>>Yeah. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit here in Washington D. C. We're live on the ground for two days. Face to face conference and expo hall and everything here but keith brooks who is the director and head of technical business development for a dress government Govcloud selling brains 10th birthday. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. Thank you john happy to be E. C. 2 15 S three is 9.5 or no, that maybe they're 10 because that's the same day as sqs So Govcloud. 10 years, 20 years. What time >>flies? 10 years? >>Big milestone. Congratulations. A lot of history involved in Govcloud. Yes. Take us through what's the current situation? >>Yeah. So um let's start with what it is just for the viewers that may not be familiar. So AWS Govcloud is isolated. AWS cloud infrastructure and services that were purposely built for our U. S. Government customers that had highly sensitive data or highly regulated data or applications and workloads that they wanted to move to the cloud. So we gave customers the ability to do that with AWS Govcloud. It is subject to the fed ramp I and D O D S R G I L four L five baselines. It gives customers the ability to address ITAR requirements as well as Seaga's N'est ce MMC and Phipps requirements and gives customers a multi region architecture that allows them to also designed for disaster recovery and high availability in terms of why we built it. It starts with our customers. It was pretty clear from the government that they needed a highly secure and highly compliant cloud infrastructure to innovate ahead of demand and that's what we delivered. So back in august of 2011 we launched AWS GovCloud which gave customers the best of breed in terms of high technology, high security, high compliance in the cloud to allow them to innovate for their mission critical workloads. Who >>was some of the early customers when you guys launched after the C. I. A deal intelligence community is a big one but some of the early customers. >>So the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense were all early users of AWS GovCloud. But one of our earliest lighthouse customers was the Nasa jet propulsion laboratory and Nasa Jpl used AWS GovCloud to procure Procure resources ahead of demand which allowed them to save money and also take advantage of being efficient and only paying for what they needed. But they went beyond just I. T. Operations. They also looked at how do they use the cloud and specifically GovCloud for their mission programs. So if you think back to all the way to 2012 with the mars curiosity rover, Nasa Jpl actually streamed and processed and stored that data from the curiosity rover on AWS Govcloud They actually streamed over 150 terabytes of data responded to over 80,000 requests per second and took it beyond just imagery. They actually did high performance compute and data analytics on the data as well. That led to additional efficiencies for future. Over there >>were entire kicking they were actually >>hard core missing into it. Mission critical workloads that also adhere to itar compliance which is why they used AWS GovCloud. >>All these compliance. So there's also these levels. I remember when I was working on the jetty uh stories that were out there was always like level for those different classifications. What does all that mean like? And then this highly available data and highly high availability all these words mean something in these top secret clouds. Can you take us through kind of meetings >>of those? Yeah absolutely. So it starts with the federal compliance program and the two most popular programs are Fed ramp and Dodi srg fed ramp is more general for federal government agencies. There are three levels low moderate and high in the short and skinny of those levels is how they align to the fisma requirements of the government. So there's fisma low fisma moderate fisma high depending on the sensitivity of the government data you will have to align to those levels of Fed ramp to use workloads and store data in the cloud. Similar story for D. O. D. With srg impact levels to 45 and six uh impacts levels to four and five are all for unclassified data. Level two is for less sensitive public defense data levels. Four and five cover more sensitive defense data to include mission critical national security systems and impact level six is for classified information. So those form the basis of security and compliance, luckily with AWS GovCloud celebrating our 10th anniversary, we address Fed ramp high for our customers that require that and D. O. D impact levels to four and five for a sensitive defense guy. >>And that was a real nuanced point and a lot of the competition can't do that. That's real people don't understand, you know, this company, which is that company and all the lobbying and all the mudslinging that goes on. We've seen that in the industry. It's unfortunate, but it happens. Um, I do want to ask you about the Fed ramp because what I'm seeing on the commercial side in the cloud ecosystem, a lot of companies that aren't quote targeting public sector are coming in on the Fed ramp. So there's some good traction there. You guys have done a lot of work to accelerate that. Any new, any new information to share their. >>Yes. So we've been committed to supporting the federal government compliance requirements effectively since the launch of GovCloud. And we've demonstrated our commitment to Fed ramp over the last number of years and GovCloud specifically, we've taken dozens of services through Fed ramp high and we're 100% committed to it because we have great relationships with the Fed ramp, Jabor the joint authorization board. We work with individual government agencies to secure agency A. T. O. S. And in fact we actually have more agency A. T. O. S. With AWS GovCloud than any other cloud provider. And the short and skinny is that represents the baseline for cloud security to address sensitive government workloads and sensitive government data. And what we're seeing from industry and specifically highly regulated industries is the standard that the U. S. Government set means that they have the assurance to run control and classified information or other levels of highly sensitive data on the cloud as well. So Fed ramp set that standard. It's interesting >>that the cloud, this is the ecosystem within an ecosystem again within crossover section. So for instance um the impact of not getting Fed ramp certified is basically money. Right. If you're a supplier vendor uh software developer or whatever used to being a miracle, no one no one would know right bed ramp. I'm gonna have to hire a whole department right now. You guys have a really easy, this is a key value proposition, isn't it? >>Correct. And you see it with a number of I. S. V. S. And software as the service providers. If you visit the federal marketplace website, you'll see dozens of providers that have Fed ramp authorized third party SAAS products running on GovCloud industry leading SAAS companies like Salesforce dot com driven technology Splunk essay PNS to effectively they're bringing their best of breed capabilities, building on top of AWS GovCloud and offering those highly compliant fed ramp, moderate fed ramp high capabilities to customers both in government and private industry that need that level of compliance. >>Just as an aside, I saw they've got a nice tweet from Teresa Carlson now it's plunk Govcloud yesterday. That was a nice little positive gesture uh, for you guys at GovCloud, what other areas are you guys moving the needle on because architecturally this is a big deal. What are some areas that you're moving the needle on for the GovCloud? >>Well, when I look back across the last 10 years, there were some pretty important developments that stand out. The first is us launching the second Govcloud infrastructure region in 2018 And that gave customers that use GovCloud specifically customers that have highly sensitive data and high levels of compliance. The ability to build fault tolerant, highly available and mission critical workloads in the cloud in a region that also gives them an additional three availability zones. So the launch of GovCloud East, which is named AWS GovCloud Us East gave customers to regions a total of six availability zones that allowed them accelerate and build more scalable solutions in the cloud. More recently, there is an emergence of another D O D program called the cybersecurity maturity model, C M M C and C M M C is something where we looked around the corner and said we need to Innovate to help our customers, particularly defense customers and the defense industrial based customers address see MMC requirements in the cloud. So with Govcloud back in December of 2020, we actually launched the AWS compliant framework for federal defense workloads, which gives customers a turnkey capability and tooling and resources to spin up environments that are configured to meet see MMC controls and D. O. D. Srg control. So those things represent some of the >>evolution keith. I'm interested also in your thoughts on how you see the progression of Govcloud outside the United States. Tactical Edge get wavelength coming on board. How does how do you guys look at that? Obviously us is global, it's not just the jet, I think it's more of in general. Edge deployments, sovereignty is also going to be world's flat, Right? I mean, so how does that >>work? So it starts back with customer requirements and I tie it back to the first question effectively we built Govcloud to respond to our U. S. Government customers and are highly regulated industry customers that had highly sensitive data and a high bar to meet in terms of regulatory compliance and that's the foundation of it. So as we look to other customers to include those outside of the US. It starts with those requirements. You mentioned things like edge and hybrid and a good example of how we marry the two is when we launched a W. S. Outpost in Govcloud last year. So outpost brings the power of the AWS cloud to on premises environments of our customers, whether it's their data centers or Coehlo environments by bringing AWS services, a. P. I. S and service and points to the customer's on premises facilities >>even outside the United States. >>Well, for Govcloud is focused on us right now. Outside of the U. S. Customers also have availability to use outpost. It's just for us customers, it's focused on outpost availability, geography >>right now us. Right. But other governments gonna want their Govcloud too. Right, Right, that's what you're getting at, >>Right? And it starts with the data. Right? So we we we spent a lot of time working with government agencies across the globe to understand their regulations and their requirements and we use that to drive our decisions. And again, just like we started with govcloud 10 years ago, it starts with our customer requirements and we innovate from there. Well, >>I've been, I love the D. O. D. S vision on this. I know jet I didn't come through and kind of went scuttled, got thrown under the bus or whatever however you want to call it. But that whole idea of a tactical edge, it was pretty brilliant idea. Um so I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. That's where I was supposed to come in, get snowball, snowmobile, little snow snow products as well, how are they doing? And because they're all part of the family to, >>they are and they're available in Govcloud and they're also authorized that fed ramp and Gov srg levels and it's really, it's really fascinating to see D. O. D innovate with the cloud. Right. So you mentioned tactical edge. So whether it's snowball devices or using outposts in the future, I think the D. O. D. And our defense customers are going to continue to innovate. And quite frankly for us, it represents our commitment to the space we want to make sure our defense customers and the defense industrial base defense contractors have access to the best debris capabilities like those edge devices and edge capable. I >>think about the impact of certification, which is good because I just thought of a clean crows. We've got aerospace coming in now you've got D O. D, a little bit of a cross colonization if you will. So nice to have that flexibility. I got to ask you about just how you view just in general, the intelligence community a lot of uptake since the CIA deal with amazon Just overall good health for eight of his gum cloud. >>Absolutely. And again, it starts with our commitment to our customers. We want to make sure that our national security customers are defense customers and all of the customers and the federal government that have a responsibility for securing the country have access to the best of breed capability. So whether it's the intelligence community, the Department of Defense are the federal agencies and quite frankly we see them innovating and driving things forward to include with their sensitive workloads that run in Govcloud, >>what's your strategy for partnerships as you work on the ecosystem? You do a lot with strategy. Go to market partnerships. Um, it's got its public sector pretty much people all know each other. Our new firms popping up new brands. What's the, what's the ecosystem looks like? >>Yeah, it's pretty diverse. So for Govcloud specifically, if you look at partners in the defense community, we work with aerospace companies like Lockheed martin and Raytheon Technologies to help them build I tar compliant E. R. P. Application, software development environments etcetera. We work with software companies I mentioned salesforce dot com. Splunk and S. A. P. And S. To uh and then even at the state and local government level, there's a company called Pay It that actually worked with the state of Kansas to develop the Icann app, which is pretty fascinating. It's a app that is the official app of the state of Kansas that allow citizens to interact with citizens services. That's all through a partner. So we continue to work with our partner uh broad the AWS partner network to bring those type of people >>You got a lot of MST is that are doing good work here. I saw someone out here uh 10 years. Congratulations. What's the coolest thing uh you've done or seen. >>Oh wow, it's hard to name anything in particular. I just think for us it's just seeing the customers and the federal government innovate right? And, and tie that innovation to mission critical workloads that are highly important. Again, it reflects our commitment to give these government customers and the government contractors the best of breed capabilities and some of the innovation we just see coming from the federal government leveraging the count now. It's just super cool. So hard to pinpoint one specific thing. But I love the innovation and it's hard to pick a favorite >>Child that we always say. It's kind of a trick question I do have to ask you about just in general, the just in 10 years. Just look at the agility. Yeah, I mean if you told me 10 years ago the government would be moving at any, any agile anything. They were a glacier in terms of change, right? Procure Man, you name it. It's just like, it's a racket. It's a racket. So, so, but they weren't, they were slow and money now. Pandemic hits this year. Last year, everything's up for grabs. The script has been flipped >>exactly. And you know what, what's interesting is there were actually a few federal government agencies that really paved the way for what you're seeing today. I'll give you some examples. So the Department of Veterans Affairs, they were an early Govcloud user and way back in 2015 they launched vets dot gov on gov cloud, which is an online platform that gave veterans the ability to apply for manage and track their benefits. Those type of initiatives paved the way for what you're seeing today, even as soon as last year with the U. S. Census, right? They brought the decennial count online for the first time in history last year, during 2020 during the pandemic and the Census Bureau was able to use Govcloud to launch and run 2020 census dot gov in the cloud at scale to secure that data. So those are examples of federal agencies that really kind of paved the way and leading to what you're saying is it's kind >>of an awakening. It is and I think one of the things that no one's reporting is kind of a cultural revolution is the talent underneath that way, the younger people like finally like and so it's cooler. It is when you go fast and you can make things change, skeptics turned into naysayers turned into like out of a job or they don't transform so like that whole blocker mentality gets exposed just like shelf where software you don't know what it does until the cloud is not performing, its not good. Right, right. >>Right. Into that point. That's why we spend a lot of time focused on education programs and up skilling the workforce to, because we want to ensure that as our customers mature and as they innovate, we're providing the right training and resources to help them along their journey, >>keith brooks great conversation, great insight and historian to taking us to the early days of Govcloud. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks thanks for having me cubes coverage here and address public sector summit. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Mhm. Mhm mm.

>>law from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and Intel along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the Sands. We continue our coverage here on the Cube of Day, one of a W s ram in 2019 show. Bigger and better than ever. Tough to say, because last year was awesome. This year if they think you're gonna have a little bit higher on the knots. Justin Warren, I'm John Walls were joined by Brandon Walsh, who is the s creepy apartment relations at the 1901 group. Good to see you, sir. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>Right now. I can't imagine anything intact dating back to 1901 So I'm trying to think What What was the origination of? Of the company? First off, tell us a little bit about what you do, but what's the name all about? >>Well, real quick for the name are our CEO. So new Singh came up with this idea for automation of I t routine. I t management in 1901 was the year the assembly line was invented, so a gentleman named Ransom E. Olds from the famed Oldsmobile gets credit for that. So so new named the company after that automation breakthrough of an assembly line model. And we have built an assembly line concept what we call an I T factory for a cloud migration factory into our operations center. And that's part of our managed service is offering that we sell, promote, provide to our customers. >>And, of course, you're doing that with the help of a company called Cohee City. Find Data Management Solutions provider. So let's talk a little bit about cohesively as well. And your relationship, how that works and what you're I guess, of deriving are extracted from their service is that you find that great value in that >>absolutely were. Maybe this is a little different for today in the show. We actually are a customer of Cohee City. We consume cohesive. So in our managed service offering portfolio, one of the things that we've been using Holy City four is helping our customers set, create or start up. Disaster recovery or backup service is capability. In 1901 group has been packaging marketing, selling that D R. As a service and that bur back up as a service to our federal state, local customers. >>A longtime fan of the Toyota production system, I am very pleased that you are turning an assembly line concept. You know, I think it's vastly overdue. So it's great to hear you focus a lot on the public sector is my understanding absolutely. Tell me a little bit more about what the public sector is. A very complicated based is a >>complicated is putting it politely. >>So walk us through how you're using cohesive toe help. Public sector organizations transform themselves to use this kind of as a service back up and disaster recovery. >>You hit on a really good point. It's sort of two points. One is the term is I t modernization. So in order to modernize a very large complex, I T Environment Assets Systems Service is multi locations, various data centers, multiple data classifications that that complexity with the cohesive product. What has allowed us to do is to start incrementally by doing a disaster recovery or a backup on premise that gives the agency since a confidence we get to show success and progress and that sort of a win win for everyone involved, where the growth with a future and how those agencies will modernize is once you start getting the data backed up properly, prepped for disaster, recover properly. You can also start migrating data toward Native Cloud. And particularly we've been working with AWS aws govcloud in particular, but also a WC commercial clout. >>I like how you mentioned that building trust part with the agencies to begin with. It's not so much about the technology, but about the human part of the process. Way heard that came out this morning with Andy Jesse talking about how data transfer transformation happens, and it's a lot to do with the humans. It's not all about technology. >>At the the organizational change, management is important as the technology change management and incremental shift toward the cloud and migration toward the cloud allows for both time and and reallocation of resource is both by the agency's contractors supporting the agencies and manage service providers like us, who are really providing more as a service. Models meaning way generally consumed the technology for the client, which is a little bit different of a model from the past, but that is the trend of the future. >>It's not purely incremental, though, because you're not. You have to change the way that you're doing things, to be using it as a service, as this thing from the way that you would have done it is purely on premises type infrastructure. Explain a little bit about how you helped these agencies to change the way they think to be able to use this as a service >>approach. Well, one of the one of the reasons we selected Cohesive E is because of their ability to scale out and their pricing model that allows us to better forecast costs and because we're managed service provider price to the government. So the scale out capability that Callie City provides allows us to buy technology capacity nodes as we need them so we don't have a large capital expenditure up front as orders come in. As agencies purchase as we grow, we can add to that capacity incrementally. That's lower risk for us. Lower risk for the client. So again it's a it's a win win in their pricing model. Their licensing model allows us to work with our agency customers and predict costing and pricing for next year, two years out, three years out, which, in the federal budget cycle appropriations are not appropriated. It is a pretty important thing >>got on a wire in the business. Frankly, it's such a, you know, just pull your hair out. I'm sure they're wonderful. This roast ready to say the least, but way heard a lot about a pretty big major theme, this transformation versus transition and in terms of government users, how do you get them into the transformation mindset when you have those obstacles you just talked about that you have a number of times, cycles and our funding cycles and development cycles. And so regulatory psychic, I mean and you write those concerns whatever they will throws their way, states what they throw their way. I think that would be just looking at it from the outside. Tough to get into a transformer mode when you are almost are constantly transitioning. It seems >>you bring up a good point. A. If I can make a comment about eight of us, AWS has been investing in in what's called Fed Ramp that's a federal accreditation program that insurers that that cloud systems and in the case of AWS have their security controls documented, properly documented to a standard and then enforced, so continuously monitored and reported on the investments AWS have been making. And and that speed of investment has been increasing over the last few years has really helped manage service providers. And I t providers like like 1901 group help the agency's understand how to transition and transform. But it's definitely a step. It's a step across. It's incremental in nature, but I congratulate AWS on that investment of time and resource is for Fed Ramp Way also are federally authorized way. We're going into our fifth year so we were early on and being able to watch A W s grow expand helps us helps our competition, but helps the agencies and helps. In the end, all citizens of the United States. So missions air getting better. Theodore Option is speeding up. I think a ws for that investment >>tell us a little bit more about how these federal agencies are using both AWS and Cohee City to work together because you mentioned that your business is built built on Cohee City. So where does that go? Where's coming >>s so So way started out using Cohee City in on premise environment to support federal civilian agencies. That model has been growing, so that was a single tenant, meaning we had one customer. On a single instance. We've expanded to a multi tenant instance. And now we're expanding into a AWS Cloud native instance, so being able to work with a complex environment, a complex data management environment being able to go from on prim to cloud of being will go from AWS back and forth, being able to manage that seamlessly, ensuring there's encryption of data at rest and in motion. That just makes our job that much easier. >>Now we know that Cohee City is a software data management company. It's not just about backup on D are so cohesive is making some inroads into other secondary data management service is, and some other things they're So what are you looking at to expand into what what a customer is asking you to do for them now that you've already proven yourself with with some of the D. R and back up type ability? Yeah, >>I mean, it really varies. It does very agency to agency smaller, independent agencies really may be looking at a cohesive technology to manage fragmented data. Larger agencies and groups and programs within agencies have different. Different asks different requirements. It's really hard to say a single what is the thing? I would say that the flexibility cohesive he gives us is the ability to go hybrid. So depending on what the customers asking feature wise functionality, wise architecture wise way think that Cally city is very flexible >>and about the public sector market. Then if you if you could put your headlight on that for the next 23 years, he was talked about some cycles of that far out. What do you think it would be? A. I guess shift is the right word. What would be a useful or valuable shift in terms of the public sector in terms of their acceptance or adoption in your world? >>Well, so as applications are lifted and shifted or migrated re factored rewritten into cloud environments, you're gonna we're going to see you're going to see mission applications at the agency level moved to cloud reside in the cloud, so data for performance reasons is gonna have to be right next to that application. So the data management, whether it's for production or test Dev Kohli City's got emerging capability for for Dev Test. I think it's a test of but deaf task. So all these pieces sort of go together as a CZ, you said, going from transitioning to transforming and you start looking to three years out. I do believe the agencies have a lot of momentum. There are some really interesting activities being done in the federal state local realm, around artificial intelligence machine learning. So being able to do the compute storage, the networking and security all within a A W s cloud, it's just going to speed things up and make cost and performance more manageable and transparent. >>Thank you for the time. We appreciate that. We find out earlier that Brendan is a Washington Redskins fan and a D. C. Resident, as am I. And I thought 90 No. One was the last time we had a playoff tape. It was quite that far back, but it certainly seems like it, doesn't it? Hang in there, Thank you very much. Enjoy that. Brenda Walsh joining us from the 1901 group back lot with more live here from AWS reinvent with just a warning. I'm John Walls and you are watching the Cube