>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage of eight of his public sector summit live in Washington D. C, where it's a face to face real event. I'm johN for a year host but virtual events. Hybrid events were hybrid event as well. We've got a great remote interview. Got a guest here in person, Jon Stankovic, president of cloud solutions. Smartronix and Britain was the VP of eight of his managed services, also known as A M. S with amazon web services, jOHN and jOHN and three johns here. Welcome to the cube remote >>in person. >>Hybrid. >>Thanks. Thank you. Great to be on the cube longtime viewer and I really appreciate what you >>do for fun to be here remotely but I feel like it right there. >>Yeah, I love the hybrid if it's only gonna get better next time will be in the metaverse soon. But uh, jOHn on the line there, I want to ask you with AWS managed services, take us through what you guys are doing with Smart Trust because this is an interesting service you guys are working together. How's that relates at the table for us. >>Yeah, well, you know, we're really excited about this announcement, We've been working with Smartronix since we launched A. M S 4.5 years ago. So we've been able to build up working with them, you know, a huge library of automation capabilities and this really just formalised as that in an offer for our joint customers where we can bring the expertise from AWS and Smartronix and offer a full solution that's highly integrated to help help our customers jointly accelerate their cloud adoption as well as their operating model transformation as they start to move to a more devops motion and they need help. We're there together to provide our expertise and make that simple for them. >>Well I appreciate the call. You john b john s over here. Js john Stankevich. Um tell me about Smart trust because you heard what's going on with devoPS to point a whole revolutions going on in devops, you're starting to see a highly accelerated modern application development environment which means that the software developers are setting the pace there, the pace car of the innovation, right? And so other teams like security or I. T. Become blockers. Blockers a drag and anchor. So the shift left on security for instance is causing a lot of problems on the security team. So all this is going on like right now so still the speed is the game. What's your take? >>Sure so absolutely. I think that's where this partnership really really excels. You know, we want customers to focus on their mission, you know, national security, health care outcomes. Um we want them to kind of take the rest off their plate. So when you say some of the quote unquote blockers around security uh Smartronix has invested heavily in a federally authorized platform that sits on top of what a WS has done from a Fed ramp and so right off the bat speed agility. We don't want our customers spending time replicating things that we've done at scale and leveraging what AWS has and so by kind of utilizing this, this joint offer all of a sudden a big part of that compliance is taken care of. Uh, and then things like devoPS, things like SRE models that you hear a lot about, we fold all that into this uh, combined service offering. >>I know a little about what you guys are doing. You mentioned SRE is very cool, but let's take a minute to explain what you guys are doing because you guys are on the cutting edge of solving a lot of problems from infrastructure fools around the deVOPS stack. What are you guys doing in the cloud services? >>Sure. So I think jOHN hit a little bit on it. But you know, we look at AMS as best in breed at scale managing core parts of the U. S. Infrastructure. What Smartronix does is many times customers have some unique requirements and we take that core kind of powered by aims and we try and fill in those kind of complementary skill sets and complementary requirements. And so something like the devops, which is basically making sure that those people developing that software, they have also the ability to manage it and on an ongoing basis. Kind of run it. We develop all the frameworks and that's part of this offering to enable that. >>What's the solution jOHN B because I think you guys don't, this is people have challenges. I want to understand those challenges. And then when they go to the external managed service, what's involved, you walk us through that? Because I think that's important. >>Yeah, sure. You know, it turns out jOHN nailed this one. That moving to the cloud can be, can be a big transformation for many, many enterprises and government teams. Right. They worked for many years and have an ecosystem in their traditional data center. But when they move to the cloud, there's a lot of moving pieces and so what we like to focus on is helping them with the undifferentiated aspects of safely and automating cloud operations. So working with, with Smartronix allows us to take what we're doing across the infrastructure services, around security, around automation, around patching instance management, container management, all of those uh, undifferentiated, heavy lifting passed by now with Smartronix and expertise across the application layer across customers, unique environments across federal and moderate the various government standards and compliance is, and we think we're able to get, take a customer um, from kind of really early stage cloud experience and rapidly deploy configure and get them into a very stable scalable posture operationally on the cloud so that they can start to invest in their people, their skills and their differentiated application on the cloud that really drive the differentiation in their business and not have to worry about best practice configurations and operational run books and, and and automation is and and and the latest dep sec ops capabilities that will pick up for them while they're training and getting, they're getting their emotions in place, >>jOHn is on the Smartronix side. Talk about the difference between scale okay. Which is a big issue with cloud these customers want to have with AMS but then you also have some scale, maybe some scale to but highly compliant environments, regulated industries, for instance, this is the hot areas because scale is unwieldy, but if you don't want get rain it in, it can be chaotic. Right? So also regulations and compliance is a huge issue. >>Yeah. What what we found is um, at times customers look at it and they just get frustrated because it can be kind of intimidating and we as a combined team really have spent a lot of time we have accelerators to walk customers through that process and a really flexible model. If they feel that they have a lot of domain expertise in it, then we'll just kind of be almost a supporter other customers look at it and say, you know, we'd like you to take the entire patch of that compliance and so highly regulated environments. Both commercial D. O. D. National Security, um federal civilian agencies, state and local, they're all looking to this and saying we really want someone that's been through things like the U. S. Audited managed service provider, things like they're managed security service provider, things like fed ramp or D. O. D. Ill four and five. And I think to be honest Smartronix has just invested heavily in that with the goal of reducing all that complexity and it's it's really been taken off and we really appreciate the partnership specifically with jOHn and uh the A. W. S. A. M. S. Team. >>All right so you guys were going together, what's the ultimate benefit to the customer? >>I can I'll give my thing right off the bat all this innovation coming out of A. W. S. Um It's fantastic but only if you have the ability to take advantage of it. And so thousands of new services being rolled out. We really want customers to be able to take advantage of that and let at times us do what we do best and let them focus on their mission. And I think that's what really AWS is all about and we just feel very fortunate to be an enabler of that >>john be talking about talking about the staffing issues too because one of the problems that we have been reporting and this has come up at every reinvest on the max. Peterson about this as well. He's promised last year was gonna train 29 million people. See how that comes out of reinvent when the report card comes back. I was kinda busting his chops a little bit there but he had a smile on his face I think is gonna hit the numbers a lot of times, Maybe people don't have an SRE they don't have a devout person or they have some staff that they're in transition or transforming this is a huge factor. What's your take on this, >>you know, that that is so important, you know, as john mentioned, it's all about helping the customers focused and and their their cloud talent is scarce and it's a scarce resource and you you want to make sure that your cloud talent is working on the cool stuff or they're going to leave and and as you train and skill, these folks, they want to focus on what really impacts the business, what's really differentiating doing, you know, doing the cloud and the necessities on operations and operational tasks and sec ops and things like that, sometimes, that's not the sexiest part of the work that the customer really wants to focus their team on. So again, I think together we're able to help drive high levels of automation and really do that day in and day out work that is not necessarily the differentiator of their business and that's going to attract and keep the best and brightest minds in these in these customers um which allows us to help them with the undifferentiated aspects of of the heavy lifting. >>Not only is availability of people, it's keeping the people, I love that great call out there, Okay, where does this go? Where's the relationship. So you guys are partnering, you have the M. S. Is going on? Strong managed services not gonna go away mormon people were using managed services. It's part of the ecosystem within the ecosystem. What's next in the relationship? >>Well, I think, you know, I'll speak first, john, I'm sure you've got some thoughts to, but you know, we've got so many things on our plate around predictive operations and the predictive capabilities that we're excited about tackling together. Obviously there's all sorts of unique applications that require even deeper capabilities and working with Smartronix to help us, you know, provide even greater insight into the application layer. So I kind of see us expanding um both horizontally as well as well as vertically and horizontally. We've got customers looking at the edge with the outpost solutions and we can snap into those capabilities as well. So there's a tremendous amount of kind of, I'd say vertical and horizontal opportunity that we can continue to expand it together, >>john your reaction, That's >>pretty right on Absolutely. I think john Berger really hit it and I think really machine learning, you know, that's a big area of focus, if you look at all this data is being collected, predictive modeling and so we have this kind of transition from a model where people were basically watching screens reacting and what the AWS MSP offer and what you know, AmS offers is really predicting, so you you're not doing that, you're not reacting, you're proactively ahead of things. And that's the honest truth is AWS is such a well run service. It just doesn't break, you know, it doesn't break like what you see in the traditional kind of legacy infrastructure. And so at times we're just continuing to climb that stack. As, as john mentioned, >>it's really interesting as you guys are, as you're talking, I'm thinking myself just go back a couple of years ago, eight years ago or so. DevoPS is a bad word. Dev's dominate up. So I was through them now, operational leverage is a huge part of this ai operations, um, the entire I. T service management being disrupted heavily by cloud operations that also facilitate rapid development models. Right? So, again, this is like under reported, but it's a really nuanced point hardened operations for security and not holding back the developers is the cloud scale. What's your guys reaction to that? >>Yeah, I completely agree. I think, you know, the automation piece of things and I think customers are still going through transitions. You know, traditionally managed services means a big staff and it's like I said, sitting there watching screens and you flip that model where you have developers actually deploying code and infrastructure to support it. It's, you know, it's very transitional and very transformative and I think that's where an offering, like what we've really partnered on really, really helps because at times it can be overwhelming for customers and we just want to simplify that. And as I've said, let them focus on their mission. >>Amen one last question before we break, because I was talking to another partner, a big part of AWS. Um, and we're talking about SAS versus solutions and sometimes if you're too Sassy, you're not really building a custom solution, but you can have the best of both worlds. A little professional services, maybe some headroom on the stack, if you will your building solutions. So the next question is, as you guys put this cutting edge innovative innovative solution together, how are your customers consuming it? Like what's the consumption? I'm assuming there must be happy because a lot of heavy lifting being taken away, they don't have to deal with house the contract process. >>Well, you know, I think, you know, we have the opportunity, we support customers and kind of all modes of their application stack. So, you know, a full stacks solution. You know, even a legacy architecture moving to the cloud requires a high degree of automation to support it. And then as those applications become modernized over time, they become much more cloud native at some point, they might even become a full stack Starzz offer. So many of our customers actually run their SAAS platform leveraging our capability as well. So, you know, I think it gives the customer a lot of optionality uh, and future kind of growth as they modernize their application stack. >>Yeah, john your reaction. Absolutely. >>I think one of the greatest benefits is it's freeing up funds to do mission work. And so instead of spending time procuring hardware and managing it and leasing data center space, they literally have more funding. And so we've seen customers literally transform their business because this piece of it's done more efficiently and they have really excess and really additional funding to do their mission. >>We love the business model innovation, faster um, higher quality, easy and inexpensive. That's the flywheel gentlemen, Thank you for coming on and get the three. John john thank you. Vice President Cloud Solutions. That Smartronix, thank you for coming on. John Barrington BP of amazon websites managed. There is a also known as AWS and A M. S. A W. S got upside down. W. M. Looks the same. Thank you guys for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you. We appreciate great great Cube covers here. eight of us summit we're live on the ground and were remote. It's a hybrid event. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel AWS and our community partners. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeffrey here with the Cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with our continuing coverage of aws reinvent 2020 the virtual event. We're excited to be back. We've been coming to reinvent for years and years and years, I think since 2013 1st years virtual But that's the way it is. And we're gonna jump into Cloud and government and D o d. And we're really excited to have our next guest. You know a lot about the topic. We have Robert Grote. He is the VP of technology and strategy from spark Tronics coming to us from Virginia. Great to see you, Robert. >>Great. Thank you. >>And joining him is Anthony Voltaggio, the CTO of Smartronix. Anthony. Good to see you as well. Thank you. Great. So let's jump into it. I think Rob, we had you on a couple of years ago. I I looked it up. It was early October 18 and you guys were getting a lot of success with cloud in government and I think it was before the Jedi and all that other stuff was going down. Two years is forever in cloud time. I wonder if you could just share a little bit about how the market has changed since I think it was February or March of 2018 to now late November 2020 in terms of cloud and government and Department of Defense. And you're highly regulated customers. >>Sure, I think one of the things that's changed is that security certainly used to be a headwind on bond. Now we're actually seeing it more of a tailwind where our customers, especially are heavily regulated, compliance driven customers in the public sector and the D. O. D are really looking at new ways of embracing the value of the cloud. So one of the things that has changed is that maybe two years ago, we were looking at How do we move digital estate from on premise into the cloud environment? We're now we're looking at. How do we actually achieve value in the cloud? How do we allow our customers to optimize their portfolio? How do they modernize their application footprint in a in a secure way and some of the things that we focused on, particularly smartronix, is how do we remove that friction that exists when a new kind of legacy customer really wants to transform the way that they deliver services. So we built, uh, capabilities that really allow them to more rapidly migrate their services into the cloud environment. We created and have an 80 0, now for a cloud assured manage services, which means that our customers who want to meet the rigorous security mandates now have that ability to utilize our services when they're deploying these services. And it really enables them to focus on the development of the modernization, you know, versus having to do the cumbersome components of security compliance and operation on def. You if you look at what we're trying to build and trying Thio intersect with where our customers we're going, they really want to get to that pace of innovation that the cloud provides. Um, you know, I think I've said this before to the Cube that the slope of disruption is correlated to the pace of innovation. And if you continue to build technical debt like our customers may have done in the past, they're gonna fall behind and it might be okay, um, for, you know, Blockbuster to fall behind the Netflix or for uber disrupted industry. But for our customers, there's national security consequences when they fall behind. So we've got to create a platform and a capability that enables them to innovate on, deliver very agile services rapidly. >>And then I wanna go. I wanna go to you because I think Robin, in your last interview, talked about your customers very secure, highly regulated, compliance driven environments. Right? And? And to be clear, you guys sell a lot to Department of Defense and all the various branches of the U. S. Military etcetera. You know, Anthony, a lot of talk of digital transformation on the commercial side and and people going right And then, of course, all the jokes and memes about Covic, you know, being the accelerator to that for >>your >>customers. The accelerators thio at modernization in the digital transformation are very different. It's not about necessarily the competitors down the street, but it's about some nasty competitors that want to cause this real harm. How how have they adopted? You know, kind of this this digital transformation and what's different in terms of accelerating it in your customer base. >>We're looking our defense customers and national security customers. Absolutely. The velocity and scale of cloud is becoming an enabler again. Looking at those information work was that they have looking at the nation state adversaries that we're facing right now. Information is information warfare. So if we're not ready to scale, innovate at much higher velocity than we have in the past, we're gonna become victim to those attacks. Methodologies that score matters of using so that the scale and power of the cloud as well is that tailwind of all these authorized services that are offered by Amazon that are already at the federal federal high and D o D. Impact. Those for higher, up to impact level six really, really enable them to go ahead and meet that mission. But mad and speed and agility. They need toe mash that for necessary, >>right? Well lets you just talked about impact level, and I want to dig into that for a little bit because in doing research on you guys and a lot of the solutions that customers you talk about, there's there's constant conversation about these impact levels Impact level for impact level five Impact Level six Again. It's highly regulated industry. You guys have a very, very high bar that you have to hit in your solutions. What does impact level mean and why is it important? And how are you basically working your way up the chart, which I assume is a much more impactful? Not not no pun intended, but much more significant solution delivery. >>So impact levels really have to do with information risk. So what is the level of information that that system is processing? So as you move up the impact levels, that information becomes more more critical to national security. So on impact Level four system may have to do with standard mission operations and Ministry of Task, etcetera, where when you go up the staff to impeccable five and even to impact level six or higher, you're really dealing with, let's say, in the d. O d, uh, perspective, the horror fighter eso. Now you're dealing with where that war fighters deployed the capabilities of the water fighter that they're leveraging To fight that battle against the adversary eso you have to put more and more rigorous controls around that information to ensure the adversaries can gain the tactical advantage over our war fighters. >>It's really interesting. You know how all these systems are really designed? Uh, toe work together. And as you said, kind of for that, that warfighter, if you you know, you you watch anything on defense, it's kind of the point into the stick, but there's a whole lot of support behind that behind that person at the very end to help them get the information to be successful in their job and support them. Um, etcetera. But I'm curious. Have you seen a change in attitude in terms of not only the data and the information in the systems as a support for the war fighter, but in fact, that data itself being a significant asset as well as a significant target, probably bigger and more valuable than an aircraft carrier or any other kind of traditional defense assets? >>Yeah, I would say we've definitely seen that change. Our our our customers air really looking at data and aggregate and when you're when you're building a cloud profile when you're building a portfolio systems, um, and it's all in a single type environment or an enclave where you can unlock the value of that data, the aggregate of all of those applications. The aggregate of that data has increased value, and that allows you to do a lot more things with it. Allows you to innovate a lot. Mawr toe. Learn more about that data on We're seeing our customers really looking at. How can they unlock that value? Whether it's looking at improving the supply chain, looking at data feeds that they're able to aggregate from commercial sources as well as sources that they're getting in a distributed fashion or whether it's just, you know, looking at, how can they improve the efficiency of of delivering services to the to the warfighter? Um, it really is about unlocking that value of data. So that's why it's also important that we have capabilities that protect that data. And then we provide more capabilities that allow our customers to be able to leverage as the C. S. P s as AWS innovates. Allow them to leverage these new capabilities much more rapidly than they could in the past, >>right? Well, and you talk about technical debt and you know there's kind of technical dead and There's application dead, and there's kind of application portfolio stuff that that you have right that may or may not work well, that's probably running and has been running for years. That doesn't necessarily all have to be modernized. You said Sometimes you know it's it's best to leave. Leave it as it lies. How are you helping people figure out? You know what, what to modernize, what to leave it as as it is. And then you know, or you know how much effort should really be spent on new on new applications and new development. You know, taking taking advantage of the latest because that's kind of a tricky portfolio strategy. And as you said, there's a whole lot of legacy stuff that's still running in those old data centers. >>You mentioned the key word there and that strategy. Our our customers are looking to us to help them evaluate their portfolio, determine what things that they should be doing next, the sequencing events and how they can unlock some of those values in the cloud. So, you know, one of the things that we talk about is that ability to even if you're taking stuff from a legacy environment and moving that estate into the cloud. There's certain things that you can do to opportunistically re factor and get value out of the cloud. You don't have to rewrite the application every time there's things that you can do to just re factor. Um, and one of those components is that when you look at cloud and you look at the a p I nature of the cloud, um, transparency is the gift of the cloud. And automation is how you get value out of that gift. And when when you look at how automation and transparency you're kind of tied together for our customers and you look at the fact that again everything's in a P I based, you know, with, you know, full non repudiation who made that call when they made that call? You've got an ability to create this autonomic response system, and this is This is a key part of application modernization, giving that customer the ability to rapidly respond to an event, create automation, create run books, use you know, advanced technologies like machine learning for anomaly detection, create, you know, security orchestration, all of those components when you could build that framework. Then your customers can even take some of their legacy assets and be able to utilize, you know, the high value of the cloud and respond to events much faster and in, um, or automated an autonomic manner. >>I love that transparency in automation. And I want to go back to you. Anthony, you've been doing this for a long time. Um, you didn't have these tools at your disposal before, and you didn't have necessarily the automation that you have before. And I think more importantly, you know, interesting thing that Rob you touched on on on your earlier interview a couple of years back, you know, kind of this scale learning something identified by by Bill Chamorro's I once in terms of calling it out where you learn something in one place and you can apply that learning, you know, across many, many places. And then the other piece. I want you to comment on its automation because, as we know, a lot of errors happen from silly things, fat fingers, bad copy paste, putting in a wrong config code. This that and the other. So, by adding mawr and Mawr automation and continuing to kind of remove potential little slip ups that can cause big big problems. It's a really different world that you've got in the tools that you have in your portfolio to offer these solutions up to your clients >>absolutely again, as we've learned MAWR Maura about these repeatable patterns that have happened across our different customers. That allows us to create that run book automation library that then allows our team and our capabilities scale across multiple workloads and kind of like Robert identified earlier. There's a lot of these cognitive services, and I'll take Amazon a specific example. Guard duty. It is a very innovative capability with M. L. A. I behind it that allow you to look at these access patterns and communication patterns of these application workloads and quickly identify threats. But the automation and road book and orchestration that you can build behind this then allows you to leverage that library to immediately respond to these events. When you see a threat and you see that pattern, your your ability to rapidly respond to that and mitigate that threat, Israel allows your business and information systems continue providing no the primary business use case and again in our GOP customer. National security system. Customers dividing to the warfighter complete their mission. >>Yeah, well, what a good and let you give. Give a plug for some of your processes and techniques. You have something that you call fast, um, to help people, you know, go through this decision process. And I think, as you said, Rob, you know, you gotta have some strategy before you start making some decisions. And also, this thing that we're seeing out there called the shift left. Um, what does that mean to you? What does it mean to your customers? Why is that important? Why should people know about it? Start with you, Rob. >>So what? We notice we've been doing cloud services, you know, since 2009, Really? One of the first eight of us public sector partners delivering the first capabilities to that market. And what we noticed is that ah, lot of organizations found it easy to move one or two workloads into the cloud. But they struggled in making a cloud, a true enterprise asset. So we took a step back and we created something that we call foundational agile strategic transformation. And that's fast. It's a It's a program that we developed that allows complex organizations. Security minded organizations understand What are all the foundational things that need to be in place to really treat cloud as an enterprise asset? And it covers much more than just the technical components. It covers the organizational components. It covers all the stakeholders around security. But one of the key things that we've changed in the past couple of years is how do we not only look at, you know, leveraging the cloud is an enterprise asset, But how do we allow them to accelerate how they can get the value out of the cloud, modernize their applications, create thes capabilities? And the shift left component of fast is providing as much capability all the way down to where the developer is, where you have maybe dead set cops when it used to be a developer on one side and operations on the other. Security is kind of a binding function. Now we're talking about how can we create more capability, right at the point of development? How can we shift that capability? And I think the role of the managed service provider is to enable that in an organization provide capability, provide operations capability but also help them in a You know, we use the term SRE quite a bit. Site reliability, engineering. How can we really help them continuously optimize their portfolio and build a set of capabilities and services? So when they're building new applications, they're not adding to their technical debt. >>That's great and so and so, so important. And it's just been so interesting. Toe watch again. A security specifically for Public Cloud in AWS has become from you know, what was potentially a concern and a headwind to now being a tailwind. And all you have to do is go to go to some of the the architectural keynotes my some of my favorites and see the scale in massive investments that they can put into infrastructure. And they can put into security that no single company, unless you have the biggest, biggest ones you know, can possibly invested to be able to leverage that opportunity. And obviously, Teresa Carlson and the Public Sector team have done a really good job and giving you guys the solutions that satisfy the very tight requirements that you're very important customers have. So it's really a great story and really enjoy learning mawr and continued success to you guys And, uh, and your teams and your importance, your customers and all the important stuff that they protect for us. Uh, eso thank you very much. All right. Thank you. All right, well, signing off. That's Robert and Anthony. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Ongoing coverage of aws reinvent 2020. Thanks for watching. See you next time. Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live, from Washington D.C. It's Cube Conversations, with John Furrier. >> Hello there, welcome to the special Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier with the Cube here in Washington D.C. at the headquarters of Amazon Web Services Public Sector, here in Arlington, Virginia, right around the corner from D.C. Our next guest is Robert Groat, with the Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronix, a service provider in Cloud and an IT. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you John. >> So we're in D.C. and the Cube's getting the lay of the land, so much innovation happening around Cloud and disruption, you got one group going, scratching their heads, wondering what's happening, some groups saying what happened, and you got people making it happen, right? >> Exactly. >> What's the big "ah-ha" moment people might not know looking into D.C. now? What is the real trend? What are the people that are making it, what are they doing? Is it the Cloud, is it mobile, is it data-driven? >> Yeah, I think it's all of those components, but I think one of the things that you're really seeing is that the Cloud is enabling these organizations, these traditional organizations, to really transform in the way that they deliver and consume IT services. IT services have been a mess in this town for a long time, the contracting process has been a mess, some of the things that happened, some of the smaller organizations have had a chance to be really innovative and take a leadership role in delivering services to the community and not just the large beltway bandits that we've seen in the past. So I think some of the "ah-ha" moments are probably around, you know, we've been working, Smartronix has been working with the public sector and Cloud since 2009, so really one of the early pioneers, and we used to run across all of these issues where security was the blocker, and it would take a long time to convince people that the security in the Cloud really was what it needed to be. Now we're seeing, in terms of an "ah-ha" moment, we're seeing that security is the enabler, we're seeing that these organizations are really embracing the fact that you can do things in the Cloud from the security perspective that you could never do before. And I think that you've got this kind of next generation of managed service provider that embraces those tenants of how to manage services and manage security services and it's really disrupting the way that the Federal Government's done business in the past. >> You know, we were at the Public Sector Summit last June, and we were commeters, the first time the Cube was at an event, which we had been to other ones before that, but it was very clear to me that we're in a no-excuses government at this point, cause there's a lot of forcing functions. You have one, connected social media, and everyone's like hey, why can't I do that over there? It's like the old iPhone moment on the enterprise. Why can't I bring me iPhone to work? You know, years ago, right? >> Exactly. >> Now you have security looking down the barrel, and IOT happening, and you don't have a thing, so you have Swiss cheese called malware, attacking every hole, every corner of the network potentially is compromised. >> Exactly. >> So security is forcing, and we're at cyberwar. >> We are! >> You can't deny that, so why isn't the Congress emergency funding for more security, or is it happening? >> Well, they need to be, but if you look at, if you look at the way traditional data centers are built and on-premise infrastructure is built, you had a variety of contractors coming in, each kind of doing their own thing, you had this heterogeneous infrastructure that was all built and kind of tangled together, and there wasn't this great way of being able to look at Cloud services or be able to look at a Greenfield environment, and have everything that's happening in that environment aware to you. And that's really what the Cloud is enabling. You're actually. >> You mean program the whole infrastructure? >> Programmable infrastructure, exactly. You're actually, every single thing that happens in a Cloud environment ends up being an API call. Each one of those API calls ends up being logged, and when you have every event that's happening in your environment, you don't have that in a traditional data center. When you have every event that's happening in that environment, and you can apply some of these new primatives that AWS is providing around machine learning and AI, now you're using those to attack those vectors that you're talking about, to protect critical infrastructure, really in ways that you couldn't do before, and you can actually, with this programmable infrastructure, you can actually really look at being able to respond to events, and have autonomic response and remediation of these events. So when something happens, you've programmatically defined how you're going to respond to those events, and it's repeatable. >> Yeah, one of the things I'll share with you, I did an interview with, I think it was the CTO or the CSO of Fortinet, which is a security vendor, >> Mhmm. >> And we were talking, and we were totally geeking out, he was like the complexity of the Cloud actually is an advantage in the security, and I said what do you mean by that? He goes, most of the hackers will focus the main payload of their vector on one particular item, and that's where all their energy, if they have to hunt too far, they kind of give up.6 >> It's just like on the battlefield. The surface area of attack matters, and when you have such a wide, vast surface area of attack, there's no way for them to. >> So you agree with that? >> 100% agree with that. >> How is that, how do I turn that complexity, obviously there's a main range of tools to make the Cloud easier, but complexity of scale, how do I turn that as an IT person or a manager, or an executive, into a security advantage? What do I do? >> So the security advantage is that every time you build a rule, every time you think about compliance and maintaining compliance for your organization, you're actually starting to build knowledge and a new capability. That can be applied programmatically now, across your entire set of enclaves that you use for managing infrastructure, so when we develop one thing as a manage service provider, to make sure we're meeting some kind of compliance mandate, that now can be shared across all of our clients in the space, and this can start to really help create that protective ops infrastructure. >> So you scale more observation space to get more data, that gives you also an advantage. >> It does, it does. And then when you can actually take that data and use it to train to understand where these advance persistent threats are, you can then really start to do things, that this was the province of really large organizations, only in the past. And now AWS has democratized that ability to use these tools around artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve security. >> Robert, you can't go back five years without hearing, are you kidding me, that Cloud is insecure. Turns out, Cloud is becoming a better security paradigm than building on site because of human error or other force majors or any kind of other acts. >> That's exactly right. Anybody who's looking at it from a security perspective and thinks that they can have the same kind of security that, you know, a multi-billion dollar company like AWS can provide, they're mistaken. And the main thing around that is, they don't have transparency to every event happening in that environment, and that's what you get when you start to utilize Cloud services. >> Yeah, I think Verizon was the first company that notified me that this might be the trend. I think this was like a 2011 time-frame. Don't discount a multi-tenant Cloud. >> Exactly. >> Like okay, and they realized and have been tracking that like okay, so big trends in technology, tailwinds and headwinds. What trends are tailwinds for the growth, and what are the headwinds, what's the blockers? >> Well the tailwinds is the fact that I think everybody's kind of not resigned to the fact, but they're seeing the Cloud first as probably a strategy that they should take. And, you know, we've seen the government be laggards in the past with adopting new technology, I think what they're seeing now, especially in the Department of Defense, and then some of the Federal organizations that we're working with, they're actually seeing that perhaps their adversaries are having a competitive advantage by moving into the Cloud, maybe they should look at the competitive advantages that they should have moving into the Cloud infrastructure. Not just security, but the ability to be innovative and agile and deliver services much faster than they've ever been able to deliver them before. >> Well we had a different approach and automated actual code bases so that you can actually deploy services and automatically code them up with glue instantly, so it's interesting. >> That is one of the fundamental things, that when you start looking at infrastructure's code, and you look at things that you can make repeatable in these environments, then look at how many times the government's probably built out a particular enterprise software staff, whether it's Share-A-Plan or >> Authentication. >> It all gets repeated, once that gets cauterized and done right with the right subject-matter experts, then you can start to create service catalogs that these organizations can use and rapidly deploy things in a repeatable and manageable fashion. >> This is an open-source ethos. >> It is. >> We're on the shoulders of others, why replicate something that's already a service, throw it in a service catalog, make it a micro-service, make it an API. >> And that culture's finally transformed in the Federal Government, that didn't used to be the culture, right? >> People must be like, finally! >> It used to be, I have to have my arms wrapped around this, I have to be able to understand everything that's happening, and you would always hear some of these larger organizations say, you know, I don't want to have vendor lock-in. Even now sometimes, you'll see it a little bit. I don't want go with, maybe AWS, because I'll have vendor lock-in, yet for dozens of years, they've been locked into proprietary databases to commercial enterprise platforms, these behemoth software things that AWS again has helped to democratize by providing these primitives and allowing people to build things backed on open-source. >> You're speaking our language, we talk about this all the time, the lock-in, there's always a lock-in spec somewhere, if it's good, the issue is proprietary software and switching costs. >> Yes. >> And choice, right? So that the dimensions to evaluate for customers that we've seen that's successful is, okay, I don't mind lock-in if it's a damn good solution, I'm going to lock that in. >> Right. >> But I have choice. This is going to be interesting, right? So the multi-cloud conversation that is going on around the DOD is interesting, we've been reporting and out in the field, we've been getting the data coming in, saying hey, this DOD kind of overture is interesting, because now if they take the same route as the CIA, we're talking about massive infiltration of Amazon Web Services across the government, because that CIA's kicking ass and taking names with Amazon. >> Mhmm. >> Now you've got the DOD looking down potentially a single-cloud option, other vendors are crying foul calling, we need spec in policy, which is a hijack model of putting in multi-cloud requirement. What's your thoughts on that? Should it be requirement or should we jump off? >> Well, for one, when you have innovators in a space and they take a lead in the space, you're going to get, that's a forcing function for other companies to compete, and that's not a bad thing, it really isn't. And a lot of these organizations, there might be reasons that are very valid reasons for them to consider multi-cloud, or even consider what they have within their own on-premise infrastructure. You've got, you know, tens and tens of years of legacy technical debt in your data center, there's not a reason to pull everything into the Cloud environment, there might be reasons to just let that die a slow death and sunset that. >> Got the mainframe. >> And, like the mainframe stuff, for them to look at even migrating mainframe capabilities into the Cloud, it's a lot of rewrite, it's a lot of things that need to happen. And maybe there's ways that you can extend that on-premise environment, breathe a little bit of life into the on-premise environment, while you're building out your new infrastructure. And that's probably the right path to take. >> And some people choose to have Cobalt code running banks right now, and just because they have that process. >> And it's working, and you know, they'll inevitably come to the time that they have to do that migration. >> Great commentary, great to have you on, great to chat about the technology trends. Smartronix, what are you guys doing, how do you guys fit into this trend, take a minute to talk about what you guys do, and your opportunity. >> Sure, Smartronix is about a 20-year-old company, we talk about some of our competitors will talk about being born in the Cloud, we were actually pretty much born in the enterprise, we helped the Marine Core establish their network operation security command, 20 some years ago, we were first to kind of lead virtualization technologies to help the forward-deployed forces move in and create kind of these tactical data centers, mobile data centers that can move into theater, so it's always kind of been on the forefront of network operations and cybersecurity, and innovative solutions, innovative use of technology, in government. >> The battle field's an instant case of how to deploy. >> Absolutely. >> You need wireless. >> Austere environments, you know, low-power, they used to bring trucks in to be able to set up their mobile data center, and we actually using virtualization technology back in 2004, you know. >> You got to push the envelope. >> You have to. >> Your job is to push the envelope. >> And that's really where I think Smartronix has done a really good job, is that we've helped these large organizations that are in very secure and highly-regulated compliance-driven environments, and utilize technology in innovative ways. More securely, and more optimally in these environments. So when we had a chance in 2009, to do a solution for President Obama at the time, they introduced the Recovery Act, they needed a website to track 750 billion dollars worth of funding. We came in with a pretty innovative solution. They said they had 10 weeks to build this, you're not going to do that in a data center environment. We came in with a solution that said on day one, we're going to utilize Amazon Web Services capabilities, we're going to build out the test endeavor while we build out the data center environment, and we're going to make your deadline by October 1st. And that was really the jumpstart of what we did. >> Do you meet your deadline? >> We absolutely did. >> What was that other website that you didn't actually get the deadline done, they had to bring in? >> Yeah, the healthcare. >> Oh, the Obama. >> So this one was recovery.gov, a very well-documented success, it ended up being the very first cloud-first initiative for the Federal Government. The very first government property running on public Cloud infrastructure, and then from there we migrated to >> Well, he doesn't get the credit he deserves on open government. >> He doesn't. >> He opened up data sets, he changed the game. >> He did, and again, that was, I think when you look at historically, when you look back at the CTOs and CIOs of the Federal Government at that time, they were really trying to look to see how commercial technologies could be applied in the government, how you could get that agility and innovation, and speed of business of commercial and do that in the Federal Government. And I think we embraced that at Smartronix pretty early on, and we were kind of on the leading edge sometimes of delivering this kind of abilities and services. >> Literally. So, you guys are the right group to call for IT to get modernized, because this is is problem. No one can hide anymore, there's no more excuses. And again, this is the lack of innovation. If you've been sitting around not innovating, now there's cyberwars attacking, you got cybersecurity, IT needs to transform, they got to do it like really fast. >> You got all of these competing pressures, security, you've got time, you've got cost, you've got capabilities, all of those things competing. You need to have a trusted advisor, a partner, to get you through that. What Smartronix has created, we call it our four pillars, and these are very simple pillars, but it's really really required for really looking at Cloud services strategy. You have to help the organization define what the business outcomes are that they want in these environments, help them think through what the roadmap and strategy is to get there, and then when you go to the second pillar, which is design, there's unique ways to design things to make it cloud-native, to utilize cloud-native services that also, when you get to the implementation and migration point, you're building these in a programmatic way that makes it easier to operate and manage, and that's the fourth pillar. So if you can get these organizations to think from strategy all the way through to run, all the way through to operations management, you're going to have the more effective organization and better services in your environment. >> Robert Groat, Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronix, thanks for spending that time with me. >> Thanks, John. >> I'm John Furrier with the Cube, in Washington D.C., actually in Arlington, Virginia at Amazon Web Services Public Sector headquarters, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>from around the globe. It's >>the Q with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Hello. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We're here covering A W. S s international public sector virtual event. We have a great guest. The star of the program is Max Peterson, Good friend of the Cube. Also Vice President of A W s International for Public Sector Max. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on this virtual remote interview. Cuban interview. Hey, >>John. Great to be back on the Cube, even if it is virtual >>well, you know, we're not face to face. We have to go virtual. So the cube virtual, you've got to public sector summit. Virtual. Um, this is the time of the year where normally we'd be out on the road in Bahrain, Japan, Asia, Pacific Europe. We'd be out on the summits talking to all the guests and presenting that the update on public sector. But we have to do it remotely. Um, a little bit of trade off. The good news is with cove it for at least you guys. It's a global media network. And with these remote interviews. Uh, public sector is seeing a lot more global activity, and that's what I want to get your thoughts on. What is the business update internationally for public sector? I'm sure that with CO over the pandemic, you're seeing a lot of activity. How is the public sector business doing internationally? >>John, You know, you mentioned one of the silver linings of a pretty bad situation with the Koven pandemic. And that's been that it has meant that people have to be resourceful. Governments have to be resourceful on DSO. There's been a tremendous amount of innovation people have gotten used to now using modern cloud technology to support remote work and remote war learning. Um, out of necessity, we've had to figure out how do we deliver far greater health care services using digital technology, telemedicine, digital social care, uh, chime rooms? Uh, it really, in a nutshell, has been a tough six months for people, but a relative relatively busy six months for innovation. And for i t for the public sector customers, >>you know, I did an interview a few months ago for one of the award programs in Canada. Um, with the center had a customer on disk customers. The classic customer, a Amazon. You know, I'm not sure we do it all internally. He deployed A W S Connect in literally days that saved the lives of many of his countrymen and women by getting the entitlement checks out. And he was a glowing endorsement because, he said, with Cove in 19 they were crippled. He said they will. They stood up a call center and literally he was converted. That's just one example again. That's Canada of the kind of solutions that you guys air, enabling with Cloud to quickly respond to the crisis, to use technology to solve other technology problems and also business problems. Can you give an example on the international front of where you're seeing some activity? Because this seems to be the same pattern we're seeing, People who have used in the cloud we cube virtual. Will there be no Cuba's wasn't for our cloud implementations, but this is, um, obvious, but I want to call it out. It's important. Can you share some examples of people internationally using the cloud to get and respond to the to the cove in 19 pandemic in delivering services? >>Yeah, In fact, John, we're focusing a lot on that at the public sector summit online that comes up here in October. Um, a couple of quick examples. In fact, one of the top learnings is speed matters. And so we have Eve Curry from Australia, who talks about social and health care and how they were able to get a complete digital suite up and running for supporting 5000 elderly patients and over 3000 employees in less than a week, and that included getting up and running a video conferencing and tele consultation capability using AWS chime. It involved getting up and running collaboration space for the remote workers using work work docks. And it involves setting up a complete call center on the cloud, using Amazon time and literally that was done in less than a week. Another example, really ambitious example, which again is a testament to the innovation and, uh, the capability, the capability that AWS brings to customers. I'm in India. They had a number of tele medicine applications. They were available for a fee, but they didn't have a universal way to reach the vast population in India. And so when the pandemic hit three organization that was responsible for the public health component was challenged to get a no cost tele consultation hella medicine system up and running for outpatient services that could scale to reach a billion people. Um, they did that in 19 days. They got the system up and running Now hasn't gotten to a billion people online at one time. But there right now, doing 6000 consultations a day with about 4000 doctors, and they're headed toward 100,000 consultations today. Eso just to your point, speed and scale. We're seeing it across the board from from our public sector customers. >>You know, it's just mind boggling just to kind of pinch myself from it in 19 days. It's crazy, right? I mean, crazy fast If you throw back to the eighties and nineties when I broke into the business, you know, young gun client server was all the rage back then. And if you wanted to do, like a big apt upon an oracle s a p, whatever it was years, it was months just to do planning. E mean, I mean, think about the telemedicine example 19 days. That's huge. I mean, just the scale is just off the charts. So So I mean, even if you're not a believer in cloud I don't feel should be should just go home and retire at this point because it's just obvious. Uh, the question I wanna ask you specifically because Theresa brought this up on my last interview with her. And I wanna ask you the same question is, what is AWS doing specifically to help customers? I know customers are helping themselves. You mentioned that. What are you guys doing? Toe? Accelerate this. How are you helping of you guys changed a little bit. Can you just share what you guys specifically doing to help customers pivot toe not only solving it, but having a growth strategy behind it? >>Yeah, John, that's a great question. Some of the things that we're doing our long standing programs and so customers from day one have had a need for skills and workforce development. We keep on doubling down on those programs. Things like a W s academy aws educate our restart programs in different countries. So number one is we continue to help customers double down on getting the right cloud skills to enable the digital workforce. The second thing, in fact, if I can, for just amendment, um, there is actually a section of the public sector online called the New Workforce, which talks about both the digital skills that are required and then also some of the remote working skills that we need to help folks with. So So workforce is a big one. Um, the second one. Yeah, and I'm super excited about this because we've opened up the opportunity, form or customers around the globe to participate in our city on the Cloud Challenge Onda That gives a great opportunity to showcase and highlight the innovation of public sector customers and, you know, win some AWS credits and technical assistance to help them build their programs. But I think one of the most the things I'm most proud about in the last 6 to 9 months was when the when this pandemic struck and we listen to our customers about what they needed. We came out with something called the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, and that was a program specifically aimed at providing technical assistance. Um, a ws cloud credits all to researchers to help them, um, tackle the tough questions that need to be answered to help us deal with and then hopefully resolve the pandemic. >>So on the international front, like I said earlier in the open, we would've been in Bahrain. That's a new region, only a couple of years old, Obviously the historic, um this, um, geopolitical things happening there, opening things up, that's been a very successful region. This is the playbook. Can you just give us an update on some of the successes in the different regions by rain and then a pack and other areas? What? Some of the highlights? >>Sure, John, One of the things that I think it's super exciting is that all of these customers are developing new capabilities right now. Um, one example from Egypt. Uh, they had to get literally an entire student population back to school. When the pandemic hit on DSO. They quickly pivoted to bringing a online learning management system or LMS up on the cloud on AWS. Um, and they have been able to continue to teach classes, literally to millions of students there. We've seen that same sort of distance learning online education across the globe. Another example would be when countries needed to figure out how to beam or effective in that sort of time tested, contact tracing process. So So when ah person has been found to have the the flu or the illness the subject illness, um, they typically have a lot of manual contact tracers that have to try to identify kind of where that person's been and see if they can. Then, um, helped to control the spread of whatever the diseases Kobe 19. In this case, um, we put together with governments across the world with a W s partners across the world again in very fast order, automated systems to help governments manage this, um, Singapore is a super example. India's a massively scaled example, but we did it in countries of across the globe, and we did it by working with them and the partners there to specifically respond to their needs. So everybody's case, while similar at a high level, you know, was unique in the way that they had to implement it. >>And it's been a great, great ride international us with co vid. You guys have ah current situation. You guys are providing benefits and I'll see the cloud itself for the customer to build those modern APS. The question I wanna ask you, Max, as an executive at eight of yourself. So you've been in the industry, Um, with public sector pre covert, it's, you know, it's before Cove. And there's after Govind is gonna be kind of like that demarcation line in the society. Um, it has become a global thing. I just did an event with Cal Poly was mentioned before we came on, um, small little symposium that would have been, you know, face to face. But because we did it virtually it's now global reinvents coming up. That's gonna be essentially virtual. So it's gonna be more global, less physical, space to face. Everything is introduced, no boundaries. So how >>does that >>impact? How do you How do you guys, How do you look at that? Because it impacts you, I guess a little bit because there's no boundaries, >>right? You know, John, I think this plays into what we're talking about in terms of people and governments and organizations getting used to new ways of working on de so some of our new workforce development is based around that, not just the digital skills in the cloud skills a couple of the things that we've recognized by the way, Um, it's different, but done well, there's new benefits. And so so one of the things that we've seen is where people employ chime, for instance, Uh, video conferencing solution or solutions from our partners like Zoom and others. Onda people have been able to actually be Maurin touch, for instance, with elder care. Um, there were a number of countries that introduced shielding. That meant that people couldn't physically go and visit their moms and dads. Um and so what we've seen is a number of systems on care organizations that have responded andare helping thing the elderly, uh, to use this new tech on. But it's really actually, uh, heartwarming, uh, to see those connections happen again, even in this virtual world. And the interesting thing is, you can actually step up the frequency on DSO. You don't have to be there physically, but you can be there, Andi and interact and support with the number of these thes tools. I think one of the other big learnings that we've seen for many organizations and just about every public sector group has toe work with, um uh, their constituents on the phone. Of course, we've got physical offices, you know, whether it's a hospital or a outpatient center or a social care center. Um, but you always have to have a way to work on phones. What's happened during the Cove in 19 Pandemic is there's been a surge is where information needed to get out to citizens or where citizens literally rushed the phone lines to be able to get the most current information back. Andi, the legacy called systems have been completely overwhelmed, their inadequate. And we've seen customers launch the online call center in the cloud piece, using Amazon connect as their starting point. But then, you know, continuously innovating. And so starting to use things like Lex to be able to deliver a chat box function, Um, in the in the US, for example, one of our partners, Smartronix, was able to automate the welfare and social care systems for a number of different states to the point now where 90 plus percent of those calls get initially handled, satisfied using a chat bots, which frees up agents the deal, you know, with the more difficult inbound calls that they get. >>I gotta ask you, where do we go from here? What's next for these organizations? Post Covad World. You know, if we're sitting at a cocktail party was sitting down having dinner or where he talking remotely here, how would you? How would you explain to me what's what's next? Where do we go from here? And how do organizations take that next post co vid recovery and growth? What's your take? >>And John? I think that's a fantastic question to ask. Let me tell you what we learn from our customers every day because we see them try and do new things. If I had to take my sort of crystal ball, I think we're in version one of figuring out How do we work in this new environment? I think there's a couple of key things that we're going to see. Number one. Um, resilience and continuity of service is not gonna be optional. Everybody is coming to expect that government care, not for profits. Education is going to be able to seamlessly continue to deliver the core services irrespective of these world events or emergencies on B C customers. Now you know, really getting that right. It used to take. You talked about it? Um, heck, you couldn't get a system up and running in 19 days. You'd be lucky if you cut a purchase order in 19 days and citizens and constituents that aren't going to accept that anymore, right? That's one big, uh, change that I think is with us. And we'll keep on driving cloud adoption. I think the next one is how do we start putting the pieces together in ways that make some of this invisible and an example? Um, you know, kind of starts with that with that example in the US with partner that was building systems to help, uh, welfare and social care call centers operate smoother. But if you think about the range of AWS services and the building blocks that customers have, we'll find customers starting to create that virtual experience in aversion to dot away where they tie the contact center into chat box and into transcription. Like, for instance, being able to have a conversation with the parents and using comprehend medical actually get a medically accurate transcription. So the doctor can focus on that patient interaction and not on actually data captured, right, and then if that patient asks. Well, g Doc, could you give me more information about, you know, X y z, uh, medication, or about what a course of treatment sounds like? Instead of tying up the doctors time, you could go and use a tool like Amazon Polly to then go text to speech and give all of that further rich information to that citizen. Um e think some of them things. Same scenarios, right? How do we go from this? This very fast version one dot response to a a mawr immersive, less tech evident capability that strings these things together that to meet kind of unique use cases or unique needs. >>Yeah, I think that's totally right. I think you know the 19 days. Yeah, I'm blown away by that. But I think you know, we thought about agility. That was a cloud term. Being more agile with your code business. Agility has come on the scene and then with business agility you have I call I call business latency. Andi, you went from years to months, months, two days. And I think now, as you get into the decks versions, it's days, two hours, hours, two minutes, hours two seconds Because when you look at the scale of the cloud some of things we were talking what's going on? Space force and globally around with space Leighton See, technically and business late and see this is the new dynamic and it's gonna be automation. Ai these air. This is the new reality. I think co vid points that out. Uh, what's your reaction to that? And give a final message to the AWS international community out there on on how to get through this and what you guys are doing? >>Yeah, John, I think your observation is you know that increasingly, uh, there needs to be a connectedness between the services that thes public sector customers deliver on dso Um, that connectedness can be in terms of making sure that a citizen who eyes on their life journey doesn't need to continuously explain to government where they're at. But rather, government learns how to create secure, scalable data stores so that so that they understand the journey of the citizen and can provide help through that journey. Eso it becomes mawr citizen centric. I think another example is in the entire healthcare arena where what we have found is that the ability thio to securely collaborate on very complex problems and complex data sets? Uh, like like genomes, um is increasingly important on DSO. I think what you'll find is you'll find we're seeing it today, right? With customers like, uh, Genomics England and the UK Bio Bank were there, in fact, creating these secure collaboration spaces so that the best researchers can work against these very important data sets in a secure, yet trusted collaboration environment. So I think we're seeing much more of that on I would say The third thing that we're probably learning from our customers is just how important that skills and workforce pieces. Um, with the accelerated pace, we continue to see pressure on smart skills, and resource is that our customers need. Fortunately, we've got a great global partner ecosystem, Um, but you'll see us continuing to push that forward as a zone agenda that will help customers with eso. I guess my parting comment would be how could it not be? I hope that the customers that attend the summit are from all over the world. I hope they find something that's useful to them in pursuing their mission and in their journey to the cloud. And John, I just This is always a pleasure to join the Cube. Thanks very much for the time today. Thank >>you, Max. Great. Call out. Just I'll call it out. One more time to amplify the learnings in the workforce development starting younger and younger. The path to get proficiency is quickly. You could be a cloud computing cybersecurity application, modern application development, all hot areas. Uh, the new playbook is cloud. It's all there online. And, of course, Max. Global footprint with the regions, the world has changed, and it's gonna be pretty busy. Time for you. We'll be covering it. Thanks for coming on. >>That's great. Thanks, John. >>Okay, I'm John. Free with the Cube. You're watching any of US? Public sector summit, The international online event. I'm John. Hard to keep your host. Thank you for watching

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Everyone welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of Amazon Web services. Public sector Summit Online Virtual I'm John Furrier, your host of the Cube here in our Palo Alto studios were quarantined with our crew here. We're talking to all the guests, getting all the content I'm excited of. Sandy Carter Cube alumni's also the VP vice president. Worldwide public sector partners and programs. Sandy. Great to see you virtually. You look >>great virtually too. It's great to see everybody virtually. >>I love the sign behind you. Powered by AWS. I'm excited to have you on, but I really wanted to get jump right in because this is really an important conversation. Public sector is seeing a lot of activity around what's going on with covert 19 especially with all the public services that are needed. And people are now remote workers, remote consumers, public service and still needs to be delivered just like business. So it's a really had a big impact of the entire world. We're all seeing it. We're feeling it's not just tech thing. How are you seeing your community respond? Your partners are responding to covert. 19. Can you share what's happening? >>Yes, John, I have to say, I am so incredibly proud of the partners that we support and how they've stepped up in this time. That has no blueprint, right? It's brand new for everybody, whether we're talking about virtual call centers. We had so many states that said they had people waiting for hours waiting for calls to be answered about Covance for Take. For instance, West Virginia, West Virginia had collars waiting for hours 77,000 calls a day. They worked with one of our partners, Smartronix, and they got this new solution a ream or remote virtual call center, up in 72 hours. 72 hours later, Average wait. Time was 60 seconds. Amazing job by Smartronix or one of our other partners, Elektronik Caregiver who's based out of New Mexico, where my husband's from a great partner who's been looking at, um, telemedicine, how they can help those at risk in hospitals and rehabs, even just at their homes. Or another startup that's a partner of ours called Hello, Alice, that integrated with our AI and ML to create a small business platform to help those small businesses get access to funding. Answer questions During this really hard time and the last example, I'll give you his Inter vision, one of our newest premier partners, who had a customer that came to them and said, Look, I need to get a remote work solution up workspaces identity manager help desk And they thought it would take months and Inter Vision was able to do it in week. So I am so proud and so thankful of our partners and what they've done to really impact the world, not just for their own profit, but for purpose helping out states, governments and citizens >>and congratulations. And it's well needed. People are feeling the pain. One area I want to get your thoughts on is the agencies we talked to the Department of Defense general manager earlier today. Um, all of the agencies in in public sector are shifting, and obviously, with the limitations, they got a shift to the remote workforce. They got to be faster. They got to be agile. I know they've been trying to, but they can't just wait any longer. They're forced to. How are your public sector partners helping the agencies? >>Yeah, this is another just terrific story. I cannot brag about our partners enough with our agency work. So if you looked at all of the agencies, kind of had a tight title wave of this digital transformation, things that we're gonna take them years ended up taking them weeks and months. So whether it's Kansas with the Department of Labor, they had 8800 and 77,000 calls a day. 21 staff couldn't do. It worked with our partners to get a call center up and going or in New Mexico again with Accenture, they used Amazon Connect, which is one of my new favorite products from Amazon. It's a call center that leverages machine learning and AI. They were able to work with the New Mexico Human Services and get that up and going in two days, Um, or even in Montana, a great story with Deloitte, where they built a custom chat box in seven days, custom chat box and seven days to answer questions about food and medicine and even how to get cash. If you needed to get cash, our partners really stepped up with the agencies, and they did so much compelling work so quickly. I think speed was such a great component here, John. The speed of deployment, the speed of help. You know, working 24 by seven to deliver these solutions. Our partners really did an amazing job. >>Yeah, and it's really hard with virtual. I got, I got I wish I was in person with everyone because coming to the public sector summits, one of my favorite events reinvent in public sector. Some of the two big shows, I really think encapsulate all the activity because it's virtual. People might miss some news. What else is going on in the world of public sector partners? You? Can you elaborate more on what's going on around the edges? What's on the bleeding? Cutting edge? What's the pioneer and what are some of the blocking and tackling that you're doing? Share some of the news. What else is going on? >>Yeah. Thank you, John. There's so much going on. First of all, we just introduced a new partner solution portal. So all of these code that 19 solutions are featured there. We will provide a URL for any customer looking for a great solution by our partners. We also really honed in and helped our partners during this time around. Said Ramp. And you know that fed ramp is so crucial. Security cybersecurity Incredibly essential. During this time I know you talked to my good friend Casey from Salesforce. They were able to achieve their fed ramp I and we offer a lot of help to our partners to help them to achieve not just fed ramp, but GDP are as well as HIPPA too. Some other news on migrations. We've got a competency around migrations. We've got some new funding for our partners around map and we're seeing our migration's really accelerate, you know, once these agencies, once he states see the power of the cloud, they're like, give me more, I want to put more and so we're seeing migrations accelerate. I know that you saw the Navy speak about what they're doing with s AP and as to another one of my favorite partners 72,000 users now running in his two on AWS. Six different commands pretty powerful. And I would say last but not least, is PTP our program transformation program for our partners, which really is like 100 and 10 day session to help the partners become a cloud business themselves. So they're kind of drinking their own champagne before they go out and help others. They become a cloud business. It's really powerful. This program has helped to generate twice the revenue of a typical a PM program. >>You mentioned the Navy always having interesting chat about that. Migration was less than 10 months. >>Yes, again. Speed, speed, speed, right, John. I mean, it's incredible >>years, two months, and the other thing that you probably find interesting and this is something that's kind of not talked about. But it's felt just the basic stuff, like getting paperwork in some of these processes, like you mentioned Fed Ramp. There's a lot of things that go on around public sector. You just got to get done. You got a slog through it, if you will. You guys have have responded well there, and this is the benefit of the cloud. Having the streamlined processes elaborate more on that, because I think that's important. Benefit not only just started in the critical infrastructure, like call centers and things of that nature, but getting business done. That's a big thing. >>Yeah, And I would say, you know, if you look at it, we helped over 20 states with their insurance processes. I mean, it seems like a minor thing, but a lot of these things were manual before, Um, we've helped many states with unemployment, you know, very critical at this time, taking a manual process and getting it into the cloud. There's so many of these that we can go on and on about How do you get medical supplies? One of our partners cohesive down in Latin America has been helping around some of the supply chain issues that that we deal with there some of the things that we take for granted when you're in person now that your virtual, you really need to think them through in the cloud. So again, you know, our partners responded with speed. They responded with heart to John one of the other things, you know, hashtag tech for good. They responded with heart as well as they were looking at these projects and ensuring that states and agencies and governments around the world could take care of their citizens, which is all of us. >>You know, existing. We've talked in the past. We've talked on camera and off camera around our shared passion around tech for good. I've been a big proponent of as well as us of right of other folks. But with the crisis, the word impact means something. And social impact is actually social impact. Getting your unemployment check or, you know, this this is highlights the critical nature of why these services exist. I think it's a real testament. I think people should step back and saying why we should never go back to the old antiquated ways because this is now the new reality. These services can be agile, they can be faster. It takes a crisis, unfortunately, and I guess that could be the silver lining in all this. So props to you guys on giving the partnership there with the partners >>and to the governments and states, John, who have now, like they moved rapidly, right? All these states, all these agencies, all these governments move quickly to digital transformation. Now they've gotten a taste of it, and they're like, give me more. And so the great thing to me is that this wasn't a one time event or one time crisis driven movement. Now that they see the power of it much like what you're saying with your business, they're doing more and and that's what I really applaud for all of them. And the way that they're transforming the business is now longer term. >>I'm optimistic, and I hope when we come out of this when everyone gets settled and they re imagine and reinvent, there's a growth strategy and expansion could be for positive change. So you've >>got >>stuff. We're all for that, and we'll be watching that reporting on it. I >>want to >>ask you something. I've heard that you guys will be soon expanding your public safety and disaster response partner. Competency. Can you tell me more about that? >>Yeah, So we announced the This is a hard one is disaster response in public safety competency at re invent for our consulting partners? And that went over amazingly well. I mean, take, for instance, Max are who is probably the best at believing delivering data both pre and post data to a disaster. They helped Noah, for instance, where data was taking 100 minutes to get that data down. Not good enough in a disaster. They were able to achieve a 58% faster download of data so you can do something with that Use that data to make good decisions. So these consulting partners have really embraced are our disaster recovery and public safety response competency. And now what we want to do is introduce this for our technology partners. So we're announcing the coming of this program for our technology partners. Now who is a technology partner? Well, think about an AI is the or a SAS provider these type of partners who have great solutions that target this particular area, think about public safety right now and how important that is, or even disaster response. You know, we have cove it, but right after that, we have all these hurricanes and earthquakes and other things that are happening around the world. Killer hornets. Um and so we've got some great technology partners that have solutions here, and we'll be welcoming them into this confidence. He fold as well. >>Well, this brings up something I've been commenting on. I want to get your reaction is because you know, when you have that flywheel pattern, infrastructures of service platforms of service and sass that build cloud when we've seen the benefits over a decade. Plus, when you bring the business model, you start to see the same thing. Some foundational things like infrastructure as service would be like compliance. Instant auditing that the Navy seeing, for instance, I heard earlier and then that platform pieces to allow these new workloads. So these new applications are going to be coming on. Creative surge of application developers, new kinds of workloads, new kinds of workforces and and work work flows. So you're gonna start to see these new APS. That means you guys will probably be inundated with new things. How do people get involved? Do they join a PN? What are some of the benefits? What should someone do? I want to be a partner of AWS because I see a solution. I create something that may be unique and specialize in niche. But it solves a really important problem. I want to bring it to Amazon. How do I do that? >>And we want you as a partner to John. Um, so yes. I mean, if you're a partner, the very first place to start is to join our A p m r Amazon Partner Network. If you're a startup or an I s d a distributor or reseller consulting partner, any of those that would be the first place to start, And then based on what you're interested in, you would then select the types of help that you might get. So, for example, if you're a start up, we helped start ups with credits because a lot of startups need free credits as they're starting their businesses or even technologies. So if you think about Hello, Alice, uh, you know, really using tagging for her small business site during Cove it we were able to provide some technology expertise to get her moving and grooving. Um, other great programs that we have out there are things like 80 0 the authority to operate. And this is really important, John, because a lot of our our customers require fed ramp and fed ramp is very costly and not only costly, but takes a lot of time so we can dramatically reduce your time to market with fed ramp really help you through with all those best practices. In fact, today we have 110 fed ramp solution that have gone through our 80 or authority to hire authority to operate process. And that's four X. Our top two competitors combined four x the number of partners that have gotten through because of the amount of time that is reduced through this process as well as the best practices that we bring. We've done a slim down version, so if you're a start up and you're interested in it like we partner with the Joshua down at Capital Factory and they've got the Army future command, we got a lot of startups. You want it? We've also got a slim down version for for them as well. >>It's been a >>very powerful program, >>and being in the cloud you can fast track and learn from others. This >>is the >>whole point of cloud. >>Absolutely, And learning from others is, you know, one of the great things that we love to do. In fact, until I we're going to do a big partner meeting, you know, here at the summit we'll have partners that participate in the virtual online summit. We're going to do a separate meeting just for our partners in July as well to share with them some of the things that are important to them around programs and some of these AP and benefits and some of the changes that we've made to help support them during the Cove it crisis. >>And I think you know the partners or the channel or how you look at it. They're adding value and a great partner for Amazon. For you guys, It's a great city. >>Yeah, I mean, are we could not. We at Amazon could not do the business We do without our partners. They bring their expertise, their best practices, the skills and the relationships they have, the contracts they bring to the table. So we're so grateful for the partners that we have in our public sector partner program. It's one of the reasons I loved my job. Every day I get to talk to a new partner on a new technology area that they're working on. It could be, you know, spatial computing, or AI, and they're helping not just move for a business, but they're helping on a purposeful mission project usually which are so powerful in today's world, especially with all the different crisis, is that we've seen, >>you know, One thing I want to get just share with you is that I talk to a lot of partners, certainly on the Cube and in person. One of the things that resonates with partners is not only the optimism of Amazon and programs you run, but it's enablement. You guys really enable the partners to be successful on your behalf and you on their behalf. But ultimately the customer and I think, and there's money to be made so lucrative and profitable, and they could impact change. So this enabling capability is really the magic. And so I want to ask you on your final question. Here in the talk is what's the vibe now? Because also, we know it's pretty depressing with Cove it, um and we're gonna get through this, but so there will be a day we get through. This will be growth and strategies around. It will never be the same. Certainly, I believe the hybrid world. What's >>the >>vibe inside the Amazon Web services public sector partner team, the community, the ecosystem? Could you just give some insight into how people are doing? And what's the vibe? >>Yeah, I would say the vibe is hopeful um, we all see the difference and the impact that we're making on a daily basis. And because of that, um, we continue to stretch forward and really move mountains for our customers to help them deliver better services. Um, you know, our partners are jumping in and all kinds of areas. First of all, for example, they are jumping in on doing hackathons to help with covet 19. So, John, you know, girls and tech. We've got our partners and us as AWS jumping into happy on different solutions for some of these challenges that are facing there. That's all about hope. I hope that we can make a difference. We are jumping in and assisting on remote work and unemployment, um, to provide hope to the teams and the community. So I would say, you know, it's tough for all. In fact, one of my friends describes, this is a crisis cake, not one level of a crisis, but multiple levels of the crisis. And I have never been with a with a more optimistic and positive team in my whole life, one who's willing to do what it takes. And when I see team, I mean not just my AWS partner team, which is the best of the world, but our world class partner team as well, who is willing to jump in there and do what it takes to help our customers. Even this weekend, I had a part of my partner team and my partners working to solve a problem for an agency that was, you know, um, critical. And they jumped in on the weekend to make that happen. So I would say, if I could say one word, I would say My partner's are hopeful they are. They're learning. They're curious. They're stepping out into new areas like connect and remote work and remote learning. And they're doing things that they never thought was possible based on what's happening today. >>Critical infrastructure, critical software, services and processes gotta be maintained and this opportunity. So I think it's, you know, heads down with hope and growth, always great to chat with you. And of course, we'll be following and covering your event next month. So looking forward to it, exciting times. Sandy Carter, Thank you for joining me today for coverage. >>Thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to be here on the Cube Thank you guys for watching as well. >>Sandy Carter, vice president, worldwide public sector partners in program. Distinguished Cube Alumni. A tough job, great job at same time. A lot of opportunities and hope. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. You're watching our coverage. Cube Virtual of Amazon public sector Online summit. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit Online. I'm Stu Miniman your host for this segment. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this space and of course at AWS Public Sector, broad diversity of backgrounds and areas, everything from government to education and the like, so really happy they were able to bring us Joshua Spence, he is the Chief Technology Officer, from West Virginia in the Office of Technology. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. >> I appreciate the invitation to be here. >> All right so, technology for an entire state, quite a broad mandate, when you talk about that, maybe give our audience a little bit of your background and the role of your organization for West Virginia. >> Yeah, absolutely so in the public sector space, especially at state government, we're involved in a myriad of services for government to the citizens and from a central IT perspective, we're seeking to provide those enterprise services and support structures to keep those costs controlled and efficient and be able to enable these agencies to service the citizens of the state. >> Excellent, maybe just to talk about the role of the state versus more local, from a technology standpoint, how many applications do you manage? How many people do you have? Is everything that you do in the Cloud, or do you also have some data centers? just give us a little thumbnail sketch if you would, of what what's under that umbrella. >> Sure, absolutely I think you'll see at the state level we have... We typically administer a lot of the federal programs that come down through funding, ranging from health and human resources to environmental protection, to public safety you've got, just a broad spectrum of services that are being provided at the state level and so the central office, the Office of Technology, Services approximately 22,000 state employees and their ability to carry out those services to the citizens. And then of course you have like local government, like in State of West Virginia with 55 counties, and then you're following municipalities. The interesting thing though in public sector is from the citizen's perspective, government is government, whether it's local, state or federal. >> Yeah, that's such a good point and right now of course there's a strain on everything. With the global pandemic, services from the public sector are needed more than ever, maybe help us understand a little bit things like work from home and unemployment, I expect, may require a shift and some reaction from your office. So tell us what's been happening in your space the last few months. >> Yeah absolutely, well, the first part you get the work from home piece rate, West Virginia, although the last state to have a confirmed test positive of COVID-19, we were in a little bit of in a position of advantage as we were watching what was happening across the world, across the country and so we didn't hesitate to react in West Virginia and through great leadership here, we shut down the state quickly, we put protections in place to help, show up and prevent the spread of COVID. And to do that though with the government facilities, government services, we had to be able to enable a remote workforce and do so very quickly, at a scale that no one ever anticipated having to do. Coop plans for the most part rejected just picking up from the location you're working at to go work at another centralized location. No one really ever thought, "Well, we wouldn't be able to all congregate to work." So that created our first challenge that we had to respond to. The second challenge was then how do we adjust government services to interface with citizens from a remote perspective and in addition to that a surge of need. And when you look at unemployment all across the country, the demand became exponentially larger than what was ever experienced. The systems were not equipped to take on that type of load. And we had to leverage technology to very quickly adapt to the situation. >> Yeah, I'd love you to drill in a little bit on that technology piece. Obviously you think about certain services, if I had them, just in a data center and I needed it all of a sudden ramp up, do I run into capacity issues? Can I actually get to that environment? How do I scale that up fast? The promise of Cloud always has been well, I should be able to react immediately, I have in theory infinite scale. So what has been your experience, are there certain services that you say, "Oh boy, I'm so glad I have them in the Cloud." and has there been any struggles with being able to react to what you're dealing with. >> Well yeah the struggles have absolutely been there and it's been a combination of not just on-premise infrastructure, but then legacy infrastructure. And that's what we saw when we were dealing with the unemployment surge here in West Virginia, just from a citizen contact perspective, being able to answer the phone calls that were coming in, it was overwhelming and what we found is we unfortunately had a number of phone systems all supporting whether it's the central office or the regional office, they were all disparate, some of which were legacy. We therefore had no visibility on the metrics, we didn't even know how many calls were actually coming in a day. When you compound that the citizen's just trying to find answers, well, they're not going to just call the numbers you provide, they're going to call any numbers. So then they're now also calling other agencies seeking assistance just 'cause they're wanting help and that's understandable. So we needed to make a change, we need to make change very quickly. And that's when we looked to see if a solution in the Cloud might be a better option. And would it enable us to not only correct the situation, get visibility and scale, what could we do so extremely quick because the time to value was what was real important. >> Excellent, so my understanding that you were not using any cloud-based contact center before this hit. >> We were in only... There were some other agencies that had some hosted contact center capabilities, but on a small scale. This was the first large project around a Cloud Contact Center, and needed to run the project from Go Live or decision to go forward on a Friday at one o'clock and to roll over the first call center on the following Monday at 6:00 p.m. was a speed that we had never seen before. >> Oh boy yeah, I think back, I worked in telecom back in the 90s and you talk about a typical deployment you used to measure months and you're talking more like hours for getting something up and running and there's not only the technology, there's the people, the training, all these sorts of things there, so, yeah tell us, how did you come to such a fast decision and deployment? So you walk us through a little bit of that. >> Sure, so we went out to the market and asked several providers to give us their solution proposals and to do so very quickly 'cause we knew we had to move quickly and then when upon evaluation of the options before us, we made our selection and indicate that selection and started working with both the Cloud provider and the integrator, to build out a phased approach deployment of the technology. Phase one was, hey, let's get everybody calling the same 800 number as best as we can. And then where we can't get the 800 number be that focal point, let's forward all other phone numbers to the same call center. Because before we were able to bring the technology and our only solution was to put more people on the phones and we had physical limitations there. So we went after, the Amazon contact center or our integrator a Smartronix and we were able to do so very quickly and get that phase one change in place, which then allowed us to decide what was phase two and what was going to be phase three. >> Josh, you've got some background in cybersecurity, I guess in general, there's been a raised awareness and need for security with the pandemic going on, bad actors are still going in there. I've talked to some when they're rolling out their call centers, they need to worry about... Sounds like you've got everything in your municipality. So might not need to worry about, government per se but, I guess if you could touch on security right now for what's happening in general and anything specific about the contact center that you need to make sure that people working from home were following policy, procedure, not breaking any regulation and guidelines. >> Yeah, absolutely I think the most important piece of the puzzle when you're looking at security is understanding, so it's always a question of risk, right? If you're seeking first and foremost, to put in security with the understanding that now, hey we've put it in we don't have to think about it anymore. That's not the answer 'cause you're not going to stop all risk, right? You have to weigh it and understand which risks you need to address so that's really important piece. The second part that we've looked at in the current situation with the response to COVID is not only do we see threat actors trying to take advantage of the circumstances, right? Because more people are working from home, there are less computers on the hard network, right? They're now either VPN-ing in or they are just simply outside the network and there may be limited visibility that central agency or the central entity has on those devices. So what do you do? We got to extend that protection out to the account and to the devices itself and not worry so much about the boundary, right? 'cause the boundary now is a lot in all and since it purposes the accounts, but then I think an additional piece of the puzzle right now is to look at how important technology is to your organization, look at the role it's performing in enabling your ability to continue to function remotely (indistinct) the risk associated with those devices becoming compromised or unavailable. So, we see that the most important aspects of our security changes were to extend that protection as best we could to push out education to the users on the changing threats that might be coming their way. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to think if this pandemic had hit 10 years ago, you wouldn't have the capability of this. I'm thinking back to like, well, we could forward numbers to a certain place and do some cascading, but the Cloud Contact Center, absolutely wasn't available. Have you had a chance to think about now that you have this capability, what this means as we progress down the road, do you think you'll be keeping a hybrid model or stay fully Cloud once people are moving back to the offices? >> Well, I definitely think that the near future is a hybrid model and we'll see where it goes from there. There's workloads without a doubt that are better served, putting them in the Cloud, giving you that on demand scalability. I mean, if we look at what a project like this would have required, had we had to procure equipment, install equipment, there was just no time to do that. So having the services, the capability, whether it's microservices or VMS or whatever, all available, just don't need be turned on and configure to be used, it's just there's a lot of power there. And as government seeks to develop digital government, right? How do we transition from providing services where citizens stand in line to doing it online? I think Cloud's going to continue to play a key piece in that. >> Yeah I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the financial impact of this. So typically you think about, I roll out a project, it's budgeted, we write it off over a certain number of years, Cloud of course by its nature is there's flexibility and I'm paying for what I'm using, but this was something that was unexpected. So how were you... Did you have oversight on this? Was there additional funding put out? How was that financial discussion happening? >> Yeah, so that's a big piece of the puzzle when a government entity like a state is under a state of emergency, the good thing is there's processes and procedures that we leverage regularly to understand how we're going to fund those response activities. And then the Federal Government plays a role also in responding to states of emergency that enable the state and local government to have additional funding to cover during the state of emergency. So that makes things a little easier to start in a sense, I think the bigger challenge is going to be what comes from the following years after COVID, because obviously tax revenues are going to take a hit across the board. And what does that mean to government budgets that then in turn are going to have to be adjusted? So the advantage of Cloud services and other type technology services where they're sold under that OPEX model, do give states flexibility in ways to scale services, scale solutions as needed and give us a little bit more flexibility in adjusting for budget challenges. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch, we know how the speed of adoption in technology, tends to run at a certain pace. The last three months, there are definitely certain technologies that there's been massive acceleration like you've discussed. So, I'm wondering that you've had the modernization, things like the unemployment claims was the immediate requirement that you needed, but have there been other pieces, other use cases and applications that this modernization, leverage of cloud technologies is impacting you today or other things that you see a little bit down the path. >> Yeah, I think it's... We're going to see a modernization of government applications designed to interface directly with the citizen, right? So we're going to want to be able to give the citizen opportunity, whether it's on a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer to interface with government, whether it's communications to inquire about a service, or to get support around a service or to file paperwork around a service. We want to enable that digital interface and so that's going to be a big push, and it's going to be amplified. There was already a look towards that, right? With the smart cities, smart states and some of the initiatives there, but what's happened with COVID basically it's forced the issue of not being able to be physically together, well, how do you do it using technology? So if there was a silver lining in an awful situation that we have with COVID, one might be that, we've been able to stretch our use of technology to better serve the citizens. >> Well, great, really really impressive story. Josh, I want to give you the final word. Just what advice would you give your peers kind of dealing with things in a crisis, and any other advice you'd have in general about managing and leveraging the Cloud? >> I think in a closing comment, I think one of the most important aspects that can be considered is having that translation capability of talking to the business element, the government service component and understand what they're trying to achieve, what their purpose or their mission is and then being able to tie it back to the technology in a way to where all parties, all stakeholders understand their roles and responsibilities, to make that happen. Unfortunately I think what happens too often is on the business side or the non-technical side of the equation, they see the end state, but they don't truly understand their responsibilities to get to the end state. And it's definitely a partnership and the better that partnership's understood at the start, the more successful the project's going to have to get there under budget and on time. >> Well, thank you so much for joining us, best of luck with the project and please stay safe. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage from AWS Public Sector Online. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)