Obviously once you put your data in something, it's very hard to make it go away, but I've always felt that had do, you know, it seemed like, oh, now we have a bunch of clusters and a bunch of network engineers. So what, >>Yeah. You know, Stan, I fell for, I wrote the book to do for dummies and it had such great promise. I think the problem is there wasn't enough education on how to extract value out of it. And that's why I say it thinks it's great. They liked clusters and engineers that you just said, but it didn't drive lineup >>Business. Got it. So do you think that the whole paradigm with the clouds that we're now on is going to fundamentally change that or is just an architectural change? >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's a great comment. What you're seeing today now is the movement for the data lake. Maybe a way from repositories, like Hadoop into cloud object stores, right? And then you look at CQL or other interfaces over that not allows me to really scale compute and storage separately, but that's all the technical stuff at the end of the day, whether you're on premise hybrid cloud, into cloud software, as a service, if you don't have the acumen for your entire organization to know how to work with data, get value from data, this whole data citizen thing. Um, you're not going to get the kind of value that goes into your investment, right? And I think that's the key thing that business leaders need to understand is it's not about analytics for kind of science project sakes. It's about analytics to drive. >>Absolutely. We fully agree with that. And I want to touch on that point. You mentioned about the wisdom of the crowds, the concept that I love about, right, and your organization is a big grout full of what we call data citizens. Now, if I remember correctly from the book of the wisdom of the crowds, there's, there's two points that really, you have to take Canada. What is, uh, for the wisdom of the grounds to work, you have to have all the individuals enabled, uh, for them to have access to the right information and to be able to share that information safely kept from the bias from others. Otherwise you're just biasing the outcome. And second, you need to be able to somehow aggregate that wisdom up to a certain decision. Uh, so as Felix mentioned earlier, we all are United by data and it's a data citizen topic. >>I want to touch on with you a little bit, because at Collibra we look at it as anyone who uses data to do their job, right. And 2020 has sort of accelerated digitization. Uh, but apart from that, I've always believed that, uh, you don't have to have data in your title, like a data analyst or a data scientist to be a data citizen. If I take a look at the example inside of Libra, we have product managers and they're trying to figure out which features are most important and how are they used and what patterns of behavior is there. You have a gal managers, and they're always trying to know the most they can about their specific accounts, uh, to be able to serve as them best. So for me, the data citizen is really in its broadest sense. Uh, anyone who uses data to do their job, does that, does that resonate with you? >>Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of myself. And to be honest in my eyes where I got started from, and I agree, you don't need the word data in your title. What you need to have is curiosity, and that is in your culture and in your being. And, and I think as we look at organizations to transform and take full advantage of their, their data investments, they're going to need great governance. I guarantee you that, but then you're going to have to invest in this data citizen concept. And the first thing I'll tell you is, you know, that kind of acumen, if you will, as a team sport, it's not a departmental sport. So you need to think about what are the upskilling programs of where we can reach across to the technical and the non-technical, you know, lots and lots of businesses rely on Microsoft Excel. >>You have data citizens right there, but then there's other folks who are just flat out curious about stuff. And so now you have to open this up and invest in those people. Like, why are you paying people to think about your business without giving the data? It would be like hiring Tom Brady as a quarterback and telling him not to throw a pass. Right. And I see it all the time. So we kind of limit what we define as data citizen. And that's why I love what you said. You don't need the word data in your title and more so if you don't build the acumen, you don't know how to bring the data together, maybe how to wrangle it, but where did it come from? And where can you fixings? One company I worked with had 17 definitions for a sales individual, 17 definitions, and the talent team and HR couldn't drive to a single definition because they didn't have the data accurate. So when you start thinking of the data citizen, concept it about enabling everybody to shop for data much. Like I would look for a USB cable on Amazon, but also to attach to a business glossary for definition. So we have a common version of what a word means, the lineage of the data who owns it, who did it come from? What did it do? So bring that all together. And, uh, I will tell you companies that invest in the data, citizen concept, outperform companies that don't >>For all of that, I definitely fully agree that there's enough research out there that shows that the ones who are data-driven are capturing the most markets, but also capturing the most growth. So they're capturing the market even faster. And I love what you said, Paul, about, um, uh, the brains, right? You've already paid for the brains you've already invested in. So you may as well leverage them. Um, you may as well recognize and, and enable the data citizens, uh, to get access to the assets that they need to really do their job properly. That's what I want to touch on just a little bit, if, if you're capable, because for me, okay. Getting access to data is one thing, right? And I think you already touched on a few items there, but I'm shopping for data. Now I have it. I have a cul results set in my hands. Let's say, but I'm unable to read and write data. Right? I don't know how to analyze it. I don't know maybe about bias. Uh, maybe I, I, I don't know how to best visualize it. And maybe if I do, maybe I don't know how to craft a compelling persuasion narrative around it to change my bosses decisions. So from your viewpoint, do you think that it's wise for companies to continuously invest in data literacy to continuously upgrade that data citizens? If you will. >>Yeah, absolutely. Forest. I'm going to tell you right now, data literacy years are like dog years stage. So fast, new data types, new sources of data, new ways to get data like API APIs and microservices. But let me take it away from the technical concept for a bit. I want to talk to you about the movie. A star is born. I'm sure most of you have seen it or heard it Bradley Cooper, lady Gaga. So everyone knows the movie. What most people probably don't know is when lady Gaga teamed up with Bradley Cooper to do this movie, she demanded that he sing everything like nothing could be auto-tuned everything line. This is one of the leading actors of Hollywood. They filmed this remake in 42 days and Bradley Cooper spent 18 months on singing lessons. 18 months on a guitar lessons had a voice coach and it's so much and so forth. >>And so I think here's the point. If one of the best actors in the world has to invest three and a half years for 42 days to hit a movie out of the park. Why do we think we don't need a continuous investment in data literacy? Even once you've done your initial training, if you will, over the data, citizen, things are going to change. I don't, you don't. If I, you Stan, if you go to the gym and workout every day for three months, you'll never have to work out for the rest of your life. You would tell me I was ridiculous. So your data literacy is no different. And I will tell you, I have managed thousands of individuals, some of the most technical people around distinguished engineers, fellows, and data literacy comes from curiosity and a culture of never ending learning. That is the number one thing to success. >>And that curiosity, I hire people who are curious, I'll give you one more story. It's about Mozart. And this 21 year old comes to Mozart and he says, Mozart, can you teach me how to compose a symphony? And Mozart looks at this person that says, no, no, you're too young, too young. You compose your fourth symphony when you were 12 and Mozart looks at him and says, yeah, but I didn't go around asking people how to compose a symphony. Right? And so the notion of that story is curiosity. And those people who show up in always want to learn, they're your home run individuals. And they will bring data literacy across the organization. >>I love it. And I'm not going to try and be Mozart, but you know, three and a half years, I think you said two times, 18 months, uh, maybe there's hope for me yet in a singing, you'll be a good singer. Um, Duchy on the, on the, some of the sports references you've made, uh, Paul McGuire, we first connected, uh, I'm not gonna like disclose where you're from, but, uh, I saw he did come up and I know it all sorts of sports that drive to measure everything they can right on the field of the field. So let's imagine that you've done the best analysis, right? You're the most advanced data scientists schooled in the classics, as well as the modernist methods, the best tools you've made a beautiful analysis, beautiful dashboards. And now your coach just wants to put their favorite player on the game, despite what you're building to them. How do you deal with that kind of coaches? >>Yeah. Listen, this is a great question. I think for your data analytics strategy, but also for anyone listening and watching, who wants to just figure out how to drive a career forward? I would give the same advice. So the story you're talking about, indeed hockey, you can figure out where I'm from, but it's around the Ottawa senators, general manager. And he made a quote in an interview and he said, sometimes I want to punch my analytics, people in the head. Now I'm going to tell you, that's not a good culture for analytics. And he goes on to say, they tell me not to play this one player. This one player is very tough. You know, throws four or five hits a game. And he goes, I'd love my analytics people to get hit by bore a wacky and tell me how it feels. That's the player. >>Sure. I'm sure he hits hard, but here's the deal. When he's on the ice, the opposing team gets more shots on goal than the senators do on the opposing team. They score more goals, they lose. And so I think whenever you're trying to convince a movement forward, be it management, be it a project you're trying to fund. I always try to teach something that someone didn't previously know before and make them think, well, I never thought of it that way before. And I think the great opportunity right now, if you're trying to get moving in a data analytics strategy is around this post COVID era. You know, we've seen post COVID now really accelerate, or at least post COVID in certain parts of the world, but accelerate the appetite for digital transformation by about half a decade. Okay. And getting the data within your systems, as you digitize will give you all kinds of types of projects to make people think differently than the way they thought before. >>About data. I call this data exhaust. I'll give you a great example, Uber. I think we're all familiar with Uber. If we all remember back in the days when Uber would offer you search pricing. Okay? So basically you put Uber on your phone, they know everything about you, right? Who are your friends, where you going, uh, even how much batteries on your phone? Well, in a data science paper, I read a long time ago. They recognize that there was a 70% chance that you would accept a surge price. If you had less than 10% of your battery. So 10% of battery on your phone is an example of data exhaust all the lawns that you generate on your digital front end properties. Those are logs. You can take those together and maybe show executive management with data. We can understand why people abandoned their cart at the shipping phase, or what is the amount of shipping, which they abandoned it. When is the signal when our systems are about to go to go down. So, uh, I think that's a tremendous way. And if you look back to the sports, I mean the Atlanta Falcons NFL team, and they monitor their athletes, sleep performance, the Toronto Raptors basketball, they're running AI analytics on people's personalities and everything they tweet and every interview to see if the personality fits. So in sports, I think athletes are the most important commodity, if you will, or asset a yet all these teams are investing in analytics. So I think that's pretty telling, >>Okay, Paul, it looks like we're almost out of time. So in 30 seconds or less, what would you recommend to the data citizens out there? >>Okay. I'm going to give you a four tips in 30 seconds. Number one, remember learning never ends be curious forever. You'll drive your career. Number two, remember companies that invest in analytics and data, citizens outperform those that don't McKinsey says it's about 1.4 times across many KPIs. Number three, stop just collecting the dots and start connecting them with that. You need a strong governance strategy and that's going to help you for the future because the biggest thing in the future is not going to be about analytics, accuracy. It's going to be about analytics, explainability. So accuracy is no longer going to be enough. You're going to have to explain your decisions and finally stay positive and forever test negative. >>Love it. Thank you very much fall. Um, and for all the data seasons is out there. Um, when it comes down to access to data, it's more than just getting your hands on the data. It's also knowing what you can do with it, how you can do that and what you definitely shouldn't be doing with it. Uh, thank you everyone out there and enjoy your learning and interaction with the community. Stay healthy. Bye-bye.

(upbeat music) >> Female: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeffrey here with The Cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios today for a Cube conversation. Again, it's a little bit of a let down in the crazy conference season, so it gives us an opportunity to do more studio work, and check in with some folks. So we're really excited to have our next guest. We'd love to talk to practitioners, people out on the front lines that are really living this digital transformation experience. So we'd like to welcome in, all the way from Toronto, the NBA champion, Toronto, home of the Raptors, he's Phillip Armstrong, global C.I.O., and E.V.P. from Great-West Lifeco. Philip, great to see you. >> Thanks, Jeff, good afternoon. >> And I got to say congrats, you know, you took the title away from us this year, but a job well done, and we all rejoiced in Canada's happy celebration. I'm sure it was a lot of fun. >> Lots of excitement here in Toronto for sure. >> Great, so let's jump into it. A lot of conversations about digital transformations. You're right in the heart of it, you're running a big company that's complicated, it's old. So first off, give us a little bit of a background just for people that aren't familiar with Great-West Lifeco in terms of how long you've been around, the scale and size, and then we can get into some of the challenges and the opportunities that you're facing. >> Sure, I'd love to. Actually, one of probably the world's best kept secrets. So Great-West Lifeco is a holding company, and underneath that company, we have a number of companies. So for example in the U.S., you may have heard of Putnam Mutual Funds out of Boston, or Empower Retirement Services, the second largest pension administration company in the United States out of Denver. We have companies called Canada Life and Irish Life. We operate in Europe, the U.S., and Canada. We were formed in 1847, so we're 170 odd years old. Very old, established company, in fact, the first life insurance company to get its charter in Canada. So we were certainly not born digital, we were not born in the cloud. In fact, we weren't even born analog. I think our history goes back to parchment, green ink, and "I" shares. So this has been quite the digital transformation for our company. >> So when you think about digital transformation, insurance companies are always interesting, right? Because insurance companies, by their very nature, they created actuarials, and you guys have always been doing math, and you've always been forecasting, and building models. What does digital transformation mean for you, and that core business in the way you look at insurance and the products that you offer your customers? >> It's been massive, it's had a massive impact right across our company. We have 30 million customers around the globe. Customers' expectations are rising every single day. They want online access to their information. We're an insurance company, but we're also a wealth management company, so we're open to market timing and exposures to the market. Our pace in our business has accelerated dramatically. So just the expectation, the other companies, digitally-native companies are setting with our customers, has forced us to completely re-examine our traditional business models that have served us so well, almost to the point where you have to take a hand grenade and just blow it up and start again. This is very, very difficult when you've got actuarial tables that are working, that are built on hundreds of years of experience. We're moving into a completely new world now. We've come from a world where security has always been very important to us. We manage 1.4 trillion dollars of other people's money. We have traditional business models and traditional data centers, and we operate at a certain level, a certain pace, and all of that, all of that, now has to change. We have skill sets and people who are very, very technical in nature, in their jobs, and have we got the right skills to take us into the future? Can we future-proof our business? This has been, not just a technology transformation, but a massive cultural transformation for our company. A reinvention of all of our business models, the way we look at our customers. A lot of our business is done through advisors. We have half a million advisors around the world that give financial planning and advice to people, and allow them to have some financial security. Our relationship with them has to change, and their expectations in using technology has to change. So this digital transformation is only a thin sliver of the transformation that our company has been going through globally over the last few years. >> That's interesting, you talked on so many topics there I want to kind of break it down into three. One is the consumerization of IT that we've talked about over and over and over, and people's experience with Yahoo and Amazon, and shopping with Google and Google Maps, really drives their expectations of the way they want to interact with every application on their phone when they want to, how they want to. So that's interesting in terms of your customer engagement. The other piece I want to go in a little bit is your own employees. You've been around since 1847, the expectations of the kids that you're hiring out of college today, and what they expect in their work environment, also driven in a big part by the phones that they carry in their pockets. And then the third leg of the stool are these, I forget the word that you used, but your partners or associates, or these advisors that you are enabling with your technology stack, but they're, I assume, independent folks out there just like you see at the local insurance office, that you need to enable them in a very different way. You're sitting in the middle. How do you break down the problems across those three groups of people, or contingencies, or constituencies? That's the word I'm looking for. >> Let's start with our advisors. We have many relationships with advisors. We have a relationship with an advisory force that is almost like a tied sales force that is positioned just to sell our products. We have advisors who are quite independent, and yet they sell our products. And then we have advisors that occasionally sell our products, and everything in between. Companies that are advisors, sort of managing general agents. We have bank assurance arrangements. We have all kinds of distribution arrangements around the globe, with our company to distribute our products. But the heart of what we do is an advice-based channel with many variants. So what do those advisors want? The want tools, online tools, they want safe connectivity, they want fast access to the internet, they want to be able to pull in advice, they want video conferencing, they want to be able to be reachable by their customers, and really leverage technology to allow them to provide that timely advice and be responsive to market changes. Almost delivering a bespoke service to each individual, in yet a mass way that's simple and timely. When you look at our employees, our employees pretty much want the same thing. They want safe access to the internet, they want safe access to the cloud and our applications. We've had to go through massive amounts of cultural change and training and education to bring our employees into the new world with new skills and equip them, just ways of working. Video, introducing video into our company, upgrading our networks. The change behind all of this different way of working has been phenomenal. I wish you could see the building we're sitting in today, that I'm coming to you from today. It's a stone building that was built in the early 1930s, a prominent landmark here in Toronto. And from the outside, it looks archaic. When you walk into the lobby, it's all art deco and beautiful. They can't make buildings like this today. But in many ways, it epitomizes our company, because then you go up the elevators and walk onto the floors, and it's all open plan, all digitally enabled. We have Microsoft Teams in every meeting room. The floors are all modern and newly decorated and designed to allow us to collaborate and create new solutions for our customers. It's a real juxtaposition . And that, I feel, is a good analogy for our company right now, and what we're going through. >> So let's talk about how it's changed in terms of the infrastructure. Your job is to both provide tools to all these different constituents you talked about as well as protect it. So it's this interesting dynamic where before, you could build a moat, and keep everybody inside the brick building. But you can't do that anymore, and security has changed dramatically both with the cloud as well as all these hybrid business relationships that you described. So how did you address that? How have you seen that evolve over the last several years, and what are some of the top of mind issues that you have when you're thinking about I've got to give access to all these people. They want fast, efficient tools, they want really a great way for them to execute their job. At the same time, I've got to keep that $1.4 trillion and all that that represents secure. Not an easy challenge. >> Not easy at all. A few years ago, it was pretty trendy to say we're going to move everything to the cloud. I think now, especially for large, complex companies like ours, a hybrid cloud is the way to go. I think we're starting to see a lot more CIOs like myself say, yes I'd love to take advantage of the cloud, and I'm certainly moving a lot of my footprint to the cloud. To start with it was because of cost, but now I think it's because of agility and access to new technologies as well. But when you move things to the cloud, you have to be very cautious around how you do that. We have in-house data centers that we have systems, administration systems that are obfuscated from our clients by fancy front ends and easy-to-use experiences. And they're running on pennies on the dollar, and you can't make a business case to move that to the cloud. So a hybrid cloud is the way to go for us. But what we realized very quickly is that we need to push our Cyrus security and defenses out to the intelligent edge, out to the edge of the internet. Stop bad things happening, stop malware, stop infections coming into our organization before they even come into our organization. The cloud has complicated that. We're reducing our surface areas. I heard just the other day a colleague of mine said yeah the cloud is fabulous, it's a faster way to deliver your mistakes to your customers and in many ways, it is, if you're not careful with what you're doing. We've deployed technology like Zscaler and other types of sand-boxing technology. But it's always a cat and mouse game. The bad guys are putting artificial intelligence into their malware. We saw the other day a piece of malware coming into our organization through email, and when it was exploded, the first thing it did was try to check signatures to see if it was in a virtualized environment. And if it was, it just went back to sleep again and didn't activate. The nice thing about Zscaler and some of the technologies that I'm deploying is that they're proprietary. They don't have these signatures. And so we can screen out, we literally get hundreds of thousands, close to millions, of malware attempts coming into our organization on a daily basis. It is a constant fight. What we've also found is that organizations like ours are big targets. What companies are trying to do is not steal our data, because they know that we won't pay ransoms. What we'd like to do is spend that money protecting our customers with credit monitoring, or changing their passwords and helping them deal with if there is a breach. So the bad guys have changed their tactics. Instead of stealing our data, they'd like to try and penetrate our networks and our systems and cripple us. They would really like to bring us down. And that determines a different strategy and protection. >> You touch on so many things there, Philip. We could go for like three hours I think just on follow-ups to that answer. Let me drill in on a couple. One of them, I'm just curious to get your perspective on how you finance insurance. You made an interesting comment, you don't pay ransom, and you have a budget that you spend on security within all the other priorities you have on your plate. But you can't spend everything on insurance, you can't get ultimate 100% protection. So when you think about your trade-offs, when you think about security almost from like an insurance or business mindset, what's the right amount to spend? How do you think about the right amount to spend for security versus everything else that you have to spend on? >> That's a great question, and I've been talking to my peers around what is the right amount of money? You could spend tons and tons of money on Cyber and still be breached. You can do everything right and again, still be breached. You just have to be very pragmatic about where you direct your resources. For us, it was hardening the perimeter was the start. We wanted to stop things getting in as best we could, so we went out to the cloud and put defenses right at the edge, right at the intelligent edge, and extended our network out. Then we went and said, what is our weakest link, and through social engineering and through dropping things onto people's desktops and them trying to breach into our network, we got some pretty sophisticated technology in end point detection. We monitor our devices using our SIM, we have a dedicated monitoring center that is global, that is in-house and staffed. We've built up a lot of capabilities around that. So then it becomes prioritizing your crown jewels, your most sensitive data, trying to put that most sensitive data into protected zones on your network, and clustering even more defenses around that most sensitive data. I'm a big believer in a defense in depth strategy, so I would have multiple layers of cyber security that overlap. So if you can manage to circumvent some, you might get caught by others. And really that's about it. It's been a struggle. We have a lot of people who specialize in risk-management in our company. So everyone's got an opinion, but I think this is a common challenge for global CIOs. >> I'll share you a pro-tip in a couple of the security shows. It seems HVAC systems are ripe for attack, and the funniest one I've every heard was the automated thermometer in a lobby fish tank at a casino that was the access point. So IOT adds a different challenge. >> Or vending machines. >> Yeah, but HVAC came up like five times out of ten, so watch our for those HVAC systems. But, we're here as part of the Zscaler program, and you've already mentioned them before, their name is on this screen. You've talked before about leveraging partners, and Zscaler specifically, but you mentioned a whole host of really the top names in tech. I wonder if you could give us a bit more color on how do you partner? It's a very different way to look at people in a relationship with a company and the reps that you deal with, versus just buying a product and putting in their product. You really talk about partnering with these companies to help you take on this ever-evolving challenge that is security. >> That's a fabulous question. I know that I cannot match the research and development budgets of some of these very large tech companies. And I don't have the expertise. They're specialists, this is what they do. We were the first company I think to install Zscaler in Canada. We have a great relationship with that company, and Jay's onto something here. He's a thought leader in this space. We've been very pleased with our cooperation and support we got from Zscaler in helping us with our perimeter. When we look inside our company, the network played a big part of delivering cyber security and protection for our customers. We placed a phone call over to Cisco and said come on in and help us with this. We need to completely revamp our network, build a leaf and spine architecture, software-defined network, state of the art, we really want the best and the brightest to come in and help us design this network globally for us. So Cisco has been a superb partner. Cisco has one North American lab, where they try out their new technologies and they advance their technologies. It's just down the street here in Toronto, so we've been able to avail ourselves with some pretty decent thought-leadership in the space. And then also FireEye has been absolutely superb working with them, and we developed pretty close relationships with them. We support their activities, they come in and help us with ours. We've used their consulting agency, Mandiant, quite a bit, to give us advice and help us protect our organization. And I think aligning yourself with these quality companies, Microsoft, I have to call out Microsoft, have been superb, starting from the desktop and moving us through, vertically aligned into the cloud, and providing cyber security every step of the way. You can't rely on one vendor, you have to make sure that these suppliers are partners. You turn vendors into partners and you make sure that they play well together, and that they understand what your priorities are and where you want to go. We've been very transparent with them around what we like and what we don't like, and what we think is working well and what isn't working well. We just build this ecosystem that has to work well in this day and age. >> Well Phillip I think that's a great summary, that it's really important to have partners, and really have a deeper business relationship than simply exchanging money for services. The only way, in this really rapidly evolving world, to get by, because nobody can do it by themselves. I think you summarized that very, very well. So final question before I let you go back to the open floor plan, and all the hard working people over there at Great-West Lifeco. What are you priorities for the balance of the year? I can't believe it's July already, this year is just zooming by. What are some of the things, as you look down the road, that you've got your eye on? >> Well we're certainly watching some of the geo-political activities. We have large operations in Europe, from my accent you can probably tell I'm a Brit. So we're watching Brexit and how that plays out. We're certainly trying to develop new and innovative products for our customers, and certain segments are interesting. The millennial segment, the transference of wealth from people in the later generations into earlier generations, passing wealth down to their kids. Retirement is a really big category for us, and making sure that people have good retirement options and retirement products. And of course, we're always kicking tires, and we're looking out for any opportunities in the M&A market as well, as our industry consolidates and costs rise. So that's kind of what's keeping us busy, and of course rolling out really cool technology. >> All right well thanks for taking a few minutes in your very busy day to spend it with us, and give us your story on the global transformation, the digital transformation and Great-West Life Company. >> You're very welcome, Jeff. Nice chatting with you. >> You too, thanks again. So he's Phil, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube. Just had a Cube Conversation out of Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)