(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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(dramatic music) >> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C., it's cube conversations with John Furrier. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special cube conversation, I'm John Furrier, the host of The Cube, co-founder of SiliconANGLE media Inc. We are here in the Washington D.C. Beltway area. We're actually at Amazon web services' public sector headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. My next guest is John Wood, he's the CEO and chairman of the board at Telos, a big provider of some of the big contracts, certainly with Amazon CIA, among others, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for joining me. >> I'm glad to be here. >> So, you guys have been pretty instrumental and we were talking to Teresa Carlson earlier, with an exclusive interview with her, and we talked about the shot heard around the Cloud. That was the CIA, Amazon win, four years ago. >> Yes. >> Kind of infiltrated the government area. It's almost a gestation period and now you got DOD action, a ton of other opportunities, but it really is an architectural mindset changeover from the old way. >> Yes You're involved in this, with Telos. What's your take, how are you guys involved, what's going on? >> Yeah, so it was groundbreaking, when the CIA made the determination that they were going to move to the Cloud, for sure. It kind of made everybody stand up and take notice, if the most security conscience organization in the world was considering it, why aren't I? And here we are, four years later, so where is the CIA now? Well now, the CIA is able to provision a server in a couple minutes, whereas the past, it used to take them almost a year. Now, with the use of automation tools like we have with Telos and the Xacta suite, the CIA is able to get their authority to operate in less than a week, when it used to take 18 months. So, I basically think what's happening is, the Cloud is providing an access point to IT modernization and the agency is showing that there is a blueprint that the rest of the government can also follow if they want to. >> One of the things we're involved in a lot of Blockchain covers, as well as kind of kicking the tires on Blockchain. You're in the middle of a Cloud gain with identity. Identity is the secret to having good scalable systems, because when you have good identity, good things happen. In Blockchain, some people say a theory about those. In IT, it's what identity you're going to use. How does the authority to operate challenge, you mentioned, become so important, because you're talking about massive amounts of time, I mean time savings. >> Wood: Yeah, so-- >> Just tease out the nuances of why it's so important to have that identity solution. >> So, in the past, there was no common language within which our cyber security professionals could engage with each other. Now, with the signing of the President's executive order on cyber security, the White House really is mandating the adoption if the NIST framework. What's relevant there is that on the one hand it provides you with a common language, but on the other hand, it's 11 hundred controls. So, as a result, automation is going to be key, to making sure that people can work with each other and making sure that, actually, the adoption actually takes off. >> They're safe, they know the trusted party. Is trust a big part of this and how does that--? >> I think what's happening, because the intelligence community has been working so closely together, and when I say the intelligence community, it's not just the traditional CIA, NSA, NRO, et cetera, it's also the military component of the intelligence community. So, you've got almost 38 assessors that are assessing C2S and SC2S. You know, the secret, if you will, Cloud, and the top secret Cloud, and those assessors all have been working in the same community under this framework and I think that has given them the confidence that the data is protected and as a result, they're heading much closer to reciprocity than ever before. >> There's been observations certainly on the Cube, we've said this many times with the past few years in tracking IT over the years, IT transformation, digital transformation, whatever you want to call it, buzz word. The reality is you had some progressives that would move faster and kick the tires, certainly financial services, in some areas you see that. Really, no problem. Then you had the folks who have just been consolidated down, didn't have a lot of budget and were lagging, waiting to adopt. Now there's no excuses, with cyber security, top of mind, with hacking, malware, ransomware, cyber warfare from nation states, sponsored states, an open source it's out of control. >> It is. >> So the security equations is forcing IT to move. The action has to be taken. What are you guys seeing in this area, because this is a big story and it's really putting a fire under everyone to move. >> And it's long over due. I co-wrote and article with our chief security officer in 2011, talking about why the Cloud was the way to go for federal, state, local, and education customers and at the end of the day, I think what's happening from a top cover perspective, the legislative community understands that. Obviously the Executive branch understands that, and now with editions like C2S the rest of the environment, the rest of the government can see what's possible. So, I believe the leadership within the government is ready for this change. They're seeing the benefit as it relates to C2S and SC2S and ultimately, the key is, the guys who run the contracts themselves, you got to make sure that those guys want that, to embrace that change too. >> Furrier: Yeah, so you have the-- >> And right now, 80, if you look across the government, 80% IT span is going back into maintenance. If you look at all my commercial customers, it's somewhere between 20 and 25%. What does that mean? It basically means that the government has a lot of legacy systems, which means that there's a lot of threats, and, which means there's a real cyber security problem. I believe fundamentally that by moving work loads to the Cloud, you'll be eliminating a lot of those cyber security problems. >> Yeah, it just means security is going to be the driver. The other thing I wanted to bring up, especially here in D.C., in public sector, is transparency. Now everyone can see everything. We're in a data-driven world, you can't hide either. The light is on, it's right there on the table. No more hiding. How has transparency been impacted in the procurement process, in the sales motions, the overall engagements with gov and public sector customers? >> I think, truth be told, there have been a lot of ideas that were sort of short-term and not really thoughtful, but the good news, as I said, is that the policy makers are really thinking and considering, trying to figure out how to make changes. Take for example, LPTA, low price technically acceptable. When I went to the congress and talked to both the House and the Senate side, and talked about how if I have one customer whose gotten hacked and the other customer has the same hack, but one happens to be a government customer and one's a commercial customer, the resources that we have are really trained, highly skilled, highly sought-after resources. Well, my commercial customers are willing to pay three to four hundred percent more than my government customers are. So when you have scarce resources, where are you going to apply them? You're going to apply them where the people are who are going to pay you. So my point to the Congress was simply to say, hey man, you get what you pay for. So ultimately, the good news is that, both on the House and the Senate side, that they elimanted LTPA, as it relates to cyber security, goods and services. So I believe, again, that there's a lot of, not just transparency happening, but there's a lot of people realizing that there are things that we can do. Procurement is kind of the last frontier for me. I have seen recently, I saw one of our government customers, where we were subcontracted, they went with something called an OTA, which stands for an other transaction agreement. Big problem in the government these days is everybody protest everything and there's really no downside to the protesting. With an OTA it's not protest-able. So I am seeing our government customers beginning to think about other means of actually doing things like procurement, and so that you can actually acquire. >> Are they going to have instant replay? (laughter) It sounds like the NFL, that call's not reversible. I mean, this is kind of, we're getting into all these rules and regulations where you've got protest, it seems that policy injection is not healthy at some level, because that point about what cost more on the commercial side, because of demand there, they understand the consequences and resource availability. To the government you just eliminated a policy that wasn't really helping. >> Right. >> So policy is a real consideration in here. >> I think so. Again though, it's a different environment than it was five or six years ago and I do think that there are some real positive things that are happening. I agree with you that there's a ground-swell of support behind the Cloud and certainly, players like us see the benefit associated with that shared security model. >> One of the things we've been observing and tracking on Sillaconangle and the Cube is this notion of public-private collaberation. Sharing data is a huge deal. Certainly, in Cyber people realize that data is valuable. Certainly, at Scale, you see patterns you might not see, customers on workloads, here and there, need to be identified. You're not sharing the data you don't know. So data sharing is a big deal, but also, collaborations between the private and public sector. Can you comment on what's going on there, because we're seeing some movement where, you're seeing some security agencies saying, "We'll share some stuff." >> Yeah. >> Furrier: You share some stuff with me, so you're seeing a little bit of the community developing heavily around data-sharing, what's you're take on that? >> So, I think we have a ways to go to make it work right, because if it was working right, you wouldn't see the very published, publicized hacks that have gone on. One of the things that the Congress can do is to provide incentives for the private sector to share more information, more quickly. When the Yahoo hacks occurred, it wasn't discovered until two or three years later. As a result, like I said, there's really no incentive and there's a perceived amount of liability. One of the things I'm asking some of our Congress people to consider is if you do share information, maybe, there's a limitation on liability and that provides, if you will, a mechanism and that provides an incentive for the private organization to work with the public organizations. >> So not to bury it, like Yahoo tried to bury that thing. >> Exactly. There's no sense in burying it. There should be no reason to bury. >> Okay, take a minute to talk about Telos, what you guys are doing, the chief executive. What's going on with the company, talk about the successes, where you guys are winning, your challenges and opportunities. >> Sure, we're in the business of, we do cyber security, we do identity and we do secure mobility. In the area of cyber security, I'm very proud about the fact that we're the database of record for intelligence community, many department of defense agencies use us, homeland security, a whole, department of safe-- There's a whole bunch of organizations that tend to work with us. I think that the issue for me has always been around investing in things that make our customers more efficient. So whether it's cyber security, it's one thing to provide the authority to operate, but I like to provide that authority to operate on a continuous basis. When we talk about identity, it's one thing to say that I am who I say I am, but it's another thing to let you know that I'm actually somebody that's trust worthy. So, we have a special relationship with the FBI that allows us to do real-time data look-ups on their people. We're the integrator of record for the common access card, the military ID card, we have been for a long time. From that, we built a business relationship with the TSA and now we have about 70 airports around America that use our service to do identity as a service for all their employees. >> Can you get me to cut the line at Pre? (laughter) >> You know, if you want to cut the line at TSA pre-- >> Quality of service opportunity and people will pay more for that. >> Absolutely. And plus, I think TSA pre-check wants to have a lot more people in that ecosystem too. No different than when the Easy Pass came into play years and years ago. I remember just zooming through the Easy Pass and wondering why people would want to stand in line, why would you, right? And then if you think about it, we're also involved with secure mobility, so we have a capability called Telos ghost that allows you to basically hide on a network. You're familiar with the notion of signal hopping? In World War two that's how we avoided detection by the enemy, so this is what we invented here with something around IP hopping. So as a result of that, whether you're a server-facing thing or a client-facing thing or a mobile device, you can't be seen on the network and if you can't be seen on the network, you can't be hacked. >> Well, that's awesome stuff. Your relationship with Amazon Web Services, talk about that, some of the things you're involved in. >> Yeah. >> The deals, the momentum. What's the relationship look like between you guys? >> So we have an enormous relationship with Amazon, most important part that we have, it started with the agency and I was in a meeting with Teresa Carlson, one of the senior people in the agency, and we wondered whether or not we could do for, we Telos, can do for the Cloud that which we've been doing for the enterprise for the better part of 15 to 17 years now, which is basically providing that authority to operate in an automated way. So we invested together and we were able to prove that we could absolutely do that. Now, what we're doing is we're basically copying and pasting that model to our customers across the government. >> And you guys put a stake in the ground, 2011. You were early. I mean 2008 was the beginning of the DevOps movement, you were in the heart of it in 2011. >> Wood: Yep. What's the biggest thing you've learned or observed or experienced over those years, since 2011? >> The biggest thing? >> Or just the most important. >> Wood: That is an enormous question. >> It could be the most important, the most relevant, most surprising-- >> Well the most important thing was I got married in 2012. (laughter) I have a four year old and two year old and a 14-year old, those are the most important. >> Was it really you who got married, was it your identity? >> Wood: It was really me and it was my identity. I will say, I think that the government is embracing efficiency. The government is embracing change. I think it started around 2014 or 15, and now it's really moving out. I think there's a lot of top cover, both from a policy side and an executive side and I'm seeing a lot of leadership from within the government itself of people who want to make the change happen. >> And there's also the competitive fairness question we're hearing, just here in town, yesterday, rumblings of one-source Cloud, multi-Cloud. Amazon is technically a one-source Cloud, but they've got an ecosystem. Should they have multi-Cloud in their requirements? All these things almost feel like that protest model is going on, like there's a little fud going everywhere from the other vendors. Do we expect to see more of that in your mind or less of it? (laughter) >> I think at the end of the day-- >> The chips are taken off the table. >> The people who don't want change are the ones, who are, if you will, very invested in the legacy. If those people are paid, time, material or cost blessed, they're not paid to be efficient. So there's going to be push back. On the other hand we've seen by the gigantic growth of the adoption of the Cloud and by the Cloud infrastructure and the Cloud ecosystem itself, there are enomorous opportunities for organizations out there. So I think people should embrace the change, I really do. I think, fundamentally, it's going to be a really big positive to this industry and into this region. >> I always say to Dave Vellante and my co-hosts, it's like no brainer, you look at the main frame, that was the generation when I was growing in the industry. I was the young gun, like main frame co-ball, who the hell wants that? Mini computer, eh, I want the client server. It's pretty obvious when you're in it. So I got to ask you with that in mind, Cloud is pretty obvious. Folks will understand DevOps and automation and those efficiences. You mentioned authority to operate as an example. Some of these numbers are pretty significant. So let's go down the problems that are important, what are the consequences, how do you quantify it, right? So the problem that people are trying to solve is how do I get resources, computing, software, whatever. Pretty important, because now you've got security, you've got all kinds of stuff. What are some of the consequences and you mentioned some benchmarks that you've quantified. You mentioned provisioning a server in a year. Is that really true? >> Wood: That's true! >> So give me some data on some of consequences, kind of the old way and new way. >> Well the old way if you're using the traditional procurement, it's like I said, one of the big issues is whether it was the culture or it's procurement roles or just the process to get an approval, it would take a year to get a server provisioned. Now, it's literally, you push a button and one to two minutes later you have a server, a new server. So you get ultimate scale, you get ultimate throughput, you pay as you go, you pay what you use. What's not to like? So that's all good. From the standpoint of security, because it's the NIST framework we can automate about 90% of that. That's 11 hundred controls, right? So we automate about 90% of those 11 hundred controls. Now, you get a whole bunch of auto inheritance, a whole bunch of things that can be automated are, and as a result, when NIST goes from one version of NIST to another version, all that happens automatically, and more importantly, as a cyber security professional, and I've only been at it since 1994. (laughter) I've been in it for relatively a long time as a CEO. As a cyber security professional, what I see is, as long as I can show a continuous monitoring of your current status, that's very relevant to the operational security professional. That's really good. So for us, we know that our customers are going to be a combination of Cloud, hybrid, and on-prem. These large organizations are going to take years and years and years to move to the Cloud, but they got to start, because now is the time. >> So automation and having that nice stack where it automatically updates and auto-provisioning, auto scaling, but the operational provisioning piece is really where the rubber meets the road, right? Is that what you're getting at? >> Well it's that. It's also you're consolidating your data centers. You don't need lots of them anymore. You can just focus on one, that's another big area. Another big area is, you can lift and shift your legacy IT infrastructure into the Cloud and then put the big investment into the new application as it's siting in there in the Cloud. >> Awesome, John, thanks for joining us here in the cube conversation. Here at Amazon Web Services Headquarters, breaking down the trends in GovCloud public sector as Cloud computing really levels the playing field, opens up new doors, new solutions, faster time to operate, in vi of other things, here in Washington, D.C., in Arlington, Virginia, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (dramatic music)