>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days, cloud storage, immutability, and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on it, has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is, oftentimes, data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats, this is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring, but object storage, historically, was seen as this low-cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard tradeoffs between cost and performance. That has changed, the ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parity with other storage formats, but cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes, my name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose-built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues, first up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi will then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi, and then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss School, let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO and Co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company, David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Great to have you, so look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years, why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder Jeff Flowers and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disk drive was probably 500 gigabytes and now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even 100 terabyte drives coming down the road and, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disk drives is going to run out of steam because, even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new, highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it and they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab, designing and testing this new storage architecture and when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we can sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite. You know, when you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zetabytes or something like that and if you look at that as you know, the potential market size during that data, we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions and so I said, look, this is a great opportunity, if you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on-prem, if you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud, we're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter, and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches, but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes, but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like Veeam, Convo, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups, they're never going to pay a ransom. So, once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well, so that you can't do a full restore from your backups. And that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you, you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know, write once read many, and those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud, and it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff but, you know, the net result is if you store your backups in immutable buckets, in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time, so you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that, once that data is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it, or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty. It's obviously a big deal, I mean, especially for companies with the presence overseas, but what's really is any digital business these days, how should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws and if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in-country, you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, and I've probably forgotten one or two, but the reason we do that is twofold; one is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency, and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos, and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in-country, so, you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in May of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws and we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and think it continues to evolve, we see judgments in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the U.S. and the elimination of third party cookies, what does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things of this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the U.S., Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues so it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world and this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi, where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world and we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia and so forth, you know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base and that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah, it's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David, thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations, what does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud and I think storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth, and it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local, and there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential, you know, the most analysts think that the full, all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range, whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud, like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month and so I think people are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow, that's like a six X more expensive in the clouds, more than six X, all right, thank you, David,-- >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business, you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE, a great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, keep it right there. ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Brenda in sales got an email ♪ ♪ Click here for a trip to Bombay ♪ ♪ It's not even called Bombay anymore ♪ ♪ But you clicked it anyway ♪ ♪ And now our data's been held hostage ♪ ♪ And now we're on sinking ship ♪ ♪ And a hacker's in our system ♪ ♪ Just 'cause Brenda wanted a trip ♪ ♪ She clicked on something stupid ♪ ♪ And our data's out of our control ♪ ♪ Into the hands of a hacker's ♪ ♪ And he's a giant asshole. ♪ ♪ He encrypted it in his basement ♪ ♪ He wants a million bucks for the key ♪ ♪ And I'm pretty sure he's 15 ♪ ♪ And still going through puberty ♪ ♪ I know you didn't mean to do us wrong ♪ ♪ But now I'm dealing with this all week long ♪ ♪ To make you all aware ♪ ♪ Of all this ransomware ♪ ♪ That is why I'm singing you this song ♪ ♪ C'mon ♪ ♪ Take it from me ♪ ♪ The director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince Nairobi ♪ ♪ 'Cuz he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ (gentle music) >> Joining me now is Drew Schlussel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi, hey Drew, good to see you again, thanks for coming back in theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, great to see you. >> All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, Zero Trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword and now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate, what's Wasabi's take on Zero Trust. >> So, absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention, Wasabi's take is Zero Trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places, right, where the bad guys are getting in. And, you know, I think of Zero Trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, it takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are, of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. >> Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and, you know, design and your Zero Trust and you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure, so we're going to talk about that, there's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew, about immutability and air gaps, I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics, how do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? >> So, in terms of air gap and immutability, right, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right, to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data, you need to have a copy stored offsite, and that copy needs to be immutable and we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. >> You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because, sometimes people don't understand, you actually are a cloud, you're not building on other people's public clouds and this storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that, tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. >> Yeah, I appreciate that, so there's definitely some misconception, we are our own cloud storage service, we don't run on top of anybody else, right, it's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard, we interoperate with practically hundreds of applications, primarily in this case, right, we're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage and so we've made it really simple, in many cases, you'll see Wasabi as you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, you know, put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say multifactor authentication, and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. >> I mean, we just heard from David Friend, if I did my math right, he was talking about, you know, 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that, how are you able to achieve such attractive economics? >> Yeah, so, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right, less expensive than the hyperscalers. And you know, we talked about this at Vermont, right? There's some secret sauce there and you know, we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity and the fact is we're also not having to run, you know, a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time, so we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, you know, going to be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right, they see the fact that their data is growing 40, 80% year over year, they know they need to have some place to keep it secure, and, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves, in fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. >> And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What the feature called? Can you double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the term in S3 is Object Lock and what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage, and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape, or form, the application can't change it, the system administration can't change it, Wasabi can't change it, okay, it is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right, in adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors and I named off a few earlier and the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security. Right, when you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right, they can't take away the data and that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. >> And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API, so if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data, beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right, that's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right, point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, you know, for whatever 30, 60, 90 days, and then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you know, you're often running with Wasabi. >> I talked to my open about the allure of object storage historically, you know, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, and we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up, but I forgot to answer something earlier, right, you said that immutability is a feature and I want to make it very clear that it is a feature but it's an API request. Okay, so when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right, is typically something that the other folks charge for, right, and I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge, you want to, you know, pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge, and that's an important thing, because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects, and you want to get a list of those objects, or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data, with Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. >> Excellent, so thank you for that. So, you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? You know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe, a paint a picture for us example, or two? >> Sure, so, again, we just do storage, right, that is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors, whether it's, you know, active archive, backup and recovery, IOT, surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right, those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata, they just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right, so just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right, you literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API, getting started is incredibly easy, right, we offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte, and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right, it's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty, I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're global company, right, so there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world some place that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, as well as your compliance requirements. >> Yeah, we did talk about sovereignty, Drew, this is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of a industry historian, when I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out, and for instance, I know one bought competitor of Carbonite, and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, they couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud in part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems. Like, you know, ransomware, of mutability and recovery, I'll give you the last word, Drew. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right, there's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, you know, but, you know, not all data's hot all the time and by hot, I mean, you know, extremely hot, you know, let's take, you know, real time analytics for, maybe facial recognition, right, that requires sub-millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, right, you want to store that data for a long, long time, and you're going to want to also tap back into it later, so, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like, you know, cold glacial type of tiered storage, yeah, don't believe the hype, you're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a Wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment, you know, what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right, we're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that, I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. >> All right, Drew, thank you for that, definitely we see the momentum, in a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information technology services at The Hotchkiss School, keep it right there. >> Hey, I'm Nate, and we wrote this song about ransomware to educate people, people like Brenda. >> Oh, God, I'm so sorry. We know you are, but Brenda, you're not alone, this hasn't just happened to you. >> No! ♪ Colonial Oil Pipeline had a guy ♪ ♪ who didn't change his password ♪ ♪ That sucks ♪ ♪ His password leaked, the data was breached ♪ ♪ And it cost his company 4 million bucks ♪ ♪ A fake update was sent to people ♪ ♪ Working for the meat company JBS ♪ ♪ That's pretty clever ♪ ♪ Instead of getting new features, they got hacked ♪ ♪ And had to pay the largest crypto ransom ever ♪ ♪ And 20 billion dollars, billion with a b ♪ ♪ Have been paid by companies in healthcare ♪ ♪ If you wonder buy your premium keeps going ♪ ♪ Up, up, up, up, up ♪ ♪ Now you're aware ♪ ♪ And now the hackers they are gettin' cocky ♪ ♪ When they lock your data ♪ ♪ You know, it has gotten so bad ♪ ♪ That they demand all of your money and it gets worse ♪ ♪ They go and the trouble with the Facebook ad ♪ ♪ Next time, something seems too good to be true ♪ ♪ Like a free trip to Asia! ♪ ♪ Just check first and I'll help before you ♪ ♪ Think before you click ♪ ♪ Don't get fooled by this ♪ ♪ Who isn't old enough to drive to school ♪ ♪ Take it from me, the director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince in Nairobi ♪ ♪ Because he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ >> It's a pretty sweet car. ♪ A kid without facial hair, who lives with his mom ♪ ♪ To learn more about this go to wasabi.com ♪ >> Hey, don't do that. ♪ Cause if we had Wasabi's immutability ♪ >> You going to ruin this for me! ♪ This fifteen-year-old wouldn't have on me ♪ (gentle music) >> Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at The Hotchkiss School, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut, hello, Kevin. >> Hello, it's nice to be here, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about The Hotchkiss School and your role. >> Sure, The Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role as the Director of Information Technology Services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >> Yeah, and you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens, what's the unique, you know, or if not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you? >> I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of IT security, IT in general sometimes, so, I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into. >> Because specifically you are potentially spread thin, underfunded, you got students, you got teachers, so there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >> Certainly, because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center, so, data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights and FERPA, some of our students are under 18, so, data privacy laws such as COPPA apply, HIPAA can apply, we have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition so, it's a unique place to be, again, we operate very much like a college would, right, we have all the trappings of a private college in terms of all the operations we do and that's what I love most about working in education is that it's all the industries combined in many ways. >> Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in Drew to the conversation so what are the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your data? >> Well, we take a defense in-depth approach, so we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses, we also keep it simple, you know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching , using multifactor authentication, and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >> Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >> Yeah, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what he's doing, going back to our prior conversation about Zero Trust, right, that defense in-depth approach is beautifully aligned, right, with the Zero Trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right, they need to make sure that the data that they're keeping, evidence, right, is secure and immutable, right, because that's evidence. >> Well, Kevin, paint a picture for us, if you would. So, you were primarily on-prem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and the kind of, I want to get to the before and the after Wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >> Sure, well, I came to The Hotchkiss School about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal, so again, not a lot of funding for IT in general, security, or infrastructure in general, so Nutanix was actually a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hotchkiss and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system that students would use, financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SaaS solutions coming in play, we had also taken some time to do some business continuity, planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue, I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that, so, as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud-based, we didn't really need as much of the on-premise compute and storage as we had, and it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AHV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well and it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small IT shops like ours. >> Yeah, AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor and so you migrated off of VMware avoiding the VTax avoidance, that's a common theme among Nutanix customers and now, did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider Wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >> We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, Wasabi became across our desks and it was such a low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month and then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time, it wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network, you know, some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on the internet that they could be stored as well. So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast, security wise, it has all the features of S3 compliance that works with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily and then there was no egress fees, we can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing as any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs, we need to know what we're going to spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for egress or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously, we need that, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >> So Kevin, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed, were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those concerns as an IT practitioner? >> Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing, there's lots of companies with funny names, I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history, understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from, and really looking into the technology and understanding that the value proposition, the ability to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology in which it lays down data. So, having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for, it may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's not cheap, you know, it's reliable, and that was really our concern. So we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >> Yeah, thank you for that. Drew, explain the whole egress charge, we hear a lot about that, what do people need to know? >> First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, Dave, just like theCUBE, let's be very clear about that, second of all, egress charges, so, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get, every put, every list, everything, okay, it's part of their process, it's part of how they make money, it's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services, we don't do that. And I think, you know, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond what is the list price. In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then, right, their additional cost, the egress costs, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >> So, you used a little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation, so here's what I'm imagining, like I have a lot of stuff, right? And I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly, I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff, that's kind of the same thing here. >> Oh, that's a great metaphor, right? That storage locker, right? You know, can you imagine every time you want to open the door to that storage locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >> No, that would be annoying. >> Or, every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard, you have to pay a door opening fee, right, and then if you want to look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay, and it's ridiculous, it's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker, you've already paid the annual fee, probably, 'cause they gave you a discount on that, so why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what Wasabi does and I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody else. >> Okay, good, that's helpful, it helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin, I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and ransomware protection, for example? >> Yes, cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too, right, this is often the checking the box kind of activity, insurance companies require it, but we want to make it something that people want to do and want to engage with so, even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that, so it wasn't just about protecting our school data, it's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something do in all aspects of your life, especially now that the folks are working hybrid often working from home with equipment from the school, the stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home and so knowing how to protect that is important, so we definitely run those programs in a way that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >> So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until, of course, we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples, is that what you're talking about, about having fun? >> Yeah, I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories, you know, they stop as they run, so they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going, so, you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic, yeah, and that's what I think is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure you know the sender of the email, no, you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not? So, that's where I think the learning comes in. >> Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much, appreciate your time, Kevin, Drew, awesome having you in theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thanks. >> Okay, in a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Announcer: Some things just don't make sense, like showing up a little too early for the big game. >> How early are we? >> Couple months. Popcorn? >> Announcer: On and off season, the Red Sox cover their bases with affordable, best in class cloud storage. >> These are pretty good seats. >> Hey, have you guys seen the line from the bathroom? >> Announcer: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, it just makes sense. >> You don't think they make these in left hand, do you? >> We learned today how a serial entrepreneur, along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data while at the same time, protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple, fast storage, immutability, air gaps, and solid operational processes, let's not forget about that, okay? People and processes are critical and if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign and support of digital transformations. Now, if you want to learn more about immutability and Object Block, click on the Wasabi resource button on this page, or go to wasabi.com/objectblock. Thanks for watching Secure Storage Hot Takes made possible by Wasabi. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, well, see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting adaptive data governance brought >>to you by >>Iota Ho. In this next segment, we're gonna be talking to you about getting to know your data. And specifically you're gonna hear from two folks at Io Tahoe. We've got enterprise account execs Evita Davis here, as well as Enterprise Data engineer Patrick Simon. They're gonna be sharing insights and tips and tricks for how you can get to know your data and quickly on. We also want to encourage you to engage with Sabina and Patrick. Use the chat feature to the right, send comments, questions or feedback so you can participate. All right, Patrick Sabetta, take it away. All right. >>Thanks, Lisa. Great to be here as Lisa mentioned guys. I'm the enterprise account executive here in Ohio. Tahoe you Pat? >>Yeah. Hey, everyone so great to be here. A said My name's Patrick Samit. I'm the enterprise data engineer here at Iota Ho. And we're so excited to be here and talk about this topic as one thing we're really trying to perpetuate is that data is everyone's business. >>I couldn't agree more, Pat. So, guys, what patent? I patent. I've actually had multiple discussions with clients from different organizations with different roles. So we spoke with both your technical and your non technical audience. So while they were interested in different aspects of our platform, we found that what they had in common was they wanted to make data easy to understand and usable. So that comes back. The pats point off being everybody's business because no matter your role, we're all dependent on data. So what Pan I wanted to do today was wanted toe walk. You guys through some of those client questions, slash pain points that we're hearing from different industries and different roles and demo how our platform here, like Tahoe, is used for automating those, uh, automating Dozier related tasks. So with that said, are you ready for the first one, Pat? >>Yeah, Let's do it. >>Great. So I'm gonna put my technical hat on for this one, So I'm a data practitioner. I just started my job. ABC Bank. I have over 100 different data sources. So I have data kept in Data Lakes, legacy data, sources, even the cloud. So my issue is I don't know what those data sources hold. I don't know what data sensitive, and I don't even understand how that data is connected. So how can I talk to help? >>Yeah, I think that's a very common experience many are facing and definitely something I've encountered in my past. Typically, the first step is to catalog the data and then start mapping the relationships between your various data stores. Now, more often than not, this has tackled through numerous meetings and a combination of Excel and something similar to video, which are too great tools in their own part. But they're very difficult to maintain. Just due to the rate that we are creating data in the modern world. It starts to beg for an idea that can scale with your business needs. And this is where a platform like Io Tahoe becomes so appealing. You can see here visualization of the data relationships created by the I Ho Tahoe service. Now, what is fantastic about this is it's not only laid out in a very human and digestible format in the same action of creating this view, the data catalog was constructed. >>Um, So is the data catalog automatically populated? Correct. Okay, so So what? I'm using iota. Hope at what I'm getting is this complete, unified automated platform without the added cost, of course. >>Exactly. And that's at the heart of Iota Ho. A great feature with that data catalog is that Iota Ho will also profile your data as it creates the catalog, assigning some meaning to those pesky column Underscore ones and custom variable underscore tents that are always such a joy to deal with. Uh, now, by leveraging this interface, we can start to answer the first part of your question and understand where the core relationships within our data exists. Personally, I'm a big fan of this >>view, >>as it really just helps the i b naturally John to these focal points that coincide with these key columns following that train of thought. Let's examine the customer I D column that seems to be at the center of a lot of these relationships. We can see that it's a fairly important column as it's maintaining the relationship between at least three other tables. Now you notice all the connectors are in this blue color. This means that their system defined relationships. But I hope Tahoe goes that extra mile and actually creates thes orange colored connectors as well. These air ones that are machine learning algorithms have predicted to be relationships. Uh, and you can leverage to try and make new and powerful relationships within your data. So I hope that answers the first part of your question. >>Eso So this is really cool. And I can see how this could be leverage quickly. Now. What if I added new data sources or your multiple data sources and needed toe? Identify what data sensitive. Can I Oh, Tahoe, Detect that. >>Yeah, definitely. Within the i o ta platform. There already over 300 pre defined policies such as HIPAA, ferpa, C, c, p, a and the like. One can choose which of these policies to run against their data along for flexibility and efficiency and running the policies that affect organization. >>Okay, so so 300 is an exceptional number. I'll give you that. But what about internal policies that apply to my organization? Is there any ability for me to write custom policies? >>Yeah, that's no issue. And is something that clients leverage fairly often to utilize this function when simply has to write a rejects that our team has helped many deploy. After that, the custom policy is stored for future use to profile sensitive data. One then selects the data sources they're interested in and select the policies that meet your particular needs. The interface will automatically take your data according to the policies of detects, after which you can review the discoveries confirming or rejecting the tagging. All of these insights are easily exported through the interface, so one can work these into the action items within your project management systems. And I think this lends to the collaboration as a team can work through the discovery simultaneously. And as each item is confirmed or rejected, they can see it ni instantaneously. All this translates to a confidence that with iota how you can be sure you're in compliance. >>Um, so I'm glad you mentioned compliance because that's extremely important to my organization. >>So >>what you're saying when I use the eye a Tahoe automated platform, we'd be 90% more compliant that before were other than if you were going to be using a human. >>Yeah, definitely. The collaboration and documentation that the iota ho interface lends itself to can really help you build that confidence that your compliance is sound. >>Does >>that answer your question about sense of data? >>Definitely so. So path. I have the next question for you. So we're planning on migration on guy. Have a set of reports I need to migrate. But what I need to know is that well, what what data sources? Those report those reports are dependent on and what's feeding those tables? >>Yeah, it's a fantastic questions to be toe identifying critical data elements, and the interdependencies within the various databases could be a time consuming but vital process and the migration initiative. Luckily, Iota Ho does have an answer, and again, it's presented in a very visual format. >>So what I'm looking at here is my entire day landscape. >>Yes, exactly. >>So let's say I add another data source. I can still see that Unified 3 60 view. >>Yeah, One feature that is particularly helpful is the ability to add data sources after the data lineage. Discovery has finished along for the flexibility and scope necessary for any data migration project. If you only need need to select a few databases or your entirety, this service will provide the answers. You're looking for this visual representation of the connectivity makes the identification of critical data elements a simple matter. The connections air driven by both system defined flows as well as those predicted by our algorithms, the confidence of which, uh can actually be customized to make sure that they're meeting the needs of the initiative that you have in place. Now, this also provides tabular output in case you need it for your own internal documentation or for your action items, which we can see right here. Uh, in this interface, you can actually also confirm or deny the pair rejection the pair directions along to make sure that the data is as accurate as possible. Does that help with your data lineage needs? >>Definitely. So So, Pat, My next big question here is So now I know a little bit about my data. How do I know I can trust it? So what I'm interested in knowing really is is it in a fit state for Meteo use it? Is it accurate? Does it conform to the right format? >>Yeah, that's a great question. I think that is a pain point felt across the board, be it by data practitioners or data consumers alike. another service that iota hope provides is the ability to write custom data quality rules and understand how well the data pertains to these rules. This dashboard gives a unified view of the strength of these rules, and your dad is overall quality. >>Okay, so Pat s o on on the accuracy scores there. So if my marketing team needs to run, a campaign can read dependent those accuracy scores to know what what tables have quality data to use for our marketing campaign. >>Yeah, this view would allow you to understand your overall accuracy as well as dive into the minutia to see which data elements are of the highest quality. So for that marketing campaign, if you need everything in a strong form, you'll be able to see very quickly with these high level numbers. But if you're only dependent on a few columns to get that information out the door, you can find that within this view, uh, >>so you >>no longer have to rely on reports about reports, but instead just come to this one platform to help drive conversations between stakeholders and data practitioners. I hope that helps answer your questions about that quality. >>Oh, definitely. So I have another one for you here. Path. So I get now the value of IATA who brings by automatically captured all those technical metadata from sources. But how do we match that with the business glossary? >>Yeah, within the same data quality service that we just reviewed. One can actually add business rules detailing the definitions and the business domains that these fall into. What's more is that the data quality rules were just looking at can then be tied into these definitions, allowing insight into the strength of these business rules. It is this service that empowers stakeholders across the business to be involved with the data life cycle and take ownership over the rules that fall within their domain. >>Okay, so those custom rules can I apply that across data sources? >>Yeah. You can bring in as many data sources as you need, so long as you could tie them to that unified definition. >>Okay, great. Thanks so much bad. And we just want to quickly say to everyone working in data, we understand your pain, so please feel free to reach out >>to us. We >>are website the chapel. Oh, Arlington. And let's get a conversation started on how iota Who can help you guys automate all those manual task to help save you time and money. Thank you. Thank >>you. Erin. >>Impact. If I could ask you one quick question, how do you advise customers? You just walk in this great example This banking example that you and city to talk through. How do you advise customers get started? >>Yeah, I think the number one thing that customers could do to get started with our platform is to just run the tag discovery and build up that data catalog. It lends itself very quickly to the other needs you might have, such as thes quality rules as well as identifying those kind of tricky columns that might exist in your data. Those custom variable underscore tens I mentioned before >>last questions to be to anything to add to what Pat just described as a starting place. >>Um, no, I think actually passed something that pretty well, I mean, just just by automating all those manual tasks, I mean, it definitely can save your company a lot of time and money, so we we encourage you just reach out to us. Let's get that conversation started. >>Excellent. Savita and Pat, Thank you so much. We hope you have learned a lot from these folks about how to get to know your data. Make sure that it's quality so that you can maximize the value of it. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat Techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live day two of VMworld in Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay. It's apparently very hot outside but we're in here getting all the exciting scoop. I'm Lisa Martin with my esteemed co-host John Furrier. Hey, John. >> Great to see you, welcome back to the set. >> Thank you so much. John and I are pleased to be joined by a Fortinet customer, Ken Busby, Keith Busby, excuse me, the executive director of information technology and security at the school district of Philadelphia. Keith, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So, the school district of Philadelphia, eight largest public school district in the United States. You've got over 134,000 students. >> Yes. >> Over 18,000 staff. If only your IT budget was enormous, right? >> Yes. (laughing) >> So you guys, something also interesting, this morning Malala Yousafzai was speaking with Sanjay Poonen. Very intriguing, on the whole spirit of education, let's talk about that. You guys gave Chromebooks to over maybe half the students, about 50, 60 thousand? >> Well it's not one to one, so they're shared resources, they have carts throughout the school. We have between 50 or 60 thousand Chromebooks on our network right now. >> So I imagine great for the students and the education, the firewall security maybe a bit challenged? >> As we started transitioning to the Chromebooks, it overwhelmed our legacy internet firewalls so we had to go out and do proof of concepts and test multiple vendors. >> Talk about the security, we had Pat Gelsinger sit in theCUBE, I think four years ago, Dave Vellante, co-host, asked him, "Is security a do over?" And he's like, "Yes, it's a do over, "we need to do a do over." I said mulligan, used all kinds of terms, resetting. How have you guys set up your security architecture because I've heard stories of fishing attacks just to get the bandwidth to do Bitcoin mining, to crazy things on the security front. How are you guys laying out your network security? >> Honestly, it changes on a day to day basis, right? Because as new vulnerabilities come out, you always have to adjust your posture. Over the last year and a half we redesigned to wear we're not, we were routing through web proxies, we're required to do web filtering for the students by the CIPA, Children's Internet Protection Act. When we replaced our legacy firewalls, we were able to transition everything over to that and just use the Fortinet firewall to do web filtering, intrusion prevention, anti-virus and traditional firewalling. >> How virtualized are you guys? >> Pretty much completely virtual. We still have a few legacy physical servers but pretty much all. >> One of the things that came up in keynote, today was Sanjay Poonen but yesterday Pat Gelsinger, referred it to, was the bridging of the ways, connecting computers together but he mentioned BYOD, bring your own device as one of the ways and that was really the iPhone kind of generation. Obviously kids got Instagrams and they're on all kind of devices these days, how is that impacting your IT? Is it up and running, is it solid? What are some of the details? >> We don't have a traditional BYOD policy. It's more teachers get devices and they bring them in and we just have to find ways to support it so it stretches us, we're a small staff so we can't always help the end user with their devices so if they bring their own device, we have issues, they're trying to use applications that we can't support for whatever reason so it's an issue. >> Obviously all the devices that come in to the school in addition to the 60,000 Chromebooks, needing to rethink your security architecture, what were some of the technical requirements that you were looking for that made Fortinet the obvious choice? >> Performance and cost, right? As we spoke about, we have budget constraints. They have an extremely high performing firewall at a reasonable price. After we did proof of concept with five different vendors, and theirs just out performed them all. >> How about automation? A big talk in cloud is automation. How are you guys handling automation? Are you micro segmenting? >> We're transitioning to the NSX and Fortinet VMX for our server firewall. That's going to allow us, since we're short staff, if our server team stands up a new server my policies automatically take effect, just through the use of their security tags. >> That's the Fortigate product, right? The VMX? >> Yes. >> How is that working for you guys? >> We just did the proof of concept, we haven't transitioned our live systems over to it. But so far all our tests have shown that it does what we expect it to do. >> What's it like working in such a huge school district? I mean it's basically like, it's probably like a case study in campus wide networking. (laughing) >> We look at it as we're an ISP, right? Every school comes through us. We always say that we're protecting the internet from our students. We have smart kids and they-- >> They're digitally native. >> Yeah. They find ways to do things and then next thing you know I'm getting a report by a website saying, "Hey, we got students coming and throwing attacks at us." >> I was talking to a guy in higher ed about the bandwidth, they have huge bandwidth so obviously people game, including gaming centers, have all kinds of IP management issues. Fortnite's pretty hot, I'm sure how many people are playing Fortnite on your-- >> Luckily we don't allow that, right? (laughing) >> But this is what kids want to do. They're like born hackers. >> It is. >> They're curious. >> Yes. >> And it's good thing but you also want to basically make sure they're safe. >> Yes, that's pretty much what my job is. I want them to learn but at the same time, don't use it for malicious purposes. >> Yeah, its' true. One of the things I liked about public sector is cloud really makes things more efficient. >> It does. >> What are some of the things that you've seen with virtualization and with cloud kind of on the horizon, how has tech helped you guys be efficient and be lean and mean, kind of the 10X IT kind of guy thing? >> Like you said, lean and mean, right? We have a very small staff. The school district's budget is 3.2 billion dollars and IT's operating budget is 20.8 million dollars so as you can see, we really have to be cost effective and that's where virtualization comes into play. >> What's some cool tech that you like on the horizon? We hear a lot about SDWAN, sure that might be something that's cool for you guys? >> I like the VPCs, right? AWS, virtual private clouds, where you can set up your own network out there in Amazon's world, attach it to your vSphere so you can have on premise virtualization and out in the cloud, I think that. >> One of things that Pat Gelsinger talked about yesterday we hear this a lot John, is tech for good. I liked how he described it as it's essentially neutral, it's up to us, VMware, everybody else, to shape it for good. I imagine that's challenging? We talked about the Fortnite explosion, which I have only heard of but you've got so many devices, I imagine there's some amount of security gaps that are probably acceptable. In terms of reducing the maliciousness of some of the things that happen in there, tell us about some of the things that you're achieving there, leveraging such things as the automation, how is that helping you guys to enable the Chromebooks and the BYOD for good? >> Well the automation frees up our time so that we can focus on the policies, the education, the different procedures for the district. This way we're not spending time hitting the keyboard, trying to review our traffic logs. >> You had a session yesterday which you were talking, a breakout session, and you were saying that there were some folks that were so interested in what you we had to say, you had limited time in your session. Give a little bit of an idea of some of the feedback or maybe even people that might be in your similar situation that want to learn from, hey, how did you guys tackle this huge problem? >> They were from a school district in Nebraska and they wanted to see how we were handling and they just became a Fortinet customer and they wanted to see what trials and tribulations we had implementing their equipment, any lessons learned and kind of, we just had a conversation about where we see our programs going. It was nice. >> What about compliance? One of the things that's come up is managing the laws of the land. >> Luckily, I don't have much compliance, right? So we're not PCI, CIPA's pretty much, and FERPA but the only reports that we really have to provide are for CIPA, we'll have to prove that we're doing web filtering. That's where the Fortinet analyzer comes into play. I'm able to just schedule the reports through there. Shows that I'm blocking based on categorization, and we're good. >> What's the biggest thing you've learned over the past couple years in tech and IT to be effective and to do your job, what's the learnings? (laughing) >> It's going to sound weird coming from a security guy but I think it's important to take the risk, right? Accept the risk. Most organizations won't try a piece of equipment live, right? I was the exact opposite, I put every firewall that we were going to try live and pushed our entire network through it. I mean, if it breaks some things, we figured it out but I think that's the only way to get a true test of whether or not it's going to fit your needs. >> One of the things that came up yesterday, I interviewed Andy Bechtolsheim, you know, legend, been called the Rembrandt of chips, Pat Gelsinger called him that down to Arista and other companies. He talked about how NSX has the security wrapped around the application, more around NSX, that's freed up his security teams from handling a lot of the network security which kind of like has been intertwined in the past. Are you seeing that same picture emerge? >> That's why I'm transitioning to that, to get out of the traditional IP base firewall rules. It's not really what it was designed for, it was more for a transport layer. So switching over to the NSX and the BMX, now we're basing it on the application, what it's purpose is. >> What's the impact to you guys? What's that mean for your operations and your benefits for staff, what's the impact? >> It frees us up. During the winter months when we're going to have a snow storm, our server team might have to deploy some more web servers to handle the traffic that's going to come in. Before they would have to reach out to my team, to get us to modify a policy because they have new device coming online, well now they just tag it as a web server and it's automatically in the roles. >> You know I love talking about this topic. I have four kids, two of them are still in high school, two are in college, so it's so funny how they all hacked their report cards because the sandbox was out there for testing the new curriculum so they all get it and they all share it and the school sends out a note, "Well, that's not actually officially updated yet." So the kids are smart, like you said, they're going to get what a sandbox is. They don't know why it's there, they know how to get to it, so you got student elections, all kinds of things that go on in the academic world that have been digitized that are vulnerable, you have to handle that. How do you stay on top, does Fortinet help you there? Or what's the main way to keep the secure access? >> I mean that's why we're going with the VMX, NSX, the micro segmentation, it really takes the effort off of us and allows the appliances to do what they're intended to do. >> That's awesome, well it's a great case study. Any advice for practitioners out there who are in your seat in their world who might be looking at, okay I got to reset, I got to start rethinking things, I got to do more with less, I got to be lean and mean? It's kind of command and control but you got to manage it, you got a lot going on, it's the battlefield of IT is changing. >> Yes. >> So what's your advice? >> Take the risk. (laughing) Try it out. I just recently hired another engineer and on his first day I pretty much told him, "Go ahead and break something, it's alright, "we'll figure it out, we'll fix it." He has his own little lab and I'm like, "Just go mess around and figure it out." >> Play, do some R and D. >> Yeah. >> Kick the tires, yeah, it's the best way to do it. Keith, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. It's theCUBE live here in Las Vegas, stick with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Washington D.C. It's the CUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you be Amazon Web Services and it's partner Ecosystem. >> Welcome back here on the CUBE as we continue our coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls we're in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. For the sixth show, of almost 10,000 attending. somewhere in that ball park. It's come along way in a very short period of time. AWS has a lot to feel good about. >> It's a good reinvent for Public Sector. It's huge. >> And not just to think about government. We think about education as well. We had a couple of segments about that. We are going to talk about government with our next guest. If we get a name wrong on this segment shame on us, John Stephenson with John Walls and John Furrier. John's a senior manage at Public Policy at AWS. John nice to have you with us we appreciate that. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you for your time. So your focus primarily state and local governments. What exactly as the conduit do you want to bring to their table from of AWS? >> Well I'm Senior Manager, of Public Policy for Amazon Web Services in the Eastern United States. I handle state and local government relations in the Eastern U.S. from Texas to Main and then South Florida. I help our business and also our partners in government to understand how public policy can enable cloud and modern technologies. It's a very exciting place to be because there's a lot going on in state and local government when it comes to IT modernization and cloud right now. >> I think about government too. There's that big umbrella we can put on (mumbles). It's public service. But federal government has a place and state and local. I think much more responsive, much more grass roots. So those applications are much more immediate. I would think. Does that come into play with you? That you need to be a little more nimble. Or you're helping your clients to be a litter more nimble or more agile? >> Absolutely, if you look at what state and local governments are doing. Essential services from delivering health care to taking out the trash, providing public safety, providing education it's handled at the state and local government. If you look at the number of times you touch government. It is state and local. Think about renewing a driver license. Think about paying a parking ticket. Think about getting a zoning permit for remodeling of your house. You're dealing with state and local government. The demands on state and local government are also higher. They're holding more data on citizens than the Federal government. They are undergoing massive population changes. It's either positive or negative. State and local governments which have budget constraints. Need to be more nimble, more innovative. They are natural early adopters and first movers of technology. If you look at some of the more exciting things about technology that are happening in the government space. I think it's happening at state and local government in the U.S. >> Smart cities by the way is the hottest trend. Intel one of the key sponsors of this show. We had two folks on here. AI is going to be a real nice gateway for some of these innovations on their side. They have 5G opportunities. They have transformation. Lot of technology going on under the covers, under the hood if you will. One of them is smart cities and that is something that is just mind blowing. Just from a technology stand point but even more mind blowing from a policy perspective. Who sets the rules? What side does the car run on? What digital services are the citizens going to get? Who pays for them? What does the government do? What does the private sector do? These are issues that need to be grappled with. Your thoughts on how you guys look at that? And how are your constituents engaging with that and thinking about it? >> I'm glad you mentioned smart cities because there's a lot of activity going on in that space. If you look at the internet of things technologies alone. One of the enablers of smart cities. As many as 53% of state and local government according to NASCIO are looking at these technologies or deploying them. It's great to see that because that will enable a lot of potential from smarter government services, better government services, improving service delivery and improving constituent fulfillment. Which resonates with us, as part of Amazon. We're all about our customer fulfillment and delighting our customer. >> Lower prices and ship things faster that's Bezos' ethos. That's Amazon's culture. >> Exactly. >> And you could deliver services any digital service. >> Everything we do starts with the customer and we work backwards. In the conversations I've had with policy makers in the state and local governments. They see smart cities as a way to do that. Everything from improving transportation in places like Columbus, Ohio. To improving connectivity and engagement with the internet in places Kansas City, Missouri. And new ways of delivering services in places like New York and Los Angeles. It's very exciting stuff. Policy makers are coming to us and others in the industry. What are the policies? What are the best practices that can enable these technologies? We've been working with them. Providing information on what we're seeing around the world. How open data can be made (mumbles). How security and compliance can be built into applications. And we're happy to provide that because we know from working in the cloud ourselves. The potential that's there for state and local government. >> You want to foster innovation but at the same time you don't want to create this restrictive environment. Or have legacy be the baggage that holds things back. In fact you look at some of the best smart cities implementation. It's Singapore. It's Dubai. It's areas all over the world. In some cases it didn't have real strong infrastructure. So now come back to your role. As you look at the U.S. which has great infrastructure. Except for broadband connectivity, we'd be faster. They have some pre-existing conditions. They're under pressure. The cloud is a prefect vehicle for them. Because they can come in with their existing stuff. Get apps and services online quicker. How are you dealing with the challenge of? OK, calm down we're not going to take over the world. No, skynet's not coming. You know terminator reference. That's a concern, privacy. Lot of in policy issues, to be dealt with. How do you handle those? >> I think with any policy issue. I've been in public policy for a while now. It really starts with education. Understanding in really simple layman's terms. What the cloud is. And what it is not. It is a very transformative technology. It is not an end all one size fits all technology. What we've done is help educate policy makers by understanding the potential of cloud. What it can do in terms of cost savings, improved security, and being more agile. And to tell that story, we don't use PowerPoints at Amazon. We're not coming in and giving PowerPoint presentations. >> Good ole flesh pounding, hand shakes, and hit the streets. >> We'll more importantly it's sharing the customer's stories We're talking with them about what's happening at the New York City Department of Transportation. We're talking with them about what's happening at the city of Los Angeles with their emergency operation center. About how cities are using cloud technologies to deliver far superior products and services faster. >> So what is New York doing and what is L.A. doing specifically? >> New York city they have their iRide application to help citizens get from one point to the other much more quickly and safely as part of their Vision Zero campaign. Anyone who's been in New York, and I've been in New York quite a few times. Knows that traffic and be a real pain getting from part of Manhattan to the other. So what iRide does, is it helps people navigate Manhattan and the other boroughs much more quickly and efficiently using all the modes of transportation available to them. The city of New York was able to deploy that much more quickly, to many more people. They're able to update it, keep it secure thanks to cloud technology offered by AWS. The city of Los Angeles. They face cyber attacks everyday. Then there are the huge cost of maintaining that security. But with cloud they're able to build out event management systems and integrate those with their Homeland Security technologies and practices. And to be able to do it for a fraction of the cost using traditional systems, traditional IT, and traditional practices. It's very exciting. Suddenly local government can move at the speed and agility of a startup. Which has made Amazon very innovative. Last year we launched over a thousand new services and features. Local governments are seeing that. They want to be more like us and others in the industry. That are using cloud to deliver new products and services. And be better at their job. >> And the education, I say it probably patience in the educational role. You think about just the civil liberties of the citizens. That's really job one. Because I think most people get spooked. Whoa all this surveillance. The thing about it, just watching Patriots Day with my family. You know the Boston bombing, Boston strong with Mark Wahlberg. These things actually happen all the time. And we take for granted the some of the things we have in the surveillance community for the kinds of data that's out there. The same time that's the balance. Can you bring me value with my liberties. It's the same compliance scheme. Same governance game. This is the public sector. >> Well, that's where I think cloud has a great story to tell With cloud you get the benefits of economies of scale. Of Amazon with security and also with privacy. We have multiple compliance frameworks. Everything from HIPPA, FERPA, CJIS, Criminal Justice Information Systems. We are zealous guardians of security and our customer's privacy. We don't look at data. We don't share data about with out our customer's permission. We have very strong safeguards. That's why if you look a the customer base of Amazon from banks to government agencies, health care companies. Even companies like Netflix and you would think they're a competitor of ours. They're running their IT in AWS. They trust us even though with Amazon video and Amazon prime. You would think they're a competitor. But they've put that level of trust in us and our systems and our practices that they can put their data there. And we're hearing it from customer after customer. That they feel more safer and more secure with their data in the cloud offered by AWS. And we've shared that with government officials. And they take great comfort in those statements. >> You hit on something earlier. When you said that state governments and local governments have more data at their disposal than the federal government has about their consumers. Because of that, how much higher do find their concerns to be, in terms of cyber security, in terms of hack proof secured networks and systems as opposed to what might happen at the federal level. Cause we think federal. We think big. About what happened with the U.S. government's payment systems last year OPM. State and local they've got a lot more data they're protecting >> I've had a great opportunity in my current job to talk with a lot of IT officials and policy makers in the state. And, often times a meeting will start. And they'll say I've read about this. I've heard about this. And we're often able to say that's not an issue with the cloud offered the AWS. Or that's something we've already addressed through our security and compliance frame works. For example, I was in one meeting and a state policy maker asked me, well what do you do about HIPPA compliance. We have HIPPA compliance in AWS. And then he tried to ask questions, well what about this, what about that. And each time our team was able to tell the state policy maker. We meet that. We exceed that. We actually help write the standard for that compliance frame work. What we've been able to show that policy maker and others. The cloud just offers a far superior security posture than what they can do on their own. It's taken some time because the cloud is new. And as we like to say, it's still day one in this field. But we are very confident as word gets out. More and more people will be trusting particularly in state government their data to the cloud. Because of the superiority it offers on so many different levels. >> Well certainly the words getting out. This event here is just as big as it's ever been (mumbles). Use to be a little summit, now it's grown. There's a lot of interest. >> It's very exciting for me. I've been to reinvent now twice. And this is just so delightful to see so many people from government from the U.S. from internationally here to learn about the cloud share their stories. It's really inspirational to see what's possible. >> That's a testament to Teresa Carlson. Who was just years ago knocking on doors. That was before cloud was cloud. Now it's just come a long way. Congratulations to the whole team. >> Thank you. It's really to delightful to see. And I can't wait to see what's in store for next year and after that. >> We still got a little bit here to go John Don't kick us out. John Stephenson, Public Policy at AWS. Thanks for being with us we appreciate that. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. With John Furrier, I'm John Walls and we'll be back with more here on the CUBE from Washington D.C. right after this. (upbeat music)