(soft music) >> We're in Las Vegas at The Venetian for our continued coverage here of re:Invent '22, AWS's big show going on. Great success off to a wonderful start. We're in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And we're going to talk about public health and the cloud, how those have come together in the great state of North Carolina. Charles Carter is going to help us do that. He's assistant secretary for technology services with the state of North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services. Charles, good to see you. Thanks for joining us here on "theCUBE". >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Yeah, thanks for making the time. So first off, let's talk about what you do on the homefront before what you're doing here and where you're going. But in terms of kind of what your plan has been, what your journey has been from a cloud perspective and how you've implemented that and where you are right now in your journey. >> Sure, so we started. When I got there, we didn't have a cloud footprint at all. There was a- >> Host: Which was how long ago? >> I got there in 2016, so about six years. >> Host: Six, seven years, yeah. >> Yeah, five, six years. So anyways, we started off with our first module within our Medicaid expansion. And that was the first time that we went into the cloud. We worked with AWS to do our encounter processing system. And it was an incredible success. I think the ease of use was really kind of something that people weren't quite ready for. But it was really exciting to see that. And the scalability, to be able to turn that on and cover the entirety of North Carolina was awesome. So once we saw that and get a little taste of it, then we really wanted to start implementing it throughout DHHS. And we marshaled in a cloud-only cloud-first strategy where you had to actually get an exemption not to go to the cloud. And that was a first for our state. So that was really kind of the what launched us. But then COVID hit. And once COVID came in, that took us to a new level. COVID forced us to build technologies that enabled a better treatment, a better care, a better response from our team. And so we were able to stand up platforms in 48 hours. We were able to stand up COVID vaccine management systems in six weeks. And none of that would've been possible without the cloud. >> So forced your hand in a way because all of a sudden you've got this extraordinarily remote workforce, right, and people trying to- And you're doing different tasks that were totally unexpected, right, prior to that. What kind of a shock to the system was that from I get from an IT perspective? >> Yeah, so from a state government perspective, for example, you never hear you have all the money you need and you have to do it quickly. It just doesn't work like that. But this was a rare moment in time where you had this critical need. The entire country and our state population was kind of on edge. How do we move through this? How do we factor our lives into this new integration? What is this virus? Is it spreading in my county, in my city, my zip code? Where is it? And that kind of desperation really kind of focused everybody in on build me technologies that can get me the data that I need to make good healthcare decisions, good clinical decisions. And so that was our challenge. Cloud enabled it because it can scale so quickly. We can set up things, we can exchange data. We can move data around a lot easier. And the security is better from our perspective. So that COVID experience really kind of pushed us, you know, if you will, out the door. And we're never going back because it's just too good. >> Yeah, was that the aha moment then in a way because you had to do so much so fast and before capabilities that maybe you didn't have or maybe hadn't tapped? >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean what was the accelerant there? Was COVID that big, or was it somebody who had to make a decision to say, this is where we're going with this, somebody in your shoes or somebody with whom you work? >> Yeah, no, I mean cloud at the end of the day, we knew that in order to do what we needed to do we couldn't do it on-prem. It wasn't an option. So if we wanted to build these capabilities, if we wanted to bring in technologies that really brought data to our key, our governor, our secretary, to make good decisions on behalf of our residents in North Carolina, then we were going to have to build things quickly. And the only way you can do that is in the cloud. So it was when they came back and said, "We need these things," there's only one answer. That's a good thing about technology. It's pretty binary, so it was either go with what we had, which wasn't adequate, or build to what we knew we could do and pretty short order. And because of that, we were able to actually usher in a huge expansion of cloud footprint within DHHS. And now we've actually been able to implement it in other departments simply because of our expertise. And that's been a huge asset for the state of North Carolina as a whole. >> So what's your measuring stick then for value in terms of identifying benefit? 'Cause it's not really about cost. This is about service, I assume, right? >> Right. >> So, you know, how do you quantify the values and the benefits that you're deriving from this migration over to the cloud? >> So from our perspective, it hits several different areas. I mean, you can start in security. We know that if we're in the cloud the tools that can manage and give us visibility in the cloud are 10 times better than an on-prem environment. And so if we can take a lot of these legacy systems and move them to the cloud, we'll be in a better security posture. So we have that piece of it. The other part of it is the data aspect of it, being able to- We're 33 divisions strong, right? We have a large footprint. We have a lot of siloed data elements. And cloud allows us to start integrating those data sets in a much more usable fashion so that we can see that if Charles Carter's in one area in division, a specific division with DHHS, is he somewhere else? And if he is somewhere else, then how do we provide a better clinical care for that individual? And those are conversations that we can't really have if we don't move to the cloud. So those types of- And of course there's always the OKRs, the actual measurements that you apply to things that we're doing. But at the end of the day, can we get the requirements from our business partners, bring those requirements to bear in technology, and really enable the indoctrination of these requirements throughout our clinical and healthcare kills? >> What about they're always pillars here, right? Governance, huge pillar, security, huge pillar, especially in your world, right? >> Yeah. >> So making that move over to the cloud and still recognizing that these are essentials that you have to have in place, I wouldn't say adjustments, but what kind of, I guess, recognition have you had toward that and making sure that you're still very true to those principles that are vital in the terms of public health? >> It is a great question because our secretary at the time and our governor, Roy Cooper, were very focused on enabling transparency. We had to be very transparent with what we were doing because the residents in North Carolina were just really kind of, "What's going on?" It was a scary time for a lot of us. So transparency was a key element towards our success. And in order to do that, you've got to have proper security. You got to have proper governance. You've got to have proper builds within technology that really enable that kind of visibility. One of the things that we did very early on was we set up a governance structure for our cloud environments so that as we wanted to and stand up an easy-to environment or we wanted to do some sort of work within a cloud or stand up in a different environment, we were able actually to set up a framework for how do you introduce that. Are you doing it correctly? Do you have the proper security on it? Do you have the funding for it? Like all the steps that you need to really kind of build into the scaffolding around a lot of these efforts we had to put in place and pretty quickly to get them going. But once we did that, the acceptance and the adoption of it was just tremendous. I mean, it was a light on for all of our business partners 'cause they understood I can either build on-prem, in which case I won't be able to get what I want in any kind of reasonable time period. Or I can build on cloud. And I can have it in some cases in 48 hours. >> Right, tomorrow. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You know, it was a huge difference. >> So where are you there? I mean, this is just not like a really big old lift and shift and we're all done and this is great. Cloud's taken care of all of our needs. Where are you in terms of the journey that you're undertaking? And then ultimately where do you want to go, like how far? What kind of goals have you set for yourself for the next two, three years down the road? >> Yeah, so this is an exciting part because we have actually- Like I mentioned earlier, we are a cloud-first cloud-only strategy, right? There's no reasons for us to be on-prem. It's just a matter of us kind of sunsetting legacy systems and bringing on cloud performance. We hope to be a 60% of our applications, which we have over 400 applications. So it's pretty large footprint. But we're wanting to migrate all of that to the cloud by 2025. So if we can achieve that, I think we'll be well on our way. And the momentum will carry forward for us to do that. We've actually had to do a reorganization of our whole IT structure. I think this is an important part to maintain that momentum because we've reorganized our staff, reorganized ourselves so that we can focus more on how do you adopt cloud, how do you bring in platforms which are all cloud-based, how do you use data within those systems? And that has allowed us to kind of think differently about our responsibilities, who's accountable for what, and to kind of keep those, that momentum going. So we've got some big projects that are on right now. Some of them are lift and shift, like you mentioned. We have a project with kind of a clumsy, monolithic system. It's called (indistinct). We're trying to migrate that to the cloud. We're in the process of doing that. And it's an excellent demonstration of capability once we pull that off. And then of course any new procurement that we put out there no one's making anything for on-prem anymore. Everyone's making their SaaS products for cloud-based experiences. Or if we're going to build or just use integrators then we'll build that in house. But all of it's based on cloud. >> And you mentioned SaaS. How much of this stuff are you doing on your own? And how much are you doing through managed services? >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, we have over 400 applications. So we had a pretty large footprint, right? >> Big, it's huge, right. >> So we're only who we are, and we can only build so much. So we're kind of taking- We did a application rationalization effort, which kind of identified some threats to our systems. Like maybe they're older things, FoxPro, kind of older languages that we're using. And in some cases we got people who are retiring. And there's not many people who can support that anymore. So how do we take those and migrate them to the cloud, either put them on a Salesforce or ServiceNow or Microsoft Dynamics platform and really kind of upgrade those systems? So we're in the process of kind of analyzing those elements. But yeah, that's kind of the exciting launch, if you will, of kind of taking the existing visibility of our applications and then applying it to what we're capable of with the cloud. >> And if you had advice that you could give to your colleagues who are in public health or just in public, the public sector- And your resources, they're finite. This is kind of what you have to deal with. And yet you have needs, and you're trying to stay current. You've got talent challenges, right? You've got rev or spending challenges. So if you could sit down your colleagues in a room and say, "Okay, this has been our experience. Here's what I would keep an eye out for," what kind of headlights would you beat for them? >> Yeah, so I think the biggest aha that I'd like to share with my contemporaries out there is that you've got a great ability to lower your costs, to excite your own personnel because they want to work on the new stuff. We've actually set up a whole professional development pathway within our organization to start getting people certified on AWS, certified on other platforms, to get them ready to start working in those environments. And so all of that work that we're been doing is coming together and allowing us to maintain the momentum. So what I'd recommend to people is, A, look at your own individual staff. I don't think you need to go outside to find the talent. I think you can train the talent that you have interior. I think you've got to aggressively pursue modernization because modernization enables a lot more. It's less expensive. It enables quicker adoption of business requirements and modern business requirements. And then lastly, focus on your data sharing because what you're going to find in the platforms and in the clouds is that there is a lot more opportunities for data integrations and conjoining disparate data sources. So if you can do those elements, you'll find that your capabilities on the business side are much more, much greater on the other end. >> Don't be scared, right, jump in? (laughing) >> Definitely don't be scared. Don't be, the water's warm. (host laughing) Come on in, you're fine, you're fine. (laughing) >> No little toe dipping in there. You're going to dive into the deep end, let her rip. >> Exactly, just go right in, just go right in. >> Well, it sounds like you've done that with great success. >> I'm very happy with it. >> Congratulations on that. And wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you, Charles. All right, back with more. You are watching theCUBE here in Las Vegas. theCUBE of course the leader, as you know, in tech coverage. (soft music)

>>Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Supercomputing Conference 2022, otherwise known as SC 22 here in Dallas, Texas. This is day three of our coverage, the final day of coverage here on the exhibition floor. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I'm here with my co-host, tech journalist extraordinaire, Paul Gillum. How's it going, >>Paul? Hi, Dave. It's going good. >>And we have a wonderful guest with us this morning, Dr. Panda from the Ohio State University. Welcome Dr. Panda to the Cube. >>Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot to >>Paul. I know you're, you're chopping at >>The bit, you have incredible credentials, over 500 papers published. The, the impact that you've had on HPC is truly remarkable. But I wanted to talk to you specifically about a product project you've been working on for over 20 years now called mva, high Performance Computing platform that's used by more than 32 organ, 3,200 organizations across 90 countries. You've shepherded this from, its, its infancy. What is the vision for what MVA will be and and how is it a proof of concept that others can learn from? >>Yeah, Paul, that's a great question to start with. I mean, I, I started with this conference in 2001. That was the first time I came. It's very coincidental. If you remember the Finman Networking Technology, it was introduced in October of 2000. Okay. So in my group, we were working on NPI for Marinette Quadrics. Those are the old technology, if you can recollect when Finman was there, we were the very first one in the world to really jump in. Nobody knew how to use Infin van in an HPC system. So that's how the Happy Project was born. And in fact, in super computing 2002 on this exhibition floor in Baltimore, we had the first demonstration, the open source happy, actually is running on an eight node infinite van clusters, eight no zeros. And that was a big challenge. But now over the years, I means we have continuously worked with all infinite van vendors, MPI Forum. >>We are a member of the MPI Forum and also all other network interconnect. So we have steadily evolved this project over the last 21 years. I'm very proud of my team members working nonstop, continuously bringing not only performance, but scalability. If you see now INFIN event are being deployed in 8,000, 10,000 node clusters, and many of these clusters actually use our software, stack them rapid. So, so we have done a lot of, like our focuses, like we first do research because we are in academia. We come up with good designs, we publish, and in six to nine months, we actually bring it to the open source version and people can just download and then use it. And that's how currently it's been used by more than 3000 orange in 90 countries. And, but the interesting thing is happening, your second part of the question. Now, as you know, the field is moving into not just hvc, but ai, big data, and we have those support. This is where like we look at the vision for the next 20 years, we want to design this MPI library so that not only HPC but also all other workloads can take advantage of it. >>Oh, we have seen libraries that become a critical develop platform supporting ai, TensorFlow, and, and the pie torch and, and the emergence of, of, of some sort of default languages that are, that are driving the community. How, how important are these frameworks to the, the development of the progress making progress in the HPC world? >>Yeah, no, those are great. I mean, spite our stencil flow, I mean, those are the, the now the bread and butter of deep learning machine learning. Am I right? But the challenge is that people use these frameworks, but continuously models are becoming larger. You need very first turnaround time. So how do you train faster? How do you do influencing faster? So this is where HPC comes in and what exactly what we have done is actually we have linked floor fighters to our happy page because now you see the MPI library is running on a million core system. Now your fighters and tenor four clan also be scaled to to, to those number of, large number of course and gps. So we have actually done that kind of a tight coupling and that helps the research to really take advantage of hpc. >>So if, if a high school student is thinking in terms of interesting computer science, looking for a place, looking for a university, Ohio State University, bruns, world renowned, widely known, but talk about what that looks like from a day on a day to day basis in terms of the opportunity for undergrad and graduate students to participate in, in the kind of work that you do. What is, what does that look like? And is, and is that, and is that a good pitch to for, for people to consider the university? >>Yes. I mean, we continuously, from a university perspective, by the way, the Ohio State University is one of the largest single campus in, in us, one of the top three, top four. We have 65,000 students. Wow. It's one of the very largest campus. And especially within computer science where I am located, high performance computing is a very big focus. And we are one of the, again, the top schools all over the world for high performance computing. And we also have very strength in ai. So we always encourage, like the new students who like to really work on top of the art solutions, get exposed to the concepts, principles, and also practice. Okay. So, so we encourage those people that wish you can really bring you those kind of experience. And many of my past students, staff, they're all in top companies now, have become all big managers. >>How, how long, how long did you say you've been >>At 31 >>Years? 31 years. 31 years. So, so you, you've had people who weren't alive when you were already doing this stuff? That's correct. They then were born. Yes. They then grew up, yes. Went to university graduate school, and now they're on, >>Now they're in many top companies, national labs, all over the universities, all over the world. So they have been trained very well. Well, >>You've, you've touched a lot of lives, sir. >>Yes, thank you. Thank >>You. We've seen really a, a burgeoning of AI specific hardware emerge over the last five years or so. And, and architectures going beyond just CPUs and GPUs, but to Asics and f PGAs and, and accelerators, does this excite you? I mean, are there innovations that you're seeing in this area that you think have, have great promise? >>Yeah, there is a lot of promise. I think every time you see now supercomputing technology, you see there is sometime a big barrier comes barrier jump. Rather I'll say, new technology comes some disruptive technology, then you move to the next level. So that's what we are seeing now. A lot of these AI chips and AI systems are coming up, which takes you to the next level. But the bigger challenge is whether it is cost effective or not, can that be sustained longer? And this is where commodity technology comes in, which commodity technology tries to take you far longer. So we might see like all these likes, Gaudi, a lot of new chips are coming up, can they really bring down the cost? If that cost can be reduced, you will see a much more bigger push for AI solutions, which are cost effective. >>What, what about on the interconnect side of things, obvi, you, you, your, your start sort of coincided with the initial standards for Infin band, you know, Intel was very, very, was really big in that, in that architecture originally. Do you see interconnects like RDMA over converged ethernet playing a part in that sort of democratization or commoditization of things? Yes. Yes. What, what are your thoughts >>There for internet? No, this is a great thing. So, so we saw the infinite man coming. Of course, infinite Man is, commod is available. But then over the years people have been trying to see how those RDMA mechanisms can be used for ethernet. And then Rocky has been born. So Rocky has been also being deployed. But besides these, I mean now you talk about Slingshot, the gray slingshot, it is also an ethernet based systems. And a lot of those RMA principles are actually being used under the hood. Okay. So any modern networks you see, whether it is a Infin and Rocky Links art network, rock board network, you name any of these networks, they are using all the very latest principles. And of course everybody wants to make it commodity. And this is what you see on the, on the slow floor. Everybody's trying to compete against each other to give you the best performance with the lowest cost, and we'll see whoever wins over the years. >>Sort of a macroeconomic question, Japan, the US and China have been leapfrogging each other for a number of years in terms of the fastest supercomputer performance. How important do you think it is for the US to maintain leadership in this area? >>Big, big thing, significantly, right? We are saying that I think for the last five to seven years, I think we lost that lead. But now with the frontier being the number one, starting from the June ranking, I think we are getting that leadership back. And I think it is very critical not only for fundamental research, but for national security trying to really move the US to the leading edge. So I hope us will continue to lead the trend for the next few years until another new system comes out. >>And one of the gating factors, there is a shortage of people with data science skills. Obviously you're doing what you can at the university level. What do you think can change at the secondary school level to prepare students better to, for data science careers? >>Yeah, I mean that is also very important. I mean, we, we always call like a pipeline, you know, that means when PhD levels we are expecting like this even we want to students to get exposed to, to, to many of these concerts from the high school level. And, and things are actually changing. I mean, these days I see a lot of high school students, they, they know Python, how to program in Python, how to program in sea object oriented things. Even they're being exposed to AI at that level. So I think that is a very healthy sign. And in fact we, even from Ohio State side, we are always engaged with all this K to 12 in many different programs and then gradually trying to take them to the next level. And I think we need to accelerate also that in a very significant manner because we need those kind of a workforce. It is not just like a building a system number one, but how do we really utilize it? How do we utilize that science? How do we propagate that to the community? Then we need all these trained personal. So in fact in my group, we are also involved in a lot of cyber training activities for HPC professionals. So in fact, today there is a bar at 1 1 15 I, yeah, I think 1215 to one 15. We'll be talking more about that. >>About education. >>Yeah. Cyber training, how do we do for professionals? So we had a funding together with my co-pi, Dr. Karen Tom Cook from Ohio Super Center. We have a grant from NASA Science Foundation to really educate HPT professionals about cyber infrastructure and ai. Even though they work on some of these things, they don't have the complete knowledge. They don't get the time to, to learn. And the field is moving so fast. So this is how it has been. We got the initial funding, and in fact, the first time we advertised in 24 hours, we got 120 application, 24 hours. We couldn't even take all of them. So, so we are trying to offer that in multiple phases. So, so there is a big need for those kind of training sessions to take place. I also offer a lot of tutorials at all. Different conference. We had a high performance networking tutorial. Here we have a high performance deep learning tutorial, high performance, big data tutorial. So I've been offering tutorials at, even at this conference since 2001. Good. So, >>So in the last 31 years, the Ohio State University, as my friends remind me, it is properly >>Called, >>You've seen the world get a lot smaller. Yes. Because 31 years ago, Ohio, in this, you know, of roughly in the, in the middle of North America and the United States was not as connected as it was to everywhere else in the globe. So that's, that's pro that's, I i it kind of boggles the mind when you think of that progression over 31 years, but globally, and we talk about the world getting smaller, we're sort of in the thick of, of the celebratory seasons where, where many, many groups of people exchange gifts for varieties of reasons. If I were to offer you a holiday gift, that is the result of what AI can deliver the world. Yes. What would that be? What would, what would, what would the first thing be? This is, this is, this is like, it's, it's like the genie, but you only get one wish. >>I know, I know. >>So what would the first one be? >>Yeah, it's very hard to answer one way, but let me bring a little bit different context and I can answer this. I, I talked about the happy project and all, but recently last year actually we got awarded an S f I institute award. It's a 20 million award. I am the overall pi, but there are 14 universities involved. >>And who is that in that institute? >>What does that Oh, the I ici. C e. Okay. I cycle. You can just do I cycle.ai. Okay. And that lies with what exactly what you are trying to do, how to bring lot of AI for masses, democratizing ai. That's what is the overall goal of this, this institute, think of like a, we have three verticals we are working think of like one is digital agriculture. So I'll be, that will be my like the first ways. How do you take HPC and AI to agriculture the world as though we just crossed 8 billion people. Yeah, that's right. We need continuous food and food security. How do we grow food with the lowest cost and with the highest yield? >>Water >>Consumption. Water consumption. Can we minimize or minimize the water consumption or the fertilization? Don't do blindly. Technologies are out there. Like, let's say there is a weak field, A traditional farmer see that, yeah, there is some disease, they will just go and spray pesticides. It is not good for the environment. Now I can fly it drone, get images of the field in the real time, check it against the models, and then it'll tell that, okay, this part of the field has disease. One, this part of the field has disease. Two, I indicate to the, to the tractor or the sprayer saying, okay, spray only pesticide one, you have pesticide two here. That has a big impact. So this is what we are developing in that NSF A I institute I cycle ai. We also have, we have chosen two additional verticals. One is animal ecology, because that is very much related to wildlife conservation, climate change, how do you understand how the animals move? Can we learn from them? And then see how human beings need to act in future. And the third one is the food insecurity and logistics. Smart food distribution. So these are our three broad goals in that institute. How do we develop cyber infrastructure from below? Combining HP c AI security? We have, we have a large team, like as I said, there are 40 PIs there, 60 students. We are a hundred members team. We are working together. So, so that will be my wish. How do we really democratize ai? >>Fantastic. I think that's a great place to wrap the conversation here On day three at Supercomputing conference 2022 on the cube, it was an honor, Dr. Panda working tirelessly at the Ohio State University with his team for 31 years toiling in the field of computer science and the end result, improving the lives of everyone on Earth. That's not a stretch. If you're in high school thinking about a career in computer science, keep that in mind. It isn't just about the bits and the bobs and the speeds and the feeds. It's about serving humanity. Maybe, maybe a little, little, little too profound a statement, I would argue not even close. I'm Dave Nicholson with the Queue, with my cohost Paul Gillin. Thank you again, Dr. Panda. Stay tuned for more coverage from the Cube at Super Compute 2022 coming up shortly. >>Thanks a lot.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>We're back the cube's coverage of UI path forward. Five. And we're live. Dave Velante with Dave Nicholson. AJ Gupta is here. He's the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the Motor Vehicles of California dmv. Welcome Jay. Good to see you. >>Thank you. >>Good to see you. Wow, you, you have an interesting job. I would just say, you know, I've been to going to conferences for a long time. I remember early last decade, Frank Sluman put up a slide. People ho hanging out, waiting outside the California dmv. You were the butt of many jokes, but we have a happy customer here, so we're gonna get it to your taste >>Of it. Yeah, very happy >>Customer, obviously transform the organization. I think it's pretty clear from our conversations that that automation has played a role in that. But first of all, tell us about yourself, your role and what's going on at the dmv. >>Sure. Myself, a j Gupta, I am the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the dmv. Somewhat of i, one would say a made up title, but Governor's office asked me, Okay, we need help. And that's what >>Your title though? >>Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, well we are doing business and technology transformation. So that's, that's what I've been doing for the last three years at the dmv. Before that I was in private sector for 25 years, decided first time to give back cuz I was mostly doing public sector consulting. So here I am. >>Okay. So you knew the industry and that's cool that you wanted to give back because I mean obviously you just, in talking off camera, you're smart, you're very cogent and you know, a lot of times people in the private sector, they don't want to go work in the, in the public sector unless they're, unless they're power crazy, you know? Anyway, so speaking with David Nicholson, the experience has gone from really crappy to really great. I mean, take >>It from here. Yeah. Well, am I gonna be, I'm, because I'm from California, I was just, I was just, you know, we >>Got a dual case study >>Eloquently about, about the, the, the change that's happened just in, just in terms of simple things like a registration renewal. It used to be go online and pray and weed through things and now it's very simple, very, very fast. Tell us more about, about some of the things that you've done in the area of automation that have increased the percentage of things that could be done online without visiting a field office. Just as an >>Example. Yeah, what's the story? >>Yeah, so first of all, thank you for saying nice things about dmv, you as a customer. It means a lot because we have been very deliberately working towards solving all customer po pain points, whether it's in person experiences, online call centers, kiosks, so all across the channels. So we started our journey, myself and director Steve Gordon about three years ago, almost at the same time with the goal of making Department of Mo no motor vehicles in California as the best retail experience in the nation across industries. So that's our goal, right? Not there yet, but we are working towards it. So for, for our in person channels, which is what you may be familiar with, first of all, we wanna make sure brick and click and call all the customer journeys can be done across the channels. You can decide to start journey at one place, finish at another place. >>All that is very deliberate. We are also trying to make sure you don't have to come to field office at all. We would welcome you to come, we love you, but we don't want you to be there. You have better things to do for the economy. We want you to do that instead of showing up in the field office, being in the weight line. So that's number one. Creating more digital channels has been the key. We have created virtual field office. That's something that you would become familiar with if you are not as a DMV customer. During Covid, the goal was we provide almost all the services. We connect our technicians to the customer who are in need of a live conversation or a email or a text or a, or a SMS conversation or chat conversation in multiple languages or a video call, right? >>So we were able to accomplish that while Covid was going on, while the riots were going on. Those of your, you know about that, we, our offices were shut down. We created this channel, which we are continuing because it's a great disaster recovery business continuity channel, but also it can help keep people away from field office during peak hours. So that's been very deliberate. We have also added additional online services using bots. So we have created these web and process bots that actually let you do the intake, right? You, we could set up a new service in less than four weeks, a brand new service online. We have set up a brand new IVR service on call centers in less than a month for our seniors who didn't want to come to the field office and they were required certain pieces of information and we were able to provide that for our customers by creating this channel in less than less than four. >>And the pandemic was an accelerant to this was, was it the catalyst really? And then you guys compressed it? Or were, had you already started on the >>Well, we were >>Ready. I mean you, but you came on right? Just about just before the pandemic. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I came on in 2019, pandemic started in 2020 early. So we got lucky a little bit because we had a head start at, I was already working with u UI paths and we had come up with design patterns that we gonna take this journey for all DMV channels with using UiPath. So it was about timing that when it happened, it accelerated the need and it accelerated the actual work. I was thinking, I'll have a one year plan. I executed all of the one year plan items in less than two months out of necessity. So it accelerated definitely the execution of my plan. >>So when you talk about the chat channel, is that bots, is that humans or a combination? Yeah, >>It's a, it's a combination of it. I would say more AI than bots. Bots to the service fulfillment. So there is the user interaction where you have, you're saying something, the, the chat answers those questions, but then if you want something, hey, I want my, my registration renewed, right? It would take you to the right channel. And this is something we do today on our IVR channel. If you call in the DMV number in California, you'll see that your registration renewal is all automatic. You also have a AI listening to it. But also when you are saying, Yep, I wanna do it, then bot triggers certain aspects of the service fulfillment because our legacy is still sitting about 60 years old and we are able to still provide this modern facade for our customers with no gap and as quickly as possible within a month's time. How >>Many DMVs are in the state? >>Okay, so we have 230 different field locations out of which 180 are available for general public services. >>Okay. So and then you're, you're creating a digital overlay that's right >>To all of >>That, right? >>Yeah, it's digital and virtual overlay, right? Digital is fully self-service. Bots can do all your processing automation, can do all the processing. AI can do all the processing, but then you have virtual channels where you have customer interacting with the technicians or technicians virtually. But once a technician is done solving the problem, they click a button and bot does rest of the work for the technician. So that's where we are able to get some back office efficiency and transaction reduction. >>When was the last time you walked into a bank? >>Oh man. >>I mean, is that where we're going here where you just don't have to >>Go into the branch and that is the goal. In fact, we already have a starting point. I mean, just like you have ATM machines, we have kiosks already that do some of this automation work for us today. The goal is to not have to have to, unless you really want to, We actually set up these personas. One of them was high touch Henry. He likes to go to the field office and talk to people. We are there for them. But for the millennials, for the people who are like, I don't have time. I wanna like quickly finish this work off hours 24 by seven, which is where bots come in. They do not have weekends, HR complaint, they don't have overtime. They're able to solve these problems for me, 24 >>By seven. And what's the scope of your, like how many automations, how many bots? Can you give us a sense? >>Sure. So right now we are sitting at 36 different use cases. We have collected six point of eight point, well, we have saved 8.8 million just using the bots overall savings. If you were to look at virtual field office, which bots are part of, we have collected 388 million so far in that particular channel bots. I've also saved paper. I've saved a million sheets of paper through the bot, which I'm trying to remember how many trees it equates to, but it's a whole lot of trees that I've saved. And >>How many bots are we talking about? >>So it's 36 different use cases. So 36 >>Bots? >>Well, no, there's more bots I wanna say. So we are running at 85% efficiency, 50 bots. Oh wow. Yeah. >>Wow. Okay. So you, you asked the question about, you know, when was the last time someone was in a bank? The last time I was in a bank it was to deposit, you know, more than $10,000 in cash because of a cash transaction. Someone bought a car from me. It was more of a nuisance. I felt like I was being treated like a criminal. I was very clear what I was doing. I had just paid off a loan with that bank and I was giving them the cash for that transaction as opposed to the DMV transaction transferring title. That was easy. The DMV part was easier than the bank. And you're trying to make it even easier and it shouldn't, it shouldn't be that way. Yes. Right. But, but I, I have a, I have a question for you on, on that bot implementation. Can you give us, you've sort of give it us examples of how they interact. Yeah. But as your kind of prototypical California driver's license holder, how has that improved a specific transaction that I would be involved with? Can >>You, so well you as a Californian and you as a taxpayer, you as a Californian getting services and you as a taxpayer getting the most out of the money Okay. That the DMV spending on providing services, Right. Both are benefits to you. Sure. So bots have benefited in both of those areas. If you were used to the DMV three years ago, there was a whole lot of paper involved. You gotta fill this form out, you gotta fill this other form out and you gotta go to dmv. Oh by the way, your form, you didn't bring this thing with you. Your form has issues. We are calculated that about 30% of paper workloads are wasted because they just have bad data, right? There is no control. There's nobody telling you, hey, do this. Right. Even dates could be wrong, names could be wrong fields, maybe incomplete and such. >>So we were able to automate a whole lot of that by creating self-service channels, which are accelerated by bot. So we have these web acceleration platforms that collect the data, bots do the validation, they also verify the information, give you real time feedback or near real time feedback that hey, this is what you need to change. This is when you need to verify. So all the business rules are in the bot. And then once you're done, it'll commit the information to our legacy systems, which wouldn't have been possible unless a technician was punching it in manually. So there is a third cohort of Californians, which is our employees. We have 10,000 of those. They, I don't want them to get carpal tunnel. I want them to make sure they're spending more time thinking and helping our customers, looking at the customers rather than typing things. And that's what we are able to accomplish with the bots where you press that one button, which will have required maybe 50 more keystrokes and that's gone. And now you're saving time, you're also saving the effort and the attention loss of serving the best. >>Jay, what does it take to get a new process on board? So I'm thinking about real id, I just went through that in Massachusetts. I took, it was gonna be months to get to the dmv. So I ended up going through a aaa, had to get all these documents, I uploaded all the documents. Of course when I showed up, none were there. Thankfully I had backup copies. But it was really a pleasant experience. Are you, describe what you're doing with real ID and what role bots play? >>Yeah, sure. So with real id, what we are doing today and what I, what we'll be doing in the future, so I can talk about both. What we are doing today is that we are aligning most of the work to be done upfront by the customer. Because real ID is a complex transaction. You've gotta have four different pieces of documentation. You need to provide your information, it needs to match our records. And then you show up to the field office. And by the way, oh man, I did not upload this information. We are getting about 15 to 17% returns customers. And that's a whole lot of time. Every single mile our customer travels to the DMV office, which averages to about 13 miles. In my calculation for average customer, it's a dollar spent in carbon footprint in the time lost in the technician time trying to triage out some other things. So you're talking $26 per visit to the economy. >>Yeah. An amazing frustration, Yes. >>That has to come back and, and our customer satisfaction scores, which we really like to track, goes down right away. So in general, for real, id, what we have been, what we have done is created bunch of self-service channels, which are accelerated by workflow engines, by AI and by bots to collect the documentation, verify the documentation against external systems because we actually connect with Department of Homeland Security verify, you know, what's your passport about? We look at your picture and we verify that yep, it is truly a passport and yours and not your wives. Right? Or not a picture of a dog. And it's actually truly you, right? I mean, people do all kind of fun stuff by mistake or intentionally. So we wanna make sure we save time for our customer, we save time for our, for our employees, and we have zero returns required when employees, where customer shows up, which by the way is requirement right now. But the Department of Homeland Security is in a rule making process. And we are hopeful, very hopeful at this point in time that we'll be able to take the entire experience and get it done from home. And that'll give us a whole lot more efficiency, as you can imagine. And bots are at the tail end of it, committing all the data and transactions into our systems faster and with more accuracy. >>That's a great story. I mean, really congratulations and, and I guess I'll leave it. Last question is, where do you want to take this? What's the, what's your roadmap look like? What's your runway look like? Is it, is there endless opportunities to automate at the state or do you see a sort of light at the end of the tunnel? >>Sure. So there is a thing I shared in the previous session that I was in, which is be modern while we modernize. So that's been the goal with the bot. They are integral part of my transition architecture as I modernize the entire dmv, bring them from 90 60, bringing us from 1960 to 2022 or even 2025 and do it now, right? So bots are able to get me to a place where customers expectations are managed. They are getting their online, they're getting their mobile experience, they are avoiding making field off his trips and avoiding any kind of paper based processing right? For our employees and customers as well. So bots are serving that need today as part of the transition strategy going from 1960 to 2022 in the future. They're continue gonna continue to service. I think it's one thing that was talked about by the previous sessions today that we, they, they're looking at empowering the employees to do their own work back office work also in a full automation way and self-power them to automate their own processes. So that's one of the strategies we're gonna look for. But also we'll continue to have a strategy where we need to remain nimble with upcoming needs and have a faster go to market market plan using the bot. >>Outstanding. Well thanks so much for sharing your, your story and, and thanks for helping Dave. >>Real life testimony. I never, never thought I'd be coming on to praise the California dmv. Here I am and it's legit. Yeah, >>Well done. Can I, can I make an introduction to our Massachusetts colleagues? >>Good to, well actually we have, we have been working with state of New York, Massachusetts, Nevara, Arizona. So goal is to share but also learn from >>That. Help us out, help us out. >>But nice to be here, >>Great >>To have you and looking for feedback next time you was at dmv. >>All right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Get that, fill out that NPS score. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Valante for Dave Nicholson. Forward five UI customer conference from the Venetian in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. You're watching the Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five. We reach cruising altitude on day two. Christina Seacrest is here. She's the process Artificial intelligence and automation GPS automation leader at ey. And Bob PCIs, executive director for Intelligent Automation for the state of Tennessee. Folks, welcome to the cube. Thank you for Adam. >>Good >>To have you. Okay, I don't know if I messed up that title, Christina, but it's kind of interesting. You got process, you got ai, you got automation, you got gps. What's your role? >>I have a lot of rules, so thank you for that. Yeah, so my focus is first and foremost automation. So how do you get things like UI path into our clients, but also I focus specifically in our government and public sector clients. So sled specifically. So state local education. So that's why I'm here with the state of Tennessee. And then we also like to take it beyond automation. So how do you bring an artificial intelligence and all the technologies that come with that. So really full end to end spectrum of >>Automation. So Bob, when you think about the sort of the, the factors that are driving your organization of, how did you describe that, Those sort of external factors that inform your strategy. What, what's, what are the catalysts for how you determine to deploy technology? >>Well, it was primarily that we know tendency has a tendency to provide good customer service, but we want to get to a great status best in class, if you will. And we had an external advisory review where it said, Hey, you know, we could make automation to improve our customer experience. And so that was like a directive of the, the state leaders to go across the board and automate all processes statewide, starting with the 23 executive agencies. >>So where's the focus from that standpoint? Is it on just providing better interfaces to your constituents, your customers? Is it cutting costs or you actually have more budget to invest? Kind of a combination of >>Those? Yeah, so it's, it's really both qualitative and quantitative, right? So quantitative is where we're able to reduce hours and therefore we can redirect people to more less mundane work, if you will. And then qualitative is where we're able to reduce the errors, improve data quality, reduce cycle time for our citizens, you know, when they're making requests, et cetera. So it's, I think it's a combination of both of those quantitative and qualitative metrics that we are mandated in, in micromanaged, quite frankly to, to bring, make those >>Numbers. So I'm from Massachusetts, when I go to a a mass.gov website, I say, all this was done in the 1990s and you could just see where the different stovepipes were, were. But then every now and then you'll hit one and you'll say, Wow, okay, this is up to, it's such a great experience. And then the flip side of that is you want your employees to be happy and not have to do all this mundane work so you can retain the best people. You don't have to. So you're living that in, in state and, and local. So where did you start your automation journey? What role did EY play? Let's go. Yeah, >>Sure. So I, I, I think the thought for process automation was probably three or four years ago, but then we started the program about 18 months ago and there was a lot of, let's say behind the scenes work before we could bring EY in, you know, like what resources was I gonna have in, in the state that were gonna help me address all of the agency simultaneously, right? Cuz normally you'll see a project that'll do be more siloed across the state and say, we're gonna do this agency, we're gonna do this division. Well, you have 40 other agencies that are, you know, the momentum is it's just gonna fall, it wayside. So how we looked at it was let's blanket it and go across all 23 agencies at the same time, you know, identify common processes that are used across 40 divisions, for example, right? >>So, so what we basically did is we procured the software, you know, did the contracts, and then it was really about, I designed, I'm gonna say a multistream approach where they were, we could run multiple work streams, independent define all the architectures, required dev tests, production, the disaster recovery at the same time in parallel developed the center of excellence, the operation model, the processes, methodologies. And the third one was, let's go out to a few divisions, business administration, health, you know, health, human resources, and be able to do a process inventory to see what was there. And then based on that, there's all this theory of well let's do a proof of concept. Let's do a proof of technology, let's do apply. Well, the bottom line is rpa technology's been around for a long time. It's proven there's nothing to prove. But really what was important to prove before we decided to go, you know, full tilt was, you know, develop a proof of perceived business value. >>Are we gonna bring in the, the business value, the hours and the qu qualitative metrics that is expected by our ex executive team, The leadership, we were able to do that, you know, with the help of help of ey, we built out the prototypes and we got the green light to go forward, got ey to start, and then we just basically went pedal to the metal. We had our foundation already defined. We built up the architecture in less than one to two months. Now, in, in a public sector or private sector, it's just not heard of, right? But we have a tendency with EYs technical team, myself, we look around the, the road around the rock instead, the rock in the road, right? So we ended up coming up with a very unique, very easy to easy to handle architecture that was very scalable. And then were able to hit the ground running and deploy in production by December where head of >>Was EY involved in the whole, you know, dev test production, dr. Center of excellence, the, the process inventory or did you bring them in? Did you kind of do that internally then bring EY in for the proof of >>Value? EY was actually awarded the contract for soup to nuts, basically the first phase, which was those four work streams I told you about. And they worked with myself and the state of Tennessee infrastructure architecture teams. We needed to get these things defined and signed off the architecture so we could expedite getting them built out. And then they, and they basically ran all four work streams, you know, the process, inventory, the prototype, the, the proof of perceived business value, the building out the center of excellence, working with myself. And, and this wasn't just us in a, a vacuum, we ended up having to, I mean, I could do the strategy, I could do the technology and I could said the roadmap and all the good stuff, but we had to actually meet with a lot of the state or tendency organizations on change management. How do we end up putting this process or an automation in the middle of the, the normal traditional process, right? So there was a lot of interaction there and getting their feedback and then tweaking our operational model based on feedback from the state of Tennessee. So it was all very collective collaborative. I think that would be the keyword is collaborative and then building out everything. So then, and then we ended up going to the next way where they knew so much and we were, we had such a tight timeframe that we continued with ey. >>So Christina, Bob mentioned center of excellence a couple of times in the state of Tennessee, but then beyond state of Tennessee, other organizations you've worked with in this space, what's the relationship between center of excellence and this thing we've been hearing about over the last couple of days, the citizen developer has that been, has, has, has that been leveraged in the state of Tennessee? Bob, have you seen that leveraged in other places? Christina? What's that relationship look like? >>Yeah, so we don't leverage that, that model yet we have centralized model and there's reasons for that. So we don't end up having maverick's, runoff runoffs have one off, have, you know, have a a UI path version or down this division or have another RPA tool in another division, right? So then all of a sudden we're, we have a maintenance nightmare. Manageability nightmare. So we basically, you know, I I I negotiate an ELA with UI path, so therefore if anyone wants to go do another automation on another division, or they would basically follow our model, our design, our coe, our quality gates. We we're the gatekeepers to bring into production. >>Got it. Now, yeah. Now Christina, what's your perspective? Because I can imagine Nashville and Memphis might have very different ideas about a lot of things. Yeah. Little Tennessee reference there, but what, what, what about what, what about other places are you, are you seeing the citizen developer leveraged in, in some kinds of places more than others or >>What? Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of, because of the foundation we're building. Yeah. So we laid, you know, when, when Bob talks about the first phase of eight weeks, that was amazingly fast, even in that's ridiculous. Spoke about it to say you're gonna lay these four foundations. I was excited, like, I was like, wow, this, this is a very serious client. They wanna go fast and they wanna get that momentum, but the AUM was laid out so we could propel ourselves. So we are at 40 automations right now. We're in the works of creating 80 more automations in this next year. We'll be at 120 really quickly. The AUM is critical. And I will say at a client, I've, I've worked with over 50 clients on automation programs. The way state of Tennessee treats the aom and they abide by it, it is the living document of how you go and go fast. Got it. And the one thing I would say is it's also allowed us to have such immense quality. So I always talk about you put in forward, you put in another 80, we're at 98% uptime on all our automations, meaning they don't go down. And that's because of the AOM we set up. And the natural progression is going to be how do you take it to citizen developer? How do you take it to, we call, you know, process automation plus, >>But methodically, methodically, not just throwing it out at the beginning and, and hoping the chaos >>Works. Exactly. Exactly. And >>The ratio of of bots to automations, is that one to one or you have automation? Oh no, the single bot is doing multiple. So how many bots are you talking about? >>We're doing, Bob, you're gonna answer this better than I will, but the efficiency is amazing. We've been pushing that. >>So our ratio now, cause we have a high density architecture we put in is four bots, excuse me, four processes. The one bot and four bots, The one virtual machine EC two server. Right? So it's four to one, four to one. Now what we're going to get by next summer, we'll do more analysis. We'll probably get the six to one, six to one that's made serious shrinkage of our footprint from a machine, you know, management perspective from 60 down to seven right now we're gonna add the next chunk. We add another 80 automations in FIS gear 24. We're only gonna add two more bot, two more servers. Right? So that's only 10 running like close to 200 bucks. >>And, and is doing this on prem in the cloud? >>No, our, the architecture's fully >>Oh, cloud based >>Ct. Yeah. So we use UiPath SAS model. Yeah. Right. So that handles the orchestrator, the attended bots, all the other tooling you need automation hub, process minor et etc. Etc. Cetera. And then on the state side in aws we have, we use unattended bots, cert bots that have to go down into the legacy systems, et cetera. And they're sitting on EC two instances. >>Was there, was there a security not hole that you had to get through internally? What was that like? >>No, actually we, we, we were lock and step with the security team on this. I mean, there are some standards and templates and you know, what we had to follow, you know, but they're doing an assessment every single release, they do assessments on little bots, what systems it's activating or are accessing, et cetera. The data, because you have fedra data of FTI data, you know, in the public sector to make sure we're not touching it. >>Do you guys golf? >>I do, yeah. Not Well, yes, >>If you mean I I like golf but not don't golf well, but so you know what, what a mulligan is. If you had a Mulligan right, for the state of Tennessee, what'd you learn? What would you do differently? You know, what are some of the gotchas you see maybe Christina in, in other customers and then maybe specifically state of Tennessee, >>Right? I would say, you know, it is the intangibles. So when we talk about our clients that go fast and go big, like state of Tennessee, it's because that, that we call it phase zero that gets done that Bob did. It's about making sure you've got the sponsorship. So we've got executive sponsorship all the way up. You've got amazing stakeholder engagement. So you're communicating the value of what we're trying to do. And you're, you're showing them the value. We have been really focused on the return on investment and we'll talk a little bit about that, but it's how do you make sure that when you do, you know, states are different with those agencies, you have such an opportunity to maximize return on investment if you do it right, because you're not talking about automation in one agency, you're talking it across multiple agencies. We call that the multiplier effect. And that's huge. And if you understand that and how to actually apply that, the value you get is amazing. So I, I don't, I can't say there's a mulligan here, Bob, you may think of some, I know on other clients, if you don't line up your stakeholders and you don't set the expectations early on, you meander and you may get five, six automations in over the year. You know, when I go to clients and say, we're doing 40, we're doing 80, they're like, >>Wow, that's the, but that's the bottom line. Gotcha. Is if you, if you want to have an operational impact and have multiple zeros, you gotta go through that process that you said up front. >>Exactly. A >>Anything you do differently, Bob? >>Well, I I what I do differently, I mean, I think, I mean we, we did get executive sponsorship, you know, and in one area, but we still have to go out to all the 23 agencies and get, and bring awareness and kind of like set the hook to bring 'em in, right? Bring 'em to the, to the, to the lake. Right. And, and I think if, if it was more of a blanket top down, getting every agency to agree to, you know, in investigate automation, it would've been a lot easier. So we're, we're, we're getting it done. We've gone through 13 agencies already and less than a year, all of our releases are sprinkling across multiple agencies. So it's not like a silo. I'll look at that. Everyone at every agency is being impacted. So I think that's great. But I, I think our, our Mueller now is just trying to make sure we have enough backlog to do the next sprints. >>Is it, you know, the ROI on these initiatives is, is, is so clear and so fast. Is it self-funding? Is there gain sharing or do you just give business, give money back to the state and have to scramble for more? Do you get to, you know, get a lick off that cone? >>Unfortunately we don't, but I, I, I try to see if we could get some property like, nah, we don't do that. It's all cost, cost based. But, but our ROI is very attractive, I think for, for doing a whole state, you know, transformation. I think our ROI is three and a half to four years. Right. And that's pretty mind blowing. Even if you look at private sector or, I, I think some of the, the key things which people are noticing, even though we're in public sector, we're we are very nimble. This project is extremely nimble. We've had people come in, exactly, we need this, so we're gonna get penalized. Okay, knock it out in four hours, four days. Right? So it's that nimbleness that you just don't hear of even in private sector or public sector. And we're just able to do that for all the collaboration we do across ey, across myself and across all the other organizations that I, that I kind of drag along or what have, >>What do you, what do you, do you see any limits to the opportunities here? I mean, is this a decade long opportunity? Is you have that much runway >>Or that's just not my dna, so we're gonna, we're gonna probably do it like in four years, but Well, when >>You say do it, I mean, will you be done at that point? Or do you see the weight, >>Look at, you know, we could boil the ocean and I think this is one of the reasons why we're successful is we could boil the ocean and and be, it will be 10 attended 20 year program. Yeah. Okay. Or we looked at it, we had some of EY guys look at it and say, I said, what's the 25 80 rule? Meaning, you know, give me, So if we had 500 processes, tell me how many processes will gimme 80% of the hours. And it was 125, it was a 25 80 rule. I said, that's what we're doing it, we're doing, we're gonna do the 80% of the hours quantifiably. Now when we're done with that pass, then we'll have those other ones that are bringing 20% of the hours, that's when we might be bringing citizens in. That's what we're bringing state workers in. But at that same time, we will be going back in the wave and doing advanced ai. Right. Or advance ia, in other words. So right now we do rpa, ocr, icr, but you know, there's NL ml nps, there's virtual agents and stuff. So that's like the wave we're gonna do through the ones we've already gone through. Got it. Right. So it'll probably be a two or three wave or iterations. >>Cool. Guys, thanks so much for coming into the cube. Great story. Really appreciate you taking us through it. Thank you so much for having us. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson. The Dave ante. We back at UI path forward five from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

(bright music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich and today we'll highlight the best cybersecurity solution. I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Tina Thorstenson executive public sector strategist at CrowdStrike and Jennifer Dvorak information security architect for the State of Arizona. Thank you so much for being with me today. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yep, thank you. >> Perfect. Well you know obviously a really wild year with COVID and it certainly pushed a lot of boundaries. Cyber security resiliency also a hot topic as ransomware really spiked up. How have you addressed this concern and really accelerated this push with COVID-19 in the backdrop? I'd love it if either one of you would just like to jump in here. >> Well, CrowdStrike was one of our initiatives for 2020 and it was significantly increased, accelerated due to COVID. So we had to roll out in a matter of weeks when we had a matter of months previously and it really provided us the visibility that we needed for folks taking their computers home. We had no way of triaging any of our incidents when the computers were at home. So rolling out CrowdStrike as quickly as possible it gave us remote access, it gave us visibility and that was huge for our organization. >> Tina, if you could weigh in on this as well, that would be terrific. >> Sure absolutely. And you know, Jen with the State of Arizona is one of our premier customers but across the board with the 2021 global threat report that we issue each year, what we saw there was a fourfold increase in the number of intrusions. So to your point about the threat activity and it's not getting better. So what CrowdStrike is on a mission to do is stop regions and protect organizations against these bad actors so that they're, that we minimize disruptions. It's really been tremendous to see and build a ecosystem from a platform approach that started with visibility on the end point that Jen was just alluding to. >> And Jennifer, I'd love to get your insight how the public sector and the private sector can work better in tandem with each other in order to protect customers and also communities against ransomware attacks and other kinds of cybersecurity threats that we've seen coming from Russia for instance. >> Certainly so our state CISO Tim Roemer, he has definitely encouraged us to make partners with our private vendors. So that's one of his strategic initiatives and we really want partners in the private sector. We want folks that are going to come alongside us and help us with our security goals. And CrowdStrike has been one of those vendors. We don't want to just spend money and then the vendor runaway, we want somebody that's going to be with us every step of the way. We've had some incidents this past year and CrowdStrike was the first team to alert us because it was a different agency or a different part of our organization that we don't typically work with a lot. And that was really helpful because we were able to act quickly and address the issues that arose. So just having somebody that's looking out for your best interests and being a true partner is what we're really looking for. And that's the only way that we can circumvent these ransomware attacks. >> And Tina I'd love it if you'd weigh in as well. How do you see your role in this effort to protect the public evolving now in 2021? >> So I love that question and especially with the role of my role brand new in COVID interestingly enough, to create this bi-directional executive alignment with our customers and our internal teams and overall at CrowdStrike our goal, as I said is to stop breaches and it's really to bring, to minimize the frustration that comes sometimes with rolling out security tools. I've been at this a long time and tools like CrowdStrike are really game changers for security teams that are really about protecting organizations. And essentially what we do is we brought a single platform where when it, when the, when our software is deployed to an organization across their laptops, desktops, server and cloud infrastructure, we were born in the cloud kind of before it was cool and now we serve more than 11,000 customers. And that threat activity goes to a single AWS instance where we look across all of the threat activity. And then when we see activity in one area, we can protect all of our customers. That's the power of the cloud. >> Perfect and I'd love Jennifer's insights here too. What steps are you taking now to keep the public protected and the state cyber ready? >> And I like Tina's point about being born in the cloud. So State of Arizona is a cloud first state. We are also looking for solutions in the cloud, and I think by leveraging cloud solutions, we're able to be more nimble. We're able to pivot our approach to security and address anything that comes up more quickly. So being cloud first, even though it's, it wasn't embraced initially, I think that it's something that we've been driving towards and looking for more partners that support that cloud first initiative that we have. >> And Tina what's top of mind? What are some of the key initiatives that your team and teams are going to be focused on in the years ahead? What's the next phase for cybersecurity? >> Great question and we've talked quite a bit about the end point but where we're headed and really where we've invested heavily the last couple of years and we'll continue moving forward is now that we have, we've brought this game-changing visibility to our security teams on the end point of each one of the systems in their environment where we've expanded the platform to now include cloud services like I mentioned. Now include indicators of misconfigurations which are so detrimental to teams working in a hybrid cloud environment. And then we've also moved into the identity protection space. And essentially what we're doing there is the same thing we've been doing to protect workloads coming from desktops and laptops across the country and around the world and moved to a model where we're also in a zero trust principles way looking for threat activity coming in through identities, through people logging into these systems and doing the same real-time continuous monitoring and taking proactive action to protect organizations where we see malicious activity. >> Terrific, well, in light of COVID-19, we saw a big spike in ransomware and I'd love to hear specifically from Tina why do we need trusted partners rather than software vendors in this fight? >> You know, it's so important to get out in front of all of the adversaries and most recently that we've seen huge growth in the e-crime actors that are taking advantage of the tools that are unfortunately in the market today, sometimes even free that allow them to hold organizations hostage. And the reason that's so important to partner with organizations and companies like CrowdStrike, is that we've been thinking ahead and we are designed in a way to stop an individual, a breach or adversary attack from occurring but we've been watching how their adversary works and now we can see their activity very early on before they have a chance to gain a foothold in an organization's server or laptop or even a phone or a tablet. And really what we're doing is we're providing protection so that it doesn't even need to move to an analyst to do further review. We just stop it right at the gate before it causes harm. And the reason that this is so important probably is obvious, but we're about making sure that the organizations like the State of Arizona can continue on their business and without these kinds of disruptions. So we haven't designed against one particular adversary but we really designed an approach that works across them all because we've been watching so closely how they move through environments for years. And we use the power of artificial intelligence delivered from the cloud to protect against all things including ransomware. >> Right it's really an evolving process. You constantly have to be vigilant for the next threat. Now I'd love to hear how you see things change with your tech partners and providers at the moment. >> So from a CrowdStrike perspective, we aim to be absolutely the best in class for the products and services that we provide whether that's your products that you can purchase like our endpoint solutions or whether that's services like our 24/7 threat hunting teams or Falcon Complete Teams that basically serve as an extension of an organization's team. But it's absolutely critical that we move this direction and not try to be the best at everything and instead partner. So we have extensive partnerships with Zscaler and Proofpoint and so many others, Okta. I mean the list goes on and on with now hundreds. And we also have a CrowdStrike store. So once you're a customer we've reduced the friction to taking on and trying out new modules, either from us or new options that maybe you haven't considered before from our trusted partners, much like the AWS marketplace we've got the CrowdStrike store and it's a growing set of partnerships where we build those integrations. So, my prior life I was the CISO for Arizona State University most recently. And we spend an awful lot of time integrating these solutions in a CrowdStrike. We're about building those integrations so that the teams within the organizations that can get on to doing innovative things within their space, rather than having to spend all their time tying these technologies together. >> Yeah now shifting to Jennifer late last year we learned that suspected Russian hackers broke into the US government agencies including a county in Arizona. So what measures has the State of Arizona put in place now to ensure that something like that won't happen again or that at least the state is very vigilant and ready to protect citizens and the government against these threats? >> We're definitely partnering with products like or vendors like CrowdStrike. That's what we, we're looking to extend those partnerships. And not only that we're developing our information sharing program across state, local and territorial governments. So we're looking to partner with the cities, the counties. Cybersecurity is a team sport. Cybersecurity is, it takes everyone. It takes the whole state working together. And that's one of the things that we've been trying to build. So working in conjunction with the state fusion center, the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, we've been working to do more indicators of compromise sharing, any intelligence that we've been gathering from these counties that maybe did have an incident or a breach. We want to make sure that the information is disseminated to everyone so that we can be stronger and protect against it. Additionally, we we're always looking for grants that we can extend so that we're able to extend our products that we use to some of the smaller cities and towns and counties so that they can leverage some of the same technologies like CrowdStrike in their environments at a fraction of the cost or paid for by a grant. >> Terrific, well, Tina how does your experience as a CrowdStrike customer now come into play in your current role? >> Well, how's it come into play? Well, I think that it makes it really easy for me to be a liaison internally and help internal teams understand what it's like to sit as a CISO or as a CIO or deputy CIO. And to understand the kinds of challenges that these teams are (indistinct) these leaders of these teams are facing as they're moving forward with their innovation agenda while making sure to make sure that they're gaining those operational efficiencies that are so important today and wowing their customers all the while, right? So I think really what I bring to it is that level of experience to make sure that the voices of our customers are heard internally and that we continue to build products and services that make sense for the needs of our customers additional capabilities. Like we just released Falcon X Recon is an example of one of our newer capabilities where we're basically looking at their deep and dark web activity and bringing that together in the single platform, single event console that we've leveraged for years now. And in highlighting that activity many, in many cases, pre breach. So before you'd ever see it hit your, in your organization's operational environment, we would detect it through that service. So, I think it's those, all those things combined. >> Terrific well, CrowdStrike won a number of key accolades this year, and I was curious, Tina what you attribute to this huge success. >> Well, I have to tell you that I've been in the security space for far too long. And what I can say is that until CrowdStrike came along, there wasn't a solution, a security solution that we could get software running on an end point that wasn't just frustrating across the board. There were conflicts with other software running or the software would work great for one platform but it wouldn't work for the other. So we really have this new approach. And I think that that's what's made us, in fact I'm sure it's certainly what made me a wildly happy customer is that staff, faculty, employees, if we hadn't told them the software was being rolled out, they wouldn't have even noticed. You know it doesn't impact the machines and it's really provided this amazing experience and bringing all that with 150 different adversary groups that we track and we take that on for the customers and just bring visibility for the immediate things they need to take action on. I think those are all of the things that got us to this point in building out this platform is going to be really amazing to see in the years to come as we expand across other areas within the security space, either developing our own or really driving partnerships to make it easier for our customers. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, I pulled up the stat here for us to examine because I think it's really important for our viewers to understand just how important cybersecurity is and how it's going to be even more important for customers and for the private citizens and public citizens. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cyber crime costs will grow by 15% per year reaching 10.5 trillion by 2025. That's just in about four years. And not only that, cyber crime will become the third largest economy in the world after the United States and China. So, I mean, it's really terrific that you're stepping up. You know just if you could both, perhaps Jennifer can go first and then Tina, what are the key lessons that you have for even the federal government to take a more proactive stance against these threats? >> Well, I think it's clear that this is a very lucrative venture, business venture. It's treated like a business venture by these criminal actors and they have a formula and it works. So I don't see that it's going to be changing anytime soon. And it's also not something that is highly sophisticated, highly technical. It's very easy. It's very much phishing, you know, users clicking on emails and vulnerabilities and environments. It's really a very easy formula that they continue to repeat. So I think until the federal government has more ways to recoup some of these ransomware payments, or we're able to stop some of these ransomware as a service products from being used, I think it's going to continue. So we're defenders so we need to make sure that we're ready for anything that comes and using products that keep us safe is really the best way and training our users. >> Terrific and Tina? >> Thank you. So we are so passionate about making sure that our customers can sleep better at night. When it comes down to tips it really comes back to the basics in many regards but the basics are sometimes really hard to do. So they sound simple, but they aren't so easy to do. And it's basics like making sure your systems are patched. Every organization has just a growing number of devices and pieces of software and infrastructure and all of those things need to be patched nearly immediately to stay out in front of today's adversaries. And Jen's right, Some are sophisticated, some are not but the reality is if we leave those windows open, we will have adversaries, oh, you know walk into our house if you will. So the basics like that also making sure that you have great backups, right? So if you do run into an instance of a ransomware where your systems are locked that you have the ability to recover quickly, being proactive and making sure that you have the partnership arrangement ahead of time is a third really important thing to do. Many organizations now have IRR retainers that they, incident response retainers that you can use proactively in years where you don't find yourself on your heels in a reactive situation but then it's there when you need it. Sometimes it's hard to find great services when there are the flood of ransomware attacks like we've seen in recent months. And then lastly, and I should have started with this 'cause it's the most important part, train your people. It's so important to make sure that security is just a culture, a part of the culture, just like you lock your car and you lock your house. Making sure that you're thinking about those things that will help keep you safe and your organization safe. >> Really excellent points. Thank you both so much for your insights. That was Tina Thorstenson executive public sector strategist at CrowdStrike, as well as Jennifer Dvorak, information security architect for the State of Arizona. Again, really appreciate your insights. This was a fantastic conversation with you. And that's all for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards or in this session of that. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and see you very soon. (bright music)

>> 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)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone and welcome to this CUBE conversation. You know, data protection, it used to be so easy. You'd have apps, they'd be running on a bunch of servers, you'd bolt on a little backup and boom! One size fit all. It was really easy peasy. Now, business disruptions at the time, they were certainly not desired, but they were definitely much more tolerated and they were certainly fairly common place. Today, business disruptions are still fairly common occurrence but the situation is different. First of all, digital imperatives have created so much more pressure for IT organizations to deliver services that are always available with great consumer experiences. The risks of downtime are so much higher but meeting expectations is far more complex. This idea of "one size fits all" it really no longer cuts it. You got physical, virtual, public cloud, on-prim, hybrid, edge, containers. Add to this cyber threats, AI, competition from digital disrupters. The speed of change is accelerating and it's stressing processes and taxing the people skills required to deliver business resilience. These and other factors are forcing organizations to rethink how they protect, manage, and secure data in the coming decade. And with me, to talk about the state of data protection today and beyond, is a thought leader from one of the companies in data protection, Arthur Lent is the Senior Vice President and CTO of the Data Protection Division at Dell EMC. Arthur, good to see you again. Thanks for coming in. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> So, I'm going to start right off. This is a hot space and everybody wants a piece of your hide because you're the leader. How are you guys responding to that competitive threat? >> Well, so the key thing that we're doing is we're taking our proven products and technologies and we've recognized the need to transform and really modernize them and invest in a new set of capabilities and changing workloads. And our core part of that, with some changes in leadership, have been to shift our processes in terms of how we do stuff internally and so we've moved from a very big batch waterfall-style approach where things need to be planned one, two, three years out in advance, to a very small batch agile approach where we're looking a couple of weeks, a couple of months in advance of what we're going to be delivering into product. And this is enabling us to be far more responsive to what we're learning in the market in very rapidly changing areas. And we're at the spot where we now have several successive releases that have been taking place with our products in this new model. >> So, that's a major cultural shift that you're really driving. I mean, that allows you to track you know, younger people, you guys are a global organization so I mean, how is that sort of dynamic change? You know, people sometimes maybe think of you as this stodgy, you know, company been around for 20 plus years. What's it like when you walk around the hallways? What's that dynamic like? >> It's like we're the largest start-up in the data protection industry but we've got the backing of a Fortune 50 company. >> Nice. All right, well let's get into it. I talked in my narrative upfront about business disruptions and I said there's still you know, kind of a common occurrence today, is that what you're seeing? >> Absolutely! So, our latest data protection index research has 82% of the people we surveyed experienced downtime or data loss within the last 12 months and this survey was just completed within the last month or two. So, this is still very much a real problem. >> Why do you think it's still a problem today? What are the factors? >> So I would say the problem's getting worse and it's because complexity is only increasing in IT environments. Complexity around multi-platform, between physical servers, virtual servers, cloud, various flavors of hybrid cloud, data distribution between the core, edge and the cloud, growing data volumes, the amount of data, and the data that companies need to run their business is ever increasing, and a growing risk around compliance, around security threats, and many customers have multi-vendor environments and multi-vendor environments also increase their complexity and risk and challenges. >> Who was that talking about cloud? Because you know, we entered last decade. Cloud was kind of this experimental, throw some dev out in the cloud, and now as we enter this decade it's kind of a fundamental part of IT strategies. Every CIO, he or she has a cloud strategy. But it's also becoming clear that it's a hybrid world. So, in thinking about data protection, how does hybrid affect how your customers are thinking about protecting their data in the coming decade? >> So it produces a bunch of changes in how you have to think about things and today, we have over a thousand customers protecting over 2.5 exabytes of data in the public cloud. And it goes across a variety of use cases from longterm retention in the cloud, backup to the cloud, disaster recovery to the cloud, a desire to leverage the cloud for analytics and dev test, as well as production workloads in the cloud and the need to protect data that is born in the cloud. And we're in an environment where IT is spanning from the edge to the core to the cloud and the need to have a cohesive ability and approach to protect that data across its lifecycle for where it's born and where it's being operated on and where value is being added to it. >> Yeah, and people don't want to buy a thousand products to do that or even a dozen products to do that, right? They want a single platform. I want to talk about containers because Kubernetes, specifically, the containers generally one of the hottest areas. It's funny, containers have been around forever (laughs) but now they're exploding, people are investing much more in containers. IT organizations and dev organizations see it as a way to drive some of the agility that you maybe talked about earlier. But I'm hearing a lot about you know, protection, data protection for containers, and I'm thinking, "Well, wait a minute... "You know, containers come and go. "They're ephemeral. Why do I need to protect them?" Help me understand that. >> So, first I want to say yeah, we're seeing a lot of interest in enterprises deploying containers. Our latest survey says 57% of enterprises are planning on deploying it next year. And in terms of the ephemerality and the importance of protection, I have to admit, I started this job about a year ago and I was thinking almost exactly the same thing you were. I came in, we had an advanced development project going on around how to protect Kubernetes environments, both to protect the data and the infrastructure. And I was like, "Yeah, I see this "as an important advanced development priority, "but why is this important "to productize in the near future?" And then I thought about it some more and was talking to folks where the Kubernetes technologies, there's two key things with it. One: It's Kubernetes as a DevOps CI/CD environment, well if that environment is down... Your business is down in terms of being able to develop. So, you have to think about the loss of productivity and the loss of business value as you're trying to get your developer environment back up and running. But also, even though there might not be stateful applications running in the containers, there's generally production usage in terms of delivering your service that's coming out of that cluster. So, if your clusters go down or your Kubernetes environment goes down, you got to be able to bring it back up in order to be able to get it up and running. And then the last thing is in the last year or two, there's been a lot of investment in the Kubernetes community around enabling Kubernetes containers to be stateful and to have persistence with them. And that will enable databases to run in containers and stateful applications to run in to containers. And we see a lot of enterprises that are interested in doing that but... Now they can have that persistence but it turns out they can't go into production with the persistence because they can't back it up. And so, there's this chicken and egg problem in order to do the production you need both the state and the data protection. And the nice thing about the transformation that we've done is as we saw this trend materializing we were able to rapidly take this advanced development project and turn it into productization. And we're able to get to a tech preview in the summer and a joint announcement with Pat Gelsinger around our work together in the Kubernetes environment and being able to get our first... Product release out to market a couple of weeks ago and we're going to be able to really rapidly enhance the capabilities of that as we're working with our customers on where do they need the features added most and being able to rapidly integrate in with VMware's management ecosystem for container environments. >> So, you got a couple things going on there. You're kind of describing the dynamic of the developer and developers set to key... Strategic linchpin now. Because the time between you developing function and you get it to market I mean, it used to be weeks or months or sometimes even years. Today, it's like nanoseconds, right? "Hey, we need this function today. "Something's happening in the market, go push it." And if you don't have your data, you don't have the containers. The data and the containers are not protected, you're in trouble, right? Okay so, that's one aspect of it. The other is the technical piece so help us understand like, how you do that. What's the secret sauce conceptually behind you know, protecting containers? >> So, there's really two parts of what one needs to do for protecting the containers. There's the container infrastructure itself and the container configuration and knowing what's involved in the environment so that if your Kubernetes cluster goes down being able to restart it and being able to get your appropriate application environment up and running So, the containers may not be stateful but you've got to be able to get your CI/CD operate environment up and running again. And then the second part is we are seeing people use stateful containers and put databases in containers in development and they want to roll that into production. And so for there we need to backup not just the container definitions but backup the data that's inside the container and be able to restore them. And those are some of the things that we're working on now. >> One of the things I've learned from being around this industry for a while is people who really understand technology, they'll ask questions about, "What happens when something goes wrong?" so it's all about the recovery is really what you're talking about is that's the key. How does machine intelligence fit in... Stay on containers for a minute. Is machine learning and machine intelligence allowing you to recover more quickly, does it fit in there? >> So a key part of the container environment that's different from some of the environments in the past is just how dynamic it is and just how frequently containers are going to come and go and workloads mix, expand, and contract their usage of IT resources and footprint. And that really increases the need for automation and using some AI and machine learning techniques so that one can discover what is an application as it's containerized and what are all the resources it needs so that in the event of an interruption of service you know, all of the pieces that you need to bring together and automate its recovery and bring back. And in these environments you can no longer be in a spot to have people handcraft and tailor exactly what to protect and exactly how to bring it back after protection. You need these things to be able to protect themselves automatically and recover themselves automatically. >> So, I want to sort of, double click on that. Again, it's 2020 so I'm always going back to last decade and thinking about what's different. Beginning of last decade people were afraid of automation, they wanted knobs to turn. Even exiting the decade recently and even now, people are afraid about losing jobs. But the reality is things are happening so fast, there's so much data that humans just can't keep up. So, maybe you could make some comments about automation generally and specifically applying to data protection and recovery. >> Okay, so with the increasing amounts of data to be protected and the increasing complexity of environments, more and more of the instances of downtime or challenges in performing a recovery, tend to be because of the complexity of having deployed them and having the recovery procedures write and insuring that the SLAs that are needed are met and it's just no longer realistic... To expect people to have to do all of those things in excruciating detail. And it's really just necessary, in order to meet the SLAs going forward, to have the environments be automatically discovered, automatically protected, and have automated workflows for the recovery scenarios. And because of the complexities of changing, we need to reach the point of having AI and machine learning technologies help guide the people owning the data protection on data criticality and what's the right SLA for this and what's the right SLA for that and really get a human-machine partnership. So, it's not people or machines, but it's rather the people and machines working together in tandem with each doing what they do best to get the best outcome. >> Now that's great, you'd be helping people prioritize and the criticality applications... I want to change the conversation and talk about the edge a little bit. You sponsor off like, IDC surveys on how big the market is in terms of just zettabytes and it's really interesting and thank you from the industry standpoint for doing that. I have no doubt edge is coming into play now because so much data is going to be created at the edge, there's all this analog data that's going to be digitized, and it's just a big component of the digital future. In thinking about data at the edge, a lot of the data is going to stay at the edge, maybe it's got to be persisted at the edge. And obviously if it's persisted it has to be protected. So, how are you thinking about the evolution of edge, specifically around data protection? >> Okay, so the... I think you kind of caught it in the beginning. There's going to be a huge amount of data in the edge. Our analysis has us seeing that there's going to be more data generated and stored in the edge than in all the public clouds combined. So, that's just a huge shift in that three to five to ten year timeframe. >> Lot of data. >> Lot of data. You're not going to be able to bring it all back. You're just going to have elements of physics. So, there's data that's going to need to be persisted there. Some of that data will be transitory. Some of that data is going to be critical and need to be recovered. And a key part of the strategy around the edge is really, again going back to that, AI and machine learning intelligence and having a centralized control and understanding of what is my data in the edge and having what are the right triggers and understanding of what's going on of when is it an event occurred where I really need to protect this data? You can't afford to protect everything all the time. You got to protect the right things at the right time and then move it around appropriately. And so, a key part of being successful with the edge is getting that distributed intelligence and distributed control and recognizing that applications are going to span from core to edge to cloud and have just specific features and functions and capabilities that implement into various spots and then that intelligence to do the right thing at the right time with central policy control. >> So this is a good discussion. We've spanned a lot of territories but let's bring it back to the practical you know, uses for the IT person today saying, "Okay, Arthur, look. "Yeah, I'm doing cloud. I'm playing around with AI. "I've got my feet in containers "and my dev staff is doing that. "Yeah, edge. I see that coming. "But I just got some problems today that I have to solve." So, my question to you is, how do you address those really tactical day-to-day problems that your customers are facing today and still help them you know, plan for the future and make sure that they've got a platform that's going to be there for them and they're not going to just have to rip and replace in three or four years? >> Okay, and so that's like the $100,000 question as we look at ourselves in this situation. And the key is really taking our proven technologies and proven products and solutions and taking the agile approach for adding the most critical modern capabilities for new workloads, new deployment scenarios alongside them as we modernize those solutions themselves and really bringing our customers along in the journey with that and having a very smooth path for that customer transition experience on that path to our powered up portfolio. >> I mean, that's key because if you get that wrong and your customers get that wrong then maybe now it's a $100,000 problem it's going to be billions of dollars of problems. >> Fair. >> So, I want to talk a little bit about alternative use cases for data protection. We've kind of changed the parlance, we used to call it "backup". I've often said people want to get more out of their backup, they want to do other things with their backup 'cause they don't want just to pay for insurance, the CFO wants ROI. What are you seeing in terms of alternative use cases and the sort of expanding TAM, if you will, of backup and data protection? >> So, a core part of our strategy is to recognize that there is all of this data that we have as part of the data protection solutions and there's a desire on our customer's parts to get additional business value out of it and additional use cases from there. And we've explored and are investing in a variety of ways of doing that and the one that we see that's really hit a key problem of the here-and-now is around security and malware. And we are having multiple customers that are under attack for a variety of threats and it's hitting front page news. And a very large fraction of enterprises are having some amount of downtime due to malware or cyber attacks. And a key focus that we've had is around our cyber recovery solutions of really enabling a protected air gap solution so that in the event of some hidden malware or an intrusion, having a protected copy of that data to be able to restore from. And we've got customers who otherwise would have been brought down but were able to be brought back up very, very quickly by recovering out of our cyber vault. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a huge problem. Cyber has become a board-level issue, people are you know, scared to death of getting hit with ransomware, getting their entire data corpus encrypted so that air gap is obviously critical and increasingly it's becoming a fundamental requirement from a compliance standpoint. All right, I'll give you last word. Bring us home. >> Okay, so, the most important thing about the evolving and rapidly changing space of data protection at this point is that need for enterprises to have a coherent approach across their old and new workloads, across their emerging technologies, across their deployments in core, edge, and cloud, to be able to identify and manage that data and protect and manage that data throughout its lifecycle and to have a single coherent way to do that and single set of policies and controls across the data in all of those places. And that's one key part of our strategy of bringing that coherence across all of those environments and not just in the data protection domain, but there's also a need for this cross-domain coherence and getting your automation and simplification, not just in the data protection domain but up into higher levels of your infrastructure. And so we've got automation's taking place with our PowerOne Converged Infrastructure and we're looking across our Dell Technologies portfolio of how can we together, with our partners in Dell Technologies, solve more of our customer problems by doing things jointly. And so for example, doing data management that spans not just your protection storage but your primary storage as well. Your AI and ML techniques for full stack automation. Working with VMware around the full end to end Kubernetes management for VMware environments. And those are just a couple of examples of where we're looking to both be full across the data protection, but then expand into broader IT collaborations. >> You're seeing this across the industry. I mean, Arthur, you mentioned PowerOne. You're talking about microservices, API-based platform increasing, we're seeing infrastructure as a code which means more speed, more agility, and that's how the industry is dealing with all this complexity. Arthur, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Today is November 8, 2019 and I'd like to address one of the most important topics in the minds of a lot of executives. I'm talking about CEOs, CIOs, Chief Information Security Officers, Boards of Directors, governments and virtually every business around the world. And that's the topic of cyber security. The state of cyber security has changed really dramatically over the last 10 years. I mean, as a cyber security observer I've always been obsessed with Stuxnet, which the broader community discovered the same year that theCUBE started in 2010. It was that milestone that opened my eyes. Think about this. It's estimated that Stuxnet cost a million dollars to create. That's it. Compare that to an F-35 fighter jet. It costs about $85-$100 million to build one. And that's on top of many billions of dollars in R&D. So Stuxnet, I mean, it hit me like a ton of bricks. That the future of war was all about cyber, not about tanks. And the barriers to entry were very, very low. Here's my point. We've gone from an era where thwarting hacktivists was our biggest cyber challenge to one where we're now fighting nation states and highly skilled organized criminals. And of course, cyber crime and monetary theft is the number one objective behind most of these security breaches that we see in the press everyday. It's estimated that by 2021 cyber crime is going to cost society $6 trillion in theft, lost productivity, recovery costs. I mean, that's just a staggeringly large number. It's even hard to fathom. Now, the other C-change is how organizations have had to respond to the bad guys. It used to be pretty simple. I got a castle and the queen is inside. We need to protect her, so what do we do? We built a mote, put it around the perimeter. Now, think of the queen as data. Well, what's happened? The queen has cloned herself a zillion times. She's left the castle. She's gone up to the sky with the clouds. She's gone to the edge of the kingdom and beyond. She's also making visits to machines and the factories and hanging out with the commoners. She's totally exposed. Listen, by 2020, there's going to be hundreds of billions of IP addresses. These are going to be endpoints and phones, TVs, cameras, tablets, automobiles, factory machines, and all these represent opportunities for the bad guys to infiltrate. This explosion of endpoints that I'm talking about is created massive exposures, and we're seeing it manifest itself in the form of phishing, malware, and of course the weaponization of social media. You know, if you think that 2016 was nuts, wait 'til you see how the 2020 presidential election plays out. And of course, there's always the threat of ransomware. It's on everybody's minds these days. So I want to try to put some of this in context and share with you some insights that we've learned from the experts on theCUBE. And then let's drill into some of the ETR data and assess the state of security, the spending patterns. We're going to try to identify some of those companies with momentum and maybe some of those that are a little bit exposed. Let me start with the macro and the challenged faced by organization and that's complexity. Here's Robert Herjavec on theCUBE. Now, you know him from the Shark Tank, but he's also a security industry executive. Herjavec told me in 2017 at the Splunk.com Conference that he thought the industry was overly complex. Let's take a look and listen. >> I think that the industry continues to be extremely complicated. There's a lot of vendors. There's a lot of products. The average Fortune 500 company has 72 security products. There's a stat that RSA this year, that there's 1500 new security start-ups every year. Every single year. How are they going to survive? And which ones do you have to buy because they're critical and provide valuable insights? And which ones are going to be around for a year or two and you're never going to hear about again? So it's a extremely challenging complex environment. >> So it's that complexity that had led people like Pat Gelsinger to say security is a do-over, and that cyber security is broken. He told me this years ago on theCUBE. And this past VM World we talked to Pat Gelsinger and remember, VMware bought Carbon Black, which is an endpoint security specialist, for $2.1 billion. And he said that he's basically creating a cloud security division to be run by Patrick Morley, who is the Carbon Black CEO. Now, many have sort of questioned and been skeptical about VMware's entrance into the space. But here's a clip that Pat Gelsinger shared with us on theCUBE this past VM World. Let's listen and we'll come back and talk about it. >> And this move in security, I am just passionate about this, and as I've said to my team, if this is the last I do in my career is I want to change security. We just not are satisfying our customers. They shouldn't put more stuff on our platforms. >> National defense issues, huge problems. >> It's just terrible. And I said, if it kills me, right, I'm going to get this done. And they says, "It might kill you, Pat." >> So this brings forth an interesting dynamic in the industry today. Specifically, Steven Smith, the CISO of AWS, at this year's Reinforce, which is their security conference, Amazon's big cloud security conference, said that this narrative that security is broken, it's just not true, he said. It's destructive and it's counterproductive. His and AWS's perspective is that the state of cloud security is actually strong. Kind of reminded me of a heavily messaged State of the Union address by the President of the United States. At the same time, in many ways, AWS is doing security over. It's coming at it from the standpoint of a clean slate called cloud and infrastructure as a surface. Here's my take. The state of security in this union is not good. Every year we spend more, we lose more, and we feel less safe. So why does AWS, the security czar, see if differently? Well, Amazon uses this notion of a shared responsibility security model. In other words, they secure the S3 buckets, maybe the EC2 infrastructure, not maybe, the EC2 infrastructure. But it's up to the customer to make sure that she is enforcing the policies and configuring systems that adhere to the EDIX of the corporation. So I think the shared security model is a bit misunderstood by a lot of people. What do I mean by that? I think sometimes people feel like well, my data's in the cloud, and AWS has better security than I do. Here I go, I'm good. Well, AWS probably does have better security than you do. Here's the problem with that. You still have all these endpoints and databases and file servers that you're managing, and that you have to make sure comply with your security policies. Even if you're all on the cloud, ultimately, you are responsible for securing your data. Let's take a listen to Katie Jenkins, the CISO of Liberty Mutual, on this topic and we'll come back. >> Yeah, so the shared responsibility model is, I think that's an important speaking point to this whole ecosystem. At the end of the day, Liberty Mutual, our duty is to protect policyholder data. It doesn't matter if it's in the cloud, if it's in our data centers, we have that duty to protect. >> It's on you. >> All right, so there you have it from a leading security practitioner. The cloud is not a silver bullet. Bad user behavior is going to trump good security every time. So unfortunately the battle goes on. And here's where it gets tricky. Security practitioners are drowning in a sea of incidents. They have to prioritize and respond to, and as you heard Robert Herjavec say, the average large company has 75 security products installed. Now, we recently talked to another CISO, Brian Lozada, and asked him what's the number one challenge for security pros. Here's what he said. >> Lack of talent. I mean, we're starving for talent. Cyber security's the only field in the world with negative unemployment. We just don't have the actual bodies to actually fill the gaps that we have. And in that lack of talent CISOs are starving. We're looking for the right things or tools to actually patch these holes and we just don't have it. Again, we have to force the industry to patch all of those resource gaps with innovation and automation. I think CISOs really need to start asking for more automation and innovation within their programs. >> So bottom line is we can't keep throwing humans at the problem. Can't keep throwing tools at the problem. Automation is the only way in which we're going to be able to keep up. All right, so let's pivot and dig in to some of the ETR data. First, I want to share with you what ETR is saying overall, what their narrative looks like around spending. So in the overall security space, it's pretty interesting what ETR says, and it dovetails into some of the macro trends that I've just shared with you. Let's talk about CIOs and CISOs. ETR is right on when they tell me that these executives no longer have a blank check to spend on security. They realize they can't keep throwing tools and people at the problem. They don't have the bodies, and as we heard from Brian Lozada. And so what you're seeing is a slowdown in the growth, somewhat of a slowdown, in security spending. It's still a priority. But there's less redundancy. In other words, less experimentation with new vendors and less running systems in parallel with legacy products. So there's a slowdown adoption of new tools and more replacement of legacy stuff is what we're seeing. As a result, ETR has identified this bifurcation between those vendors that are very well positioned and those that are losing wallet share. Let me just mention a few that have the momentum, and we're going to dig into this data in more detail. Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Okta, which does identity management, Cisco, who's coming at the problem from its networking strength. Microsoft, which recently announced Sentinel for Azure. These are the players, and some of them that are best positioned, I'll mention some others, from the standpoint spending momentum in the ETR dataset. Now, here's a few of those that are losing momentum. Checkpoint, SonicWall, ArcSight, Dell EMC, which is RSA, is kind of mixed. We'll talk about that a little bit. IBM, Symantec, even FireEye is seeing somewhat higher citations of decreased spending in the ETR surveys and dataset. So there's a little bit of a cause for concern. Now, let's remember the methodology here. Every quarter ETR asks are you green, meaning adopting this vendor as new or spending more? Are you neutral, which is gray, are you spending the same? Or are you red, meaning that you're spending less or retiring? You subtract the red from the green and you get what's called a net score. The higher the net score, the better. So here's a chart that shows a ranking of security players and their net scores. The bars show survey data from October '18, July '19, and October '19. In here, you see strength from CrowdStrike, Okta, Twistlock, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks. You see Elastic, Microsoft, Illumio, the core, Palo Alto Classic, Splunk looking strong, Cisco, Fortinet, Zscaler is starting to show somewhat slowing net score momentum. Look at Carbon Black. Carbon Black is showing a meaningful drop in net score. So VMware has some work to do. But generally, the companies to the left are showing spending momentum in the ETR dataset. And I'll show another view on net score in a moment. But I want to show a chart here that shows replacement spending and decreased spending citations. Notice the yellow. That's the ETR October '19 survey of spending intentions. And the bigger the yellow bar, the more negative. So Sagar, the director of research at ETR, pointed this out to me, that, look at this. There are about a dozen companies where 20%, a fifth of the customer base is decreasing spend or ripping them out heading into the year end. So you can see SonicWall, CA, ArcSight, Symantec, Carbon Black, again, a big negative jump. IBM, same thing. Dell EMC, which is RSA, slight uptick. That's a bit of a concern. So you can see this bifurcation that ETR has been talking about for awhile. Now, here's a really interesting kind of net score. What I'm showing here is the ETR data sorted by net score, again, higher is better, and shared N, which is the number of shared accounts in the survey, essentially the number of mentions in that October survey with 1,336 IT buyers responded. So how many of that 1,300 identified these companies? So essentially it's a proxy for the size of the install base. So showing up on both charts is really good. So look, CrowdStrike has a 62% net score with a 133 shared account. So a fairly sizable install base and a very high net score. Okta, similar. Palo Alto Networks and Splunk, both large, continue to show strength. They got net scores of 44% and 313 shared N. Fortinet shows up in both. Proofpoint. Look at Microsoft and Cisco. With 521 and 385 respectively on the right hand side. So big install bases with very solid net scores. Now look at the flip side. Go down to the bottom right to IBM. 132 shared accounts with a 14.4% net score. That's very low. Check Point similarly. Same with Symantec. Again, bifurcation that ETR has been citing. Really stark in this chart. All right, so I want to wrap. In some respects from a practitioner perspective, the sky erectus is falling. You got increased attack surface. You've got exploding number of IP addresses. You got data distributed all over the place, tool creep. You got sloppy user behavior, overwork security op staff, and a scarcity of skills. And oh, by the way, we're all turning into a digital business, which is all about data. So it's a very, very dangerous time for companies. And it's somewhat chaotic. Now, chaos, of course, can mean cash for cyber security companies and investors. This is still a very vibrant space. So just by the way of comparison and looking at some of the ETR data, check this out. What I'm showing is companies in two sectors, security and storage, which I've said in previous episodes of breaking analysis, storage, and especially traditional storage disk arrays are on the back burner spending wise for many, many shops. This chart shows the number of companies in the ETR dataset with a net score greater than a specific target. So look, security has seven companies with a 49% net score or higher. Storage has one. Security has 18 above 39%. Storage has five. Security has 31 companies in the ETR dataset with a net score higher than 30%. Storage only has nine. And I like to think of 30% as kind of that the point at which you want to be above that 30%. So as you can see, relatively speaking, security is an extremely vibrant space. But in many ways it is broken. Pat Gelsinger called it a do-over and is affecting a strategy to fix it. Personally, I don't think one company can solve this problem. Certainly not VMware, or even AWS, or even Microsoft. It's too complicated, it's moving too fast. It's so lucrative for the bad guys with very low barriers to entry, as I mentioned, and as the saying goes, the good guys have to win every single day. The bad guys, they only have to win once. And those are just impossible odds. So in my view, Brian Lozada, the CISO that we interviewed, nailed it. The focus really has to be on automation. You know, we can't just keep using brute force and throwing tools at the problem. Machine intelligence and analytics are definitely going to be part of the answer. But the reality is AI is still really complicated too. How do you operationalize AI? Talk to companies trying to do that. It's very, very tricky. Talk about lack of skills, that's one area that is a real challenge. So I predict the more things change the more you're going to see this industry remain a game of perpetual whack a mole. There's certainly going to be continued consolidation, and unquestionably M&A is going to be robust in this space. So I would expect to see continued storage in the trade press of breaches. And you're going to hear scare tactics by the vendor community that want to take advantage of the train wrecks. Now, I wish I had better news for practitioners. But frankly, this is great news for investors if they can follow the trends and find the right opportunities. This is Dave Vellante for Cube Insights powered by ETR. Connect with me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com, or @dvellante on Twitter, or please comment on what you're seeing in the marketplace in my LinkedIn post. Thanks for watching. Thank you for watching this breaking analysis. We'll see you next time. (energetic music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this breaking analysis in this cube insights powered by ETR I'm Dave Volante and this episode is about data protection you might be saying Dave why are you gonna bore us with the conversation about backup well it's interesting the market is actually quite hot you know over the last 18 to 24 months there's been well over a billion dollars probably 1.3 1.4 billion dollars raised just from companies like rubric Kohi City Dhruva certo and a number of other startups like clew mio is a name you might not have heard of and I'm gonna mention a couple of others so you have the situation where these upstarts particularly rubric and cohesive er really challenging the install based players and they're spending a lot of money on marketing engineering and sales and they're going to market and they're really shaking things up and I want to talk about that dynamic share with you some ETR data and talk about some of the other players like veem who was you know a rocket ship because of the virtualization trend how are they faring in this kind of new market and why is this market gaining so much attention today and what does this mean for incumbents what does it mean for customers who can achieve escape velocity and what are some of the likely outcomes that we see the market is very confused right now if you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant the and compare that to for instance the Forrester wave del EMC is not even in the Forrester wave the Gartner Magic Quadrant has rubric you know not as a leader and and it's just all over the place and so what I want to do is use some ETR data and some context from the cube to share with you our audience what we are seeing in the marketplace and kind of what it all means so let's get into it Alex if you bring up the first slide I first want to make a statement about the overall storage market the the ETR data set which is incredible doesn't drill down into backup although it does have pure play backup vendors in the data set so I want to start with storage because it's a it's the superset of the data protection market so what this chart shows is the all the sectors and it shows the net scores remember net score is they they ask every every quarter are you spending more you're spending less so he's spending the same they subtract the less from the more and that gives you net score so this is the net score for the three periods of October 18 survey July 19 survey in the October 19 survey and you can see the red line shows you know storage is kind of on the back burner yeah it's up ticking a little bit from previous surveys but it's got a next score of 18 that's crappy I mean it's not really a hot market and I've talked in previous episodes and breaking analysis as to why I really two main factors that I cited cloud guys eating away at the traditional storage array business and flash injected so much capacity and performance into the equation that data center managers are saying hey I don't really need any more storage right now so storage is kind of on the back burner you can see I blew it up here and you can see sort of how it's playing you see the hot sectors are analytics cloud computing container platforms data warehousing is is making a comeback I've talked about snowflake on previous breaking analyses machine learning and AI and new workloads robotic process automation even virtualization these are the hot sectors that are that are driving spending but I will tell you storage ultimately is going to be there it won't be down forever because people are always going to need storage these new workloads are gonna require new storage and obviously backup if you go to the next slide Alex you can see some of the vendors here so we've sort of established ok storage is is right now it's down it's not one of the hottest sectors but you can see there's some companies in here that are pretty hot rubric leads the list with a net score of 53 percent now the shared end might be a little hard for you to read here but the shared end out of the last survey 1,300 respondents from the ETR survey answered what there's you know spending intentions were and then the individuals mentioning specific companies in this case rubric 55 so it's kind of a small shared in you can see pure storage a company that we've talked about previously you know continues to to show strength you know 48.1% down slightly from you know the previous quarters but still really the only clear share gainer in the overall a primary storage market again rubric you can see Nutanix is up on the list veeam is actually quite impressive I'm going to show you some data in a minute that I think will impress you in terms of Eames continued staying power you see vcn on there sis goes on the list God knows why sis goes on the list their storage is not you know perceived as as leading but they do have offerings and Cisco so big people just kind of yeah we're buying from Cisco you see cookie City their little dip this past survey but still very strong again I'll show you some other data there you know etc so you can see that the point is even though storage is down there are a couple of shining stars like rubric like Nutanix pure storage veem Kohi City etc so let's let's dig into that a little bit before I do that I just want to share with you some trends on this slide with regard to the the backup market you know i underscore backup because it's no longer just the backup market its evolving so there's pressure on the overall storage market but but the data protection is actually really hot right now it's it's it's captured a lot of venture capital startups are moving in I'll mention a few that you might not have heard of why well several reasons one is the data explosion continues it's it's it's growing at an exponential rate and it's kind of nonlinear digital transformations are all about how you leverage data and so if you're making your business a data business in a digital business well you better have a way to protect it so things like ransomware are coming into play and people are really concerned obviously about ransomware so so data protection of evolves and expands sort of transcends back up into business continuity cloud and hybrid cloud are some other trends that I'll talk about in more detail that are driving opportunities for what we're traditionally known as backup and really now evolving into sort of these new areas last decade it was about moving from from tape to disc you know tape sucks that was kind of the data domain mantra and they were the hot company of last decade they got you know they did an IPO they reached escape velocity they sold for 2.5 billion you know but today you know the data domain platform that EMC bought and and now is Dell EMC is kind of old school right it's these new guys that are coming after that so so well well data domain pioneer data deduplication and higher performance back up moving to storage today it's a whole new conversation and people have come to the realization that the primary and active storage is only about 20% of the stored data all the all the less hot data I don't want to say inactive stuff it's not cold storage but it's files and objects and copies and replicas and and backups that's 80% of the marketplace today it's in terms of the volume of data not necessarily the spend you know OLTP stuff primary storage is expensive flash arrays expensive but huge opportunity especially in terms of data growth that's where all the data growth is happening all that unstructured data so today the conversation is evolving to data protection data management data assurance particularly with containers so you think about spinning up containers spinning down containers you know dozens hundreds thousands of containers how do you keep track of that stuff how do you protect that how do you assure that your data is not leaking that you're not exposed and so that's a really hot area that you're seeing a number of startups focus on so real focus on recovery becomes much more important for a digital business how fast can I recover security compliance this notion of data sharing CDM on this slide which is stands for copy data management a practice that was really popularized by actifi Oh DevOps really supporting DevOps through a data management platform being able to give live copies or near live copies of data so that you know tests can be tested on you know much more fresh data in that in compressing that cycle time analytics becomes more important I talked about ransomware before well you can look at the the backup corpus and do analytics on that to see if there are anomalies in anomalous behavior just in terms of bad actors coming in so all this stuff joined with cloud and hybrid cloud and is put a bridging the legacy business and it's bringing out a lot of new challengers to the incumbents so let's take a look at some of that data from ETR Alex if you go to the next slide this is the ETR data set on backup vendors so what I've done here is it is pulled out of storage the pure-play data protection folks so I can you know call in backup vendors they hate when they call them backup know we're much more than backup it's where data management now data management means a lot of things to a lot of people but but nonetheless they are expanding and transcending pure backup so so credit to them this is the net score timeline from January 2017 to the latest October survey from enterprise technology research and you can see here I've pulled our rubric cohesively veem CommVault and Veritas and rubric leads as they say with 53% net score followed by Veen 44% so you can see Veeam really hanging tough though he said he just relat relat of lis new to the survey jumped up jumped down a little bit in in this quarter you'll see that you'll see that in the et our data anyone get too freaked out about it I think he said he still got some some tailwind and cementum momentum as does rubric but look at Veen Dean's ascendancy came from really VMware they were the VMware specialists and they were all virtualized and now you know they do bare metal they're doing cloud and multi cloud and and and they backup you know office 365 and and and so that's the SAS platform but look at how well they've held up quite impressive there with Veen made have made a major push into the enterprise kind of pivoted back to SMB but still does a lot of business in the enterprise and you can see them showing up here what's relevant to me is that the the shared end in other words out of the 1,300 and the total survey how many are responding to these vendors rubric 55 relatively small veeam 155 much larger so a bigger install base cohesive 42 kind of just getting started in the ETA dataset CommVault 105 so carve-outs a 700 million dollar company and revenues on a trailing 12-month basis they get about a 2.2 billion dollar market cap they just bought hedvig they're moving toward a SAS model they launched a product called metallic they get a very very large install base you can see their net scores yeah we're there holding relatively well they're smaller obviously they're lower than those top three and then you can see Veritas Veritas is the big whale in the business they kind of mostly almost a pure play software company they do have an appliance but they really are the the leader a leader here and have had a big market they went private they got bought by semantics semantics didn't know what to do with them they fumbled around with it they did a private equity deal you know that was going okay but they had some management turnover a private equity you know squeeze them a little bit even though they made some investments in the platform and so Veritas has you know some challenges they have to serve the install base but at the same time they got to compete with the new guys and all the new guys cohesively and rubric in particular are attacking you know the veritas install base you know certainly CommVault and as well Dell and EMC you can't have a discussion really around leadership and backup and data protection without talking about Delhi and C they're so large so Alex if you go to the next slide you can see the net score for Dell EMC the N here is 348 much much larger than some of the other guys that I just mentioned I'm actually look at Veritas 97 even though I have a large install base so Dell EMC but here's the caveat this is all of Delhi MC storage so not just the pure play back up the previous slide I was showing you pure play data protection vendors this is all of Dell EMC so it includes all their primary stuff all their flash storage all their storage not the other parts of their business not the compute and analytics and other stuff just storage so I'm using this as a proxy okay so this is not Dells data protection business only and so what let me make some comments there and I'll comment on Dell data protection business you can see it came out of the downturn on the past 2009 big optic and Joe toots used to say we're gonna come out stronger we're gonna invest through the downturn we got the cash we're gonna come out stronger that's exactly what happened they came out very strong but then you know cash flow started to get squeezed they expanded their product portfolio it was like product du jour all these mega launches and it just got too confusing for customers Salesforce got confused they got less productive and any an Adele or EMC at the time was really relying on VMware it's the value in Dell and I'm sorry I keep saying Dell value in EMC at the time was really in VMware and you could see that kind of steady decline in the net score and that's what happened to Elliott management came in they squeezed EMC kind of forced him forced her hand and then Dell ended up taking in private let me make some comments about the Dell acquisition and specifically Dell emcs data protection business Dell MC took its eye off the ball in storage generally but specifically in the data protection business it fell behind it wasn't investing fast enough it had some management changes that put Beth Phelan in charge a couple years ago now and her task was okay sure she was tasked with shoring up this business so but they had to get some new products out they had to focus on you know some of the the lower end of the market and then have to refocus on the higher end of the market so they've really begun to get their act together again in in data protection and really refreshing the data domain piece of the portfolio bringing Alomar and data domain to get and becoming much more competitive having said that they lost some ground okay so they've got that same challenge challenges Veritas they've not only got the new guys coming at them with this modern you know data platform they've got to service the existing install basin it's going to manage that cash flow they're now a public company again so a lot of pressure on those guys I want to go back to the to the previous chart Alex if you will and then is the one that shows you know rubric cohesive veem CommVault and and Veritas the the pure plays there's some other dynamics that I want to talk to talk about here HPE exited the software business it's it's its course offer a business it's sold off the Micro Focus and as part of that it's sold off data protector when it did that it opened up a whole new partnership opportunity for these emerging companies particular cohesive and veeam are actually reselling through HPE HP he's got a massive channel and those two companies are doing very well there I said you can't talk about data protection without talking about Dell EMC same thing for IBM you got to talk about IBM IBM is a huge install base and IBM free but Tivoli years ago Frank Moss's company and then they served mainframes and it was this big complicated platform kind of still is and so IBM had to make a move so it it it was getting killed in the marketplace by Veeam in particular so it created spectrum protect Plus and an IBM is really gone after software-defined it's it's it's it's begun to modernize its platform going after containers as I mentioned is a hot area but it's still got that same problem it's got to service the install base and so they're sort of doing that balancing act but it definitely had to you know refresh the portfolio and it's done a good job there with spectrum protect plus a couple of the companies that I haven't mentioned Dhruva is getting into that whole data management space so cohesively and rubric kind of redefining back up into data management theme goes back to the basics really talks about backup in data protection data management as being the future so it's kind of Dee trying to deep position rubric and cohesive as as you know much more in the future and not here today and so they're sort of playing that marketing game and very effectively as you can see by its net scores again Dhruva hopping on the the data management day bandwagon certo kind of a dr replication expert Klum you know is calling BS and all these guys is saying we're going pure sass model and and Klum you know does a sass for pure sass pure software for just AWS small company but it's raised a bunch of dough it's raised about 50 million dollars I think but here's some other names you might not have heard of caste ni o Valero trillion ease guys are going hard after containers and what I referred to earlier as data assurance so the big question is who's going to be able to achieve escape velocity for the for the upstarts who's going to be able to hold serve for the the incumbents let me make a couple of comments on that I think storage eventually is going to bounce back as I say some of those hot emerging workload areas like AI they they're gonna need storage you know analytics is gonna be driving you know the need for these types of things security data surance data protection service storage will theirs don't bet against the data so storage will I think eventually you know bounce back and unlike compute where Intel makes all the margin storage is more like networking where you get really good margins it's a you know 60 Plus percent gross margin business pure storage has almost 70 percent gross margins cloud is the wild card here I predict you're gonna see the cloud vendors begin to dramatically expand you know their their portfolios and you know use beyond just gonna s3 simple object storage okay yeah we got elastic you know a block store EBS from Amazon you know Microsoft has you know the you know similar store just as Google they are gonna double down on storage they're gonna they're gonna look at storage as a bigger opportunity and that is a wild card it could you know continue to pressure the traditional storage guys but look let's face it it's a hybrid world still ton of stuff going on Prem so I think that that the the overall market will bounce back I think data protection as a subset and data management is going to grow faster it has some tailwind I think it's got an expanding Tam and those tail winds are digital data digital business security data assurance this new management capability that I talked about DevOps and contain a protection container platforms as I showed you earlier and the ETR data is one of the hottest areas going and I think you're gonna see some consolidation you saw CommVault bought Hedvig you're gonna see some exits veeam is now talking about doing an IPO it just took in a half a billion dollars in investment so its investors are gonna want an exit so are cohesive ease and rubrics which together have raised almost a billion dollars so you're gonna see some some M&A I think specialists like zero and and Dhruva are probably gonna be B targets I think you're still gonna see Dell become much much more aggressive kind of getting their act together the big incumbents IBM you know Veritas refreshing their portfolio again their challenge is the innovators dilemma so I do think you're gonna see some at least one maybe two the the favorites there would be cohesive near rubric is achieve escape velocity I don't think there's enough room for three to be like blockbuster IPOs that that that can survive long term but I think this data management thing has legs and we're gonna continue to watch it here thanks to you for watching thanks to our friends at ETR for sharing this data is Dave Volante for cube insights powered by ETR we'll see you next time

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering Activia 2019 data-driven to you by Activia welcome to Boston everybody this is Dave Volante and I'm here with stupid man finally still in our hometown you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we're covering actifi Oh data-driven hashtag data-driven 19 activity it was a company that is focus started focused on copy data management they sort of popularized the term the I the concept the idea of data virtualization there's big data digital transformation all the buzz it's kind of been a tailwind for the company and we followed them quite closely over the years poly st. Claire is here she's the CEO of the state of Massachusetts that's chief of ditch and chief data officer Holly thanks for coming on the Q thanks for having me so it's kind of rare that somebody shares the title of chief digital officer of chief data officer I think it's rare right now I think that would change you think it will change I think those two roles will come together I just think data fuels our digital world and it both creates the content and also monitors how we're doing and it's just inevitably I think either they're gonna be joined at the hip or it's gonna be the same person that's interesting I always thought the chief data officer sort of emerged from this wonky back-office role data quality of this careful the word walking okay well yeah let's talk about that but the chief digital officer is kind of the mover the shaker has a little marketing genius but but okay so you see those two roles coming together that maybe makes sense because why because there's there some tension in a lot of organizations between those two roles well I think the challenge with the way that sometimes people think about data is they think about it's only a technical process data is actually very creative and you also have to tell a story in order to be good with it it's the same thing as marketing but it's just a little bit of a different hue a different type of audience a different type of pace there's a technical component to the data work but I'm looking at my organization that I'm surrounded by additional technical folks CTO CSO privacy officer CIO so we have a lot of supports that might take away some of those roles are scrunched in under the data officer or the digital so I used to turn wonky before it kind of triggered you a little bit but but you're a modeler you're a data scientist your development programmer right no but I know enough to I know enough to read code and get in trouble okay so you can direct coders and you have data scientists working for you yeah right so you've got that entire organization underneath you and your your mission is blank fill in the blank so our mission is to use the best information technology to ensure that every users experience with the Commonwealth is fast easy and wicked awesome awesome Holly our team just got back from a very large public sector event down in DC and digging into you know how our agency is doing with you know cloud force initiatives how are they doing the city environments you were state of Massachusetts and you know rolled out that that first chief data if you keep dipped officer gets a little bit of insight inside how Massachusetts doing with these latest waves of innovation uh well you know we have our legacy systems and as our opportunities come up to improve those systems our reinvest in them we are taking a step forward to cloud we're not so dogmatic that it's cloud only but it's definitely cloud when it's appropriate I do think we'll always have some on-prem services but really when it's possible whether it's a staff service off-the-shelf or it's a cloud environment to make sense than we are moving to that in your keynote this morning you you talked about something called data minimalism yeah and wonder if you could explain that for audience because for the longest time it's been well you want to hoard all the data you want to get all the data and you know what do you do with it how do you manage you right right I mean data's only as good as your ability to use it and I often find that we're ingesting all this data and we don't really know what to do with it or really rather our business leaders and decision-makers can't quite figure out how to connect that to the mission or to act properly interrogate the data to get the information they want and so this idea is an idea that's sort of coming a little bit out of Europe and or some of the other trends we see around some cyber security and hacking worlds and the idea is this actually came from fjords Digital Trends for 2019 is data minimalism the idea is that you strongly connect your business objectives to the data collection program that you have you don't just collect data until you're sure that it supports your objectives so you know one of the things that I also talked about in the keynote was not just data minimalism but doing a try test iterate approach we often collect data hoping to see that we can create a change I think we need to prove that we can create the change before we do a widespread scalable data collection program because often we collect data and you still can't see what you're doing has an effect within the data the signals too strong or too too weak or you're asking the wrong question of the data or it's the wrong plectra collection of the technique and that's largely driven from a sort of privacy a privacy privacy the reality of how costly sometimes the kennedys but you know storage of data is cheap but the actual reality of moving it and saving it and knowing where it is and accessing it later that takes time and energy of your of your actual people so I think it's just important for us to think carefully about a resource in government we have a little less resources sometimes in the private sector so we're very strategic on what we do and so I think we need to really think about the data we use if the pendulum swings remember back to the days of you know 2006 the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure said okay you got to keep electronic records for whatever seven years of depending on industry and people said okay let's get rid of it as soon as we can data was viewed as a liability and then of course all the big data height we've talked about a little bit in your in your speech everybody said I could collect everything throw it into a data Lake and we all know those became data swamps so do you feel like the pendulum is swinging and there's maybe a little balance are we reaching an equilibrium is it going to be a you know hard shift back to data as a liability what are your thoughts well I think isn't with any trend there's always a little bit of a pendulum swing as we're learning it's with it with the equilibrium is equilibrium is I think that's a great word I think the piece that I neglected to mention is the relationship to the consumer trust you know for us in government we have to have the trust of our constituents we do have a higher bar than public sector in terms of handling data in a way that's respectful of individuals privacy and their security of their data and so I think to the extent that we are able to lend transparency and show the utility and the data we're using and that will gain the trust of our users or customers but if we continue to do things behind the scenes and not be overt about it I think then that can cause more problems I think we face is organizations to ask ourselves is having more data worth the sort of vulnerability introduces and the possible liability of trust of our of our customers when you betray to test over your customers it's really hard to replace that and so you know to a certain extent I think we should be more deliberate about our data and earn the trust of our customers okay how how does Massachusetts look at the boundary of data between the public sector and the private sector I've talked to you know some states where you know we're helping business off parking by giving you know new mobile apps access to that information you talked a little bit about health care you know I've done interviews with the massive macleod initiative here locally how do you look at that balance of sharing I think it is a real balance you know I don't think we do very much of it yet and we certainly don't share data that were not allowed to by law and we have very strict laws here in Massachusetts the stricter at the ten most states and so I think it's very strategic when we do share data we are looking for opportunities when we can when I talk about demand driven data I look forward to opening the conversation a little bit to ask people what data are they looking for to ask businesses and different institutions we have throughout the Commonwealth what data would help you do your job better and grow our economy and our jobs and I think that's a conversation we need to have over time to figure out what the right balances someday it'll be easier for us to share than others and some will never be able to share the first data scientist I've ever met is somebody I interviewed the amazing Hilary Mason and she said something that I want to circle back to something you said in your talk if she said the hardest part of my job or one of the hardest parts is people come to me with data and and it's the most valuable thing I can do is show them which questions to ask and you have talked about well what's a lot of times you don't know what questions to ask until you look at the data or vice versa what comes first the chicken or the egg what's your experience pin well I do think we need to be driven by the business objectives and goals it doesn't mean there's not an iterative process in there somewhere but you know data wonks we can we can just throw data all day long and still might not give you the answer there forward but I think it's really important for us to be driven by the business and I think executives don't know how to ask the questions of the data they don't know how to interrogate it or honestly more realistically we don't have a date of actually answers the question they want to know so we often have to use proxies for that information but I do think if there's an iterative after you get to a starting point so I do think knowing what the business question is first I know you gotta go but I want to ask your last question bring it back to the state where both Massachusetts residents and your services it sounds like you're picking off some some good wins with a through the fast ROI I mean you mentioned you know driver's license renewals etc how about procurement has procurement been a challenge from the state standpoint you are you looking at sort of the digital process and how to streamline procurement that is a conversation that the secretary what is currently in and I think it's a good one I don't think we have any any solutions yet but I think we have a lot of the issues that were struggling with but we're not alone all public sectors struggling with this type of procurement question so we're working on it all right last question there's quick thoughts on you know what you've seen here I know you're in and out but data-driven yeah it's a great theme it's a really exciting agenda there's people for all these different organizations and approaches to data-driven you know from movie executives and casting to era it's just really exciting to see the program it's Nate Claire thanks so much I'm coming on the queue thank you great to meet you okay keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break well the cube is here at data-driven day one special coverage we'll be right back

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. It's the Cube, covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone, to the Cube's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nations capitol. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost John Furrier. We have Allison Robinson joining us, she is the AVP IT operations at Cal Poly University. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, talk about your big announcement yesterday in terms of ground station. This is one of John's favorite topics, so tell us more about what you announced. >> So yesterday there was an announcement that Cal Poly through our digital transformation hub, and that hub exists to do innovated things with the greater good through the public sector and helping with challenges that they're trying to learn more about and solve problems. And so, through that group, we announced the initiative to do cube satellite in connection with ground station at AWS, to be able to help people that use these satellites be able to test these satellites and collect data and share it ultimately, with others. 'Cause there's a problem, they're not expensive satellites but that means you don't have a lot of money to work with. And so to be able to test and make sure your communications are good and the infrastructure is there, is kind of missing in the whole environment. And now, that's going to be solved. >> And you're able to get many more shots and pay as you go, not necessarily have to, as you said, put up your own satellite yourself. >> Exactly, you can put the satellite up. The problem was the infrastructure to communicate back with it. So, the ground station, those antenna are approximately located to AWS regions. So you can now bring the data, process it, store it, analyze it, and then ultimately share it. That, again, being for the public good, we want to make sure the date we're collecting is in the AWS registry, data set registry. So that people can access that information, that's important. >> Allison, talk about the relationship with AWS, how did it get started? I mean your involved with these cool projects like ground station, which I'm a big fan of. 'Cause I think the impact to IOT, just forest fires in California could be a real... >> Allison: Right. >> Saver right there. Just using data, back hauling data for whatever is going to be a great thing. But you got a relationship with AWS, that goes beyond, not just ground station, there's other things going on. Take a minute to explain the relationship with AWS. >> So, the vice president of IT at Cal Poly, Bill Britton, began his position with Cal Poly about two years ago. And took a look at the data center and had to ask the question, do we invest here on prem or do we have to look for something else? And that began the conversation of, we need to do something about our data center, it looks like Amazon has the tools we need to modernize our technical environment. Both in how we work, how people work, our processes and our technical infrastructure. And so, that began the work of, we announced two years ago, I didn't work for Cal Poly yet. They announced there, the President and Bill announced that we were all in. The data center was going to AWS. I happened to be presenting on a different topic, and we connected there, and a year later, we made a connection and I have been at Cal Poly now for a year to help them get to the AWS data center. >> Lot of smart people Cal Poly, I know, I looked at the university. Great computer science, great everything. You guys got a lot of smart people, so what was it like to actually, as this starts to evolve, the progression of the modernization. Take us through where you guys are on progress, what are some of the cool things going on. What's the result of this shift? What are some of the notable highlights? >> It's really exciting, because we really did take an approach of we've got to look at, not just as AWS and a new tool. Which you have to work so differently, in dev ops and agily. We said okay, then we've got to figure out our processes to be able to work that way. We have to change as an organization. So we were more structured around those technical silos. And we became a service management group for like, who do we serve and what are they trying to accomplish? And that's the focus of everything we do. So from idea to service we have a process to handle to that. And AWS, we're all in on their tools too.6 So they completely facilitate that process6. >> You have a lot of stake holders, so you have impact at the student body level, faculty, institution overall.6 >> Right. >> What are some of the game changers that you see? Obviously the ground station, you got great R and D coming in with Amazon. What's the impact? >> The digital transformation hub is part of the IT organization as well. And our community outreach and giving students actual hands on experience to work with the public sector, whether it be law enforcement, or maybe a city trying to deal with a homeless situation. They actually are engaged with professionals and learning about problems and solutions. And in ten weeks, we work on quarters, and our quarters are ten weeks, which align perfectly to exactly how long it takes an engagement with the digital hub to find what's possible in terms of solutions to problems. >> So talk about the students of today. I mean, we hear a lot about them. And I want to hear you, you're teaching them, you're helping to educate this new generation of people who we hope will make huge, great waves in industry, private industry, as well as state, local, and the federal government. >> Allison: Right. >> What do you see as their strengths, their weaknesses, and what are they looking at in terms of building careers? >> You know, they, I really do love working with the students. They are incredible. It makes me wonder sometimes, I don't think I'd get into college now, times have changed. And they really care, they care, that's why the public, being able to work through these to serve the greater good of the public and share that data after actually means so much more to them. Than if it were just a class project, because they want to make a difference. They care about social justice and making sure that we're green and efficient with how we use our earth resources. And so this maps around a lot of the challenges. The homelessness that I mentioned before, and how we've worked with that. Or making sure that we can make cities safer. They care about that deeply. And they have access to a lot of resources. This past fall's incoming class was born in the year 2000. They've never not known a time with computers. They do math homework, they're not reading, they're actually doing homework on their phones. Their very mobilely engaged, very digitally engaged. And we're going to see wonderful things from them, because they think so differently about these things. >> It sounds as though the education that you're providing is very practical, in the sense that you're having your students work with the state and local governments on these issues like homelessness and climate change. Can you talk about some of the projects that their doing? >> So our mantra is learn by doing. And you come in and you are admitted to a major. And you begin working in that major right away. Every student finishes their last quarter with a senior project. And you actually produce an outcome and have something you can talk about, both as the product and the process to get there. I was recently invited to the senior projects showcase for the graphic arts department. And, in common, they all had technology. And some where, one of the students we had just contracted for some software, and thank you so much you helped make the difference with that. So that's neat, when you get to see to make that difference. But even though it's graphic arts, in every way technology was key to what they do. And they have, really, you know students come from some great backgrounds too, where they've had some great access to information and technology and really think differently about it. Engineering students are winning awards and doing really great things. So it's fun to see and be a part of. Great energy. >> What about the culture within your department itself? I mean, you're not only educating the next generation but you're also doing research yourself. Can you talk about, particularly, as a partner, as working so closely with AWS, which has such a famous culture of innovation and of taking risks and tolerating failure, because the more failures you'll have, you'll ultimately get there someday. So can you talk a little bit about the culture within Cal Poly? >> It's hard, because IT people are usually very analytical and there's a right and a wrong. So that sense of it's okay to get it wrong, isn't popular generally. So, that starts with me, I had to get up and say we may not get it right, but rarely do we get it wrong. We might get parts of it wrong, we adjust. It's okay to get it wrong. We've got to figure things out, all of this is new. And as I've been there longer and really work with people through different things, they believe that from me now. There's not judgment. I once worked at a place where it'd go on your permanent record. Well, try and get somebody to try something innovated if you have a problem and it goes on your permanent record. So I don't have that now. >> Rebecca: It'd be a career ender. >> Yeah. >> Bill: Yeah. >> I have a lot of people getting it, and we're trying it. And you can work so fast in the AWS environment, that if it isn't right, blow it away and start over again. >> In some organization you were a renegade if you tried something new. You know, oh my God, don't touch that third rail. >> Allison: Yeah. >> Here, you guys are doing, it's progressive in the sense that you're trying new things. >> Learn by doing is a call to action, but it also gives you that space to try. >> Bill: Yeah, be creative. >> It's learning. >> What's your impression of the show here in DC? Obviously, it's our fourth year covering public sector. I've been following them a couple years earlier, but the first four years covering live broadcasting, reporting. But, besides the growth, what's your takeaway? >> I need to be cloned. (laughter) >> There are so many things happening here. >> You need a digital twin. >> There you go. >> You can solve that, Allison. >> There's going to be a lot of people that say, no don't clone her, don't do it. But there's so much information and the innovation that AWS does. Sometimes it's like exciting to hear, and it's like oh where was that a month ago when we were working on that? So we just have to stay on our toes and we have to keep engaged with AWS and what they're doing and what we can use from them to make our environment better. And move even faster. >> You got to keep, keeping pace is also a hard thing. Because they're introducing so many new things. At amazon. We're very fortunate again in our partnership, actually that does translate into the IT operations organization. That we've been working with them on some services that they do. We can tell them, hey this isn't quite working, and they honestly listen to us. And deliver what they ask on a road map, sometimes sooner than later too. So it's been a great partnership. >> That's interesting, a company that actually delivers on what you ask for. >> Exactly, exactly. And we have scaled, you know it's a small town there's 24,000 students, you have your faculty and staff. So when we try something with them, we have the opportunity for big impacts right away. >> That's awesome, well, congratulations, great work >> Thank you. >> On the DX hubs fascinating ground station. Great projects, students and you guys to play around and help that grow. Because that's going to be a great service. >> Yes, we're excited. We can't wait to get going. >> Rebecca: Thanks for coming the Cube Allison. >> Thank you. >> We will have more of the Cubes live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington DC. Stay tuned. (upbeat beat music)

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower. Accenture's taken over five floors of the Salesforce Tower, and they're opening their brand new Innovation Hub. It's pretty cool, formal ribbon cutting earlier today. We're excited to be here. It's three floors of cool innovation, then a couple work floors, so if you get a chance come check it out. A lot co-creation, a lot of neat technology happening. But we're here to talk about something a little bit different, that's championship basketball. So we're excited to be joined by Jeremy Thum, he's the senior director of digital experience from the Golden State Warriors, Jeremy, great to see you. >> Great to see you, thank you. >> And he's accompanied by Greg Jensen managing director from Accenture. Welcome. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So digital experience, you guys are getting ready to embark on a big new adventure, a big construction project just south of, I was going to say AT&T Park, Oracle Park now at the new Chase Center. >> Yeah. >> A lot of talk, really excitement, tell us about what is going on at the Chase Center. >> There's never a dull moment at the offices these days as the Golden State Warriors organization is going through a pretty big transition. A transformation from basketball team that leases a building 50 nights a year into an entertainment company that owns and operates a world-class facility. And so all eyes are pointing to this project. All thought is going onto the project, and it's a really exciting time in the organization. >> It's really an amazing story of how much impact leadership really has. I mean, you had a perennial doormat franchise, right, that hadn't been to the playoffs for a long time. And David Lee shows up as the first all-star in Lord knows how long, and they have completely transformed their franchise on the basketball side. And now you see the same kind of energy vision, vision, probably, is really the best word, and now moving from Oracle Arena, one of the most beloved basketball home courts into the new Chase Center. So I what if you can just share some insight on what it is like to work for these guys? You know, what is the passion? How do they drive it down through the whole organization? >> It's incredible. I say that on a daily basis there is an energy level and an excitement about taking this organization to the next level, and there is no rest. We know that sports is cyclical, and the performance on the court is going to be cyclical, but the business can operate in a way, and create an environment that a business can succeed and thrive. And that's part of the move into Chase Center is the organization is expanding. The business is expanding into different areas, that we've never been in before, so it's exciting. >> Right. So how long have you been working with the Warriors? >> About 18 months. >> 18 months? And why did they bring you in? What are you helping them with? >> So we are the Warriors' official technology innovation partner. And as Jeremy and the team were thinking through the fan experience, they where assembling a really great team of partners, and one of those partners is Accenture. And so the reason that I'm here is because I spent about 3 1/2 years working with other media companies on transformations, doing sort of similar fan experience design. And it's really my job to bring the best of Accenture to the Warriors and make sure that as they're innovating on the fan experience, that we're helping them and that we're there as great partners to support them along the way. >> So what are some of the things that win the new fan experience besides just being the loudest arena in the NBA? >> Well, I think the most exciting thing that I'm working on with Greg and the Accenture team is the mobile application of the future. We have a Warriors App that exists now that serves a very specific purpose. As we move into a new building in a new district that surrounds the building and have a variety of events, we need a new mobile experience, also, so we will be building this new mobile experience as an application built specifically for the local fan. Anyone that can, or should, or will be coming to the district to enjoy an event at Chase Center. And of course, as we have a global fan base, there will still be content and interesting things to bring in a global audience to the mobile app. But this is really designed for the local fan to say how can we help you if you have a ticket to an upcoming event, or if you don't have a ticket to an event but just kind of want to see what's happening on the district, how can we help that experience along the way? And all the different touchpoints that go along with a game or an event experience. >> Right. So how much of the mobile app is kind of a launching point into the other things that are happening at the Chase Center versus being kind of its self-contained experience in it of itself? >> I'd love for your opinion on this, too. >> Yeah, I think the thing that the Warriors have done really well is they've positioned technology as enabler of the overall end-to-end experience. And so think of the mobile app as sort of the gateway that ties a lot of that experience together. But certainly there are other exciting activations that will happen within the Chase Center throughout the district, and the Warriors know how to put on a great show, both on the court and off. And so it's really that blend of sort of that background technology that's orchestrating this in concert along with that front, in-your-face, exciting Warrior brand and anthem that is really going to get folks excited. >> Yeah, we talk an awful lot about how we don't want technology to be the story. We want it to live in the background and help enhance the fan experience rather than being the headline. >> Right, I was going to say I'm sure the purists are like, I want to come watch a basketball game. It's a beautiful game, this is why I'm paying a big ticket price because this is what I want to watch. I don't need all these distractions of all these other things. So when you think about the experience and integrating it, as you said, as an amplification of watching the basketball game versus a distraction or something that takes away from the core. How do you kind of balance those priorities? How do you kind of level set a new feature request or a new workflow request? Versus, you know, don't forget at the end of the day, it's still about the basketball game first. >> It is, and in addition to the basketball game, it's all about the 200 other events that will be there. Think of all the concerts and family shows that could be coming to a facility that San Francisco has never had before. So the mobile experience is supposed to get enhanced, and I think were spending a lot of time thinking through. The moment you think about coming to an event, is when that sort of experience begins, and the mobile app should be a conduit to help and not get in the way of the experience, which is that thing that's on the stage or on the court. >> Right. A really good friend of mine is Bill Schlough, he's the CIO of the Giants, right, and every year they go through some big huge technology play, whether it's a new jumbo tron or it's new wifi under the seats. It's this really cool, like you said, this delicate balance where you want to bring in the tech, and people are expected to have tech. They want their Instagram to work when they send a picture with the kids. But, again, it's got to be, I don't want to say secondary, but it is secondary or a little bit behind the scenes. >> And I think the Warriors have been really thoughtful around using the application to help coming to the district and Chase Center become an experience. And what I mean by that is, your ability to do wayfinding from your home to get to your seat. Your ability to book a car service if you choose to leave the district or after a game. The ability to just sort of make your life more simplistic around the game, so that getting to and getting from the event is much simpler and much more streamlined for the fan. But when your in that experience, sure, you can pull up the stats to see that Stephs hit 11 three pointers in a row and broken Clay's most recent record. Or you certainly can just enjoy the game for what it is. >> Right, right. All right, before I let you go, thanks for bringing the trophy, too, Jeremy. Very nice. What's one or two totally unique nuggets that you can share at the Chase Center that are completely new and maybe kind of fall below the radar that you think are pretty cool? >> Well, I don't know if I want to give too many secrets away, but I will say that I think the experience will be something that cannot miss. From the visuals and where it's placed, I think just the visuals when you see the aesthetics is going to blow everyone away. And I think, hopefully, if we do it right, the technology and the mobile experience will be an element to it, but won't be the leading story. >> All right. Well, thanks for stopping by. Congrats on all the rings. And I look forward to one more season, right? We have one more season to go? >> Here we go! >> All right, thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> All right he's Greg, he's Jeremy, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Innovation Hub in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE at VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, AFC Champions week out from going to Super Bowl 53. Joining me is a user from the great state of Maine, Dawnna Pease, who is the Director of Computing Infrastructure and Services for the state of Maine, thank you for joining us. >> Yes, thank you. >> Alright so Dawnna, you've been to a few VTUGs, of course the Summer Fest, which is, you know it might not be quite as big, as the winter one, but it is known even broader, I've known people come from out of the country because there's a giant lobster bake at the end of the day. I've been a few times, but you know tell us, you've been to VTUG before, yes? >> We have, so I have been to many, especially in Maine. And this is probably our fourth or fifth one that I've broughten the team from the state of Maine here and I feel it's really crucial and important because it allows them to network, to talk with their peers and to look at the technologies of how we can provide services for the constituents of the state of Maine and for our services that we offer within our office. >> Yeah so we always love talking to the users, we love to be able to help you share with your peers what you've been learning and actually I've had lots of great government discussions over the last few years, even attended, I attended a public sector show in the cloud space last year, and it's always fascinating because people have a misconception when it comes to what it's like to be IT in government, so let's dig into that a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your role, your group, what's kind of under your purview. >> Sure, I've been in state government going on 33 years as a public servant, very proud of that. I have a great group and I am the Director of Computing Infrastructure Services and it's really directory services, Microsoft stack. We have VMWare environment that we been probably nine years now and we're just implementing SimpliVity our hyperconverged, and after extensive research on that, we really solidified and selected HPE SimpliVity because in state government we had a lot of aging servers that needed to be replaced as well as our VM environment which was 44 nodes and it was a huge investment so not only on the licensing, hardware, storage, the compute part as well. So lookin' at the hyperconverged that was just one of many of our technologies that we looked at. >> So Dawnna take us back, how long ago did you start looking at that initiative? >> Oh 18 months. >> Okay, and was it a single location, multiple locations, can you give us any, how many you know servers or VMs or locations that this solution was going to span? >> For me it was actually spannin' and takin' on many of our on-prem solutions that we have. Like our SQL environment, our application hostin', the one offs, we're bringin' into that. As well as upgrading our existing VM cluster. So it's really taken on and morphed even more. We have a lot of net new as that want to participate in this environment so for us it is literally like a cloud solution, but it's for within our own private cloud solution on that. >> And these were critical business productivity applications that you're talking about? >> Absolutely >> This wasn't a new project to do, you know, early days of hyper converged, it was like oh I'm doing desktop virtualization, let me roll this out. I mean you're talking about databases and applications. >> Absolutely so we run close to, little over 600 servers for virtual and physical, so when all said and done within our hyperconverged our goal is to really be under 60 physicals left within state government. And currently today we have probably over 400 in our virtual environment today. So we're really expanding that more and bringing the services all into one knowing that we're going to have compute network and everything in our storage will all be in this environment. Plus we have a legacy storage environment, so when you're thinking of your legacy storage environment and you're looking at your refreshment of hardware and all the licenses around that our return on investment was huge for the state of Maine. So it was literally the wise choice for us to do within state government for tax payers, saving money. Also for the state as a whole. >> I have to imagine in addition to kind of the Capex piece if you're saying going from 900 to 400 and looking to get down to 60, operationally hopefully it makes the jobs of you know you and your team, a little bit easier once things are up and running. And that's one of the promises of hyperconverged, is it should be that cloud layer, it should be almost invisible when you talk about, it's just a pool that my virtualization lives on but I don't need to touch and rack and stack stuff the way that I might have in the past. >> Exactly, exactly, good point on that. Also on that we've really taken a broad look at how we can leverage the cloud so from a disaster recovery aspect and not only havin' the site resilience between two data centers, but how we can leverage the cloud for that continuity aspect. So we're really broadening that and the team's doing a fabulous, excellent job at that. >> Are you doing the Cloud DR today or is that a future plan? >> That is future. >> Okay, going to leverage a public cloud as that Are you far enough down? >> Government. So we have Azure today and we have a government tenant on that so we will use that aspect within the government tenant as well. >> Great so primarily Microsoft applications, you've moved into hyperconverged and you leveraged the Azure government certified cloud pieces. >> Correct >> Okay, awesome, when you started going down this path did you have in your mind hyperconverged or is that, how did you end up on that type of solution? >> So no, we didn't. Doin' the research on that and lookin' at all options, and really doin' the research with that, hyperconverged was more of makin' sense from the return on investment and also from a ... I want to say the simplified fashion, like you said it's simple you want to make it not so complex, it provided everything within that environment, and it was really based on how we were structured today, the investment that we would need to do if didn't go down this path. And taking in, so we did go with the hyperconverged. >> In your previous environment were you using HPE for the servers or the storage? >> So we were HPE, we are an HPE shop. And we have VMC, we have Pure Storage, we have different aspects of our storage today that exist so lookin' at that as well, we had an investment that we either needed to upgrade, replace, and, or invest. >> What I was poking at a little bit is were you HPE before, was that part of the decision to buy SimpliVity which is part of the HPE family or was that not a major factor? >> It was not a major factor, I mean we were ... We have always been a HPE shop, however we had criteria we were lookin' at, so you know after doing the research and we had 15, we were lookin' at 15 vendors at the time. We narrowed it down to like eight, and out of that we really narrowed it down to two that were in the quadrant, in the Gartner quadrant. And in doing our own research and study and bringin' all the vendors in and everything and what we had already invested what we currently had, it really came out to SimpliVity as the choice. >> And your 18 months into this, you've got some Cloud DR in the future, how are things going? What have you learned so far, is there anything you would have done differently or any advice you'd give to your peers if they're starting to go down this path? >> Do the research, do the research, be very thorough in what you're lookin' at for your requirements. And you know not only the research but look at what you've already invested in and take that into consideration and what your return on investment, what you're looking for your return on investment because you need to look just past not only your hosting environment but it really goes into can your network support that environment? Do you need to upgrade your network, your storage aspects, licensing aspects of that as well? So it's a huge investment, however look at the money they already pay in. >> Yeah licensing, one of those things when you talk about that great reduction of servers, are you today or do you expect in the future some of those licensing costs from the database, the virtualization, will those actually be able to be scaled down? >> Absolutely, and that was part of our ROI as well. By a lot, you know and that is one of the benefits of the hyperconverged as well. Once you set that up and purchase the proper licenses, I mean like data center licenses, you can put in as many VMs as you need within that environment and that's important. So you're really just looking at your compute at that, what you need for storage and compute. >> Yeah, I'm curious just spoke, cause we have, we've worked with clients for years on that and often times I've got a ELA or I've got a multi-year contract there and I have to renegotiate it, has that gone smoothly? Have there been any bumps along the road or is it pretty straightforward that licensing can be a huge chunk of your budget and like oh great, I'm two years later and I'm going to save myself a lot of money. >> So I actually am the administrator of our enterprise agreement with Microsoft, had been for many years, so I know what we have. And so I work very closely with that and I as far as the licensing and what we have, so for the renewals, I will say it gets easier. I found that being consolidated because when the agencies own their IT, at the time, we had many enterprise agreements and that was more complex so if you can actually consolidate and go into one, we have one enterprise agreement, or under the three I would say, it's much more manageable on that. So I don't find that that's a show stopper on that, it's gotten easier over the years. Simplified, it's more simplified. >> It's great to hear that and actually Microsoft has made great strides, Microsoft today is not the Microsoft of fives years ago or 10 years ago. >> Correct, I would agree. >> So, Dawnna Pease, pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and be sure to check out thecube.net for all the recordings from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 as well as all of the other shows. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.

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

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE! Covering IMAGINE: A Better World, a global education conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Seattle, Washington at the AWS IMAGINE education event. First time ever as part of the public sector series. Theresa Carlson kicked it off earlier today. 900 registered people watched this thing grow, like every other Amazon event that we've ever covered. And really, this is all about education. We're excited to be here. Our next guest has been working on this for awhile, He's Lou Pugliese, he's the Senior Innovation Fellow and Managing Director of Technology Innovation at Action Lab, Arizona State. Welcome. >> Thanks for letting me interview here. >> Absolutely. So just before we get started, kind of general impressions of this event? >> You know, it's amazing. I was just saying just a few minutes ago that you go to a lot of conferences, and you know, you go to so many conferences that the goal is to sort of try to meet 80% of the time new people. And you don't ever do that. Here you do, you know. And so there's a lot of people here that I've known for years, that I haven't seen. And there are a lot of new faces here too, so it's great. >> Right. It's really interesting, we cover a lot of conferences and kind of the lifecycle as they grow. But when they're small like this and just getting started you know, it's so intimate. There's so much hall conversations going on, there's so much just genuine sharing of best practices 'cause everybody's still trying to figure it out. >> Exactly, exactly. That's what you're doing here now. >> Absolutely. So, one of the things you're involved in, that caught my eye doing the research for this, is working on research based approach to really understand what works for the student learning experience. So there's all kinds of conversations we can have about higher education. Does it work, does it not work, is it broken? There's a lot of interesting things. Here, you know, it's been really interesting to focus on community colleges specifically and this kind of direct path between skills and getting a job. And it almost feels like the old apprenticeship model, kind of back in the day. You're at a big four year institution and really exploring. What is changing in the education interaction between kids and teachers, kids and curriculum, and how that stuff gets communicated and what's effective? 'Cause it's a new world, it's not the old world. >> No, it is. And you know, at ASU, what's interesting is is that there's a significant digital presence. You know, 35 thousand students very historically, back to 2009. So with that comes a significant amount of footsteps, digital footsteps, that students have taken. And so now you have the ability to be able to analyze that at a much higher level. And so now what we can do, and the part of what we're doing at the Action Lab is: looking specifically at the efficacy of these digital programs, finding out what course design elements do work, and what needs to be changed. And that gives us the ability to sort of feed that information back into the instructional design process, and continue to iterate on that improvement. The unique thing about the lab is that, it's a persistent lab. Most universities are sort of stop and start research initiatives, and they learn a lot and they publish a lot of papers. We've been around for three years, and we'll be around for 10 more, and it's a persistent examination of what we're doing at a digital environment, and we're taking it one step further, we're trying to understand how students behave in a digital environment. We know a lot about how students behave in a classroom or traditional learning setting, but we don't know how they how they learn in a digital environment. >> Right. I love, you said digital footprints, not digital exhaust, (both laugh) and it kind of reminds me of kind of these older you know, long term longitudinal studies, because it's still pretty early days in trying to figure out how these educational tools and mobile and stuff are impacting the way these kids learn. But we know they spend so much time on them, that is their interface to the world. It's almost like your remote control to life is actually this little thing that you carry around in your hand. So I'm curious, what are some of the things you've discovered that are working? What are some of the things that maybe that were kind of surprising that didn't work? What's some of the early findings that's coming out of that research? >> Sure, so in the early studies, we looked specifically at how demographic populations succeed or don't succeed in an environment. And what we found out is: there are certain demographics of students that flourish in an online environment, and consistently perform well. There are some that don't. The second thing we learned specifically is: what types of design features within a course, like the interaction within students, or exposing learning objectives, or getting students to really understand what rubrics of measurement, how content is being used and paced throughout our curriculum. A lot of really detailed information that faculty need to reorient and redesign their instruction, and so we can see a direct predictive value of improvement based on those changes. >> Right. So are you getting stuff out now that's impacting curriculum development? Or are you still kind of pulling the data together and there has not been enough time to really implement it? >> We are doing that, absolutely. One of the elements that we're introducing into the research now is: this notion of, it sounds like a fancy term, non cognitive or social and emotional learning; things that are a predispositions of learning about a student in their, you know, sort of soft skills world. Grit, determination, goal orientation, a variety of different soft skills, and their disposition, and how that impacts how they learn, and how they succeed in a classroom. >> And how important is that? I would imagine it's got to be super important. >> It's a field that is just still early in its science, but we're learning a lot. Not necessarily just about how students will succeed in a course environment, but those types of social/emotional learning skills that are required for them to be successful in a workplace environment. >> Right, right. And then the other factors that were discussed earlier in the key note are some of the, you know, what's happening at home? You know, there's all these other factors that are in a student's life that aren't directly tied to their education, but it can have a significant impact on their ability to learn, either temporarily, or-- >> They're all predispositions, yeah absolutely, yeah. >> Yeah, or full time. That's great. So, as you look forward now, and I think it came up too in the keynote, there's no shortage of data (chuckles) in this education environment. It's really been the time to grab it, analyze it, and put it to work. So, how are, you know, your engagement with Amazon kind of helping you to move your objectives forward? >> Well the Amazon engagement allows us to sort of off load all of the technological constraints, and gives us ultimate possibilities of not necessarily focusing on the tough stuff; the hardware, the integration, the specific tool sets that are required to extract data and analyze data, and focusing specifically on the research. So ultimately, it allows us to redirect our focus in what's really important in our world, because it's not necessarily about the technology, it's how the technology can point and draw a direct line between what the data says and how we create an intervention with students. >> Right. So I'm just curious to get your perspective. You said before we turned on the cameras, you've been involved in this field for a long time, trying to figure out how people can learn, how they can learn better, more effectively. Are there some big, kind of macro themes, that maybe people don't think about enough, that you've seen repeated time and time again, that people should be thinking about when they think about effective education and how to get kids to actually learn what we're trying to teach them? >> Sure, so a couple things. I mean, what we're focused on is not necessarily what we call big data, what we typically know big data as, it's really more about small data, which shows us causality. So for instance, one of the things that we are learning is that peer-to-peer engagement is really, really important in many courses in engaging in asynchronous and synchronous organizations within the course to learn from peers. Also avenues specifically to faculty, so faculty can actually look at the map of the entire classroom and understand who's achieving and focus just only on those people. >> Interesting. Well, good stuff, and, I'm sure, as you get more and more of the digital footprints, the insights will only increase by leaps and bounds. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, Lou, well thanks for taking a few minutes of your time >> Thank you. and we'll look forward to catching up next year and getting some new information. >> Thanks. >> He's Lou, I'm Jeff, thanks for watchin', we're in Seattle, signing off from AWS IMAGINE educate, See ya next time. (upbeat techno music)