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STEPHANIE WONG: Hi, everyone.
And welcome to today's next panel discussion.
My name is Stephanie Wong, Google Cloud Developer
Advocate.
And today, I am joined by Chris Stewart, Vice President
of Business Development at Exabeam,
and John Murphy, Global Field Chief Security Officer
at Rubrik.
Today we have an amazing panel for you
all on how Google Cloud's infrastructure and security
partner ecosystem helps customers,
where we are going to be talking about security
and digital transformation trends,
and how these might directly impact your business.
So Chris and John, thank you so much for being here today.
Why don't we have you both start with a quick introduction
about you and Exabeam and Rubrik.
And Chris, we'll start with you.
CHRIS STEWART: Well, thanks for having us, Steph.
Really appreciate it, and looking forward
to the discussion with John and yourself today.
So as you mentioned, I'm Chris Stewart
I head up Global Business Development for Exabeam.
I've been with the company about six years.
So I've seen quite a bit over the last six years.
Basically, Exabeam, for a quick overview,
we are a leader in the security and information event
management segment of security.
Effectively, we take data sources, lots of data sources,
at scale and help our customers make really, really
strong, educated decisions on their security posture
and what's at risk and what's not
by baselining what's normal.
And therefore, we can understand what's abnormal.
And a lot of what we have uncovered
over the last many years is around
things like compromised credentials
and the low and slow attacks.
So I'm really looking forward to this discussion
today with yourself on Google Cloud and also with our friends
at Rubrik.
STEPHANIE WONG: Amazing, thank you.
And how about you, John, and Rubrik?
JOHN MURPHY: Yeah, thanks again for the opportunity to be here.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation,
as Chris said.
As you mentioned, I'm the Chief Security Officer for Rubrik.
Rubrik is a data protection company on the journey
to make sure that, at any point in time,
our client's data is protected from all the cyber threats
that we see out there today, including
ransomware, and extortion, and a whole bunch of other issues.
And we start by basically making sure
that the data is protected, and that it
can't be accessed by anybody.
And then we move on to providing you
intelligence into what we're seeing
with that data for things like sensitive data discovery.
What kind of data do I really have?
Do I have insight into what my exposure might
be if this data were to be, let's say, exposed,
infiltrated, et cetera.
And then we focus on helping you to recover those applications
as quickly as you can.
We provide a lot of value in terms
of helping customers understand what
risks they're acknowledging and what risks they may not
be acknowledging in terms of how they're managing the data
and ensuring that they have a solid base for understanding
what risks they're facing.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yes, and security
has been a top of mind subject lately.
And we've seen a huge adoption of Cloud Services
in the past couple of years, especially with COVID.
So what kind of trends around digital transformation
are you seeing?
And what blockers are customers still facing today?
Chris, we'll start with you.
CHRIS STEWART: Good question, and it's a tough question.
And certainly, digital transformation
sounds great until you try to implement.
And there's certainly not a one size fits all solution
to every company.
So you mentioned COVID.
We saw a dramatic acceleration of enterprises
looking to leverage Cloud Services
with the onset of COVID.
The world changed, and so did people's appetites
for basically leveraging other people's infrastructure, i.e.
CSPs, to get their business where they needed to get to.
And it's been an interesting--
I think that people were on the journey anyways,
whether they're at the very beginning or fully
Cloud native, like Exabeam is.
But it's definitely something that
is top of mind for all CIOs that we talk to
around digital transformation, leveraging the Cloud for all
the good reasons, that the Cloud can scale, speed, et cetera,
reach.
But we've seen some definite comfort levels.
Regionally, there's some very interesting parts
of the world that are still struggling with understanding
or being accepting of Cloud native services and such--
but also certain verticals, different appetites,
as far as how deep they want to go with Cloud adoption.
So it's, again, not a one size fits all.
But to reinforce the point, everyone is on the journey.
We haven't talked to an enterprise
in the world who's not.
It's just where they are in the journey and what comfort levels
they have about accelerating their journey to leverage
the power and scale of Cloud services.
STEPHANIE WONG: And John, what are you seeing out there?
JOHN MURPHY: Yeah, yeah, very similar.
I think COVID was the accelerant, if you will,
for Cloud, for a lot of organizations.
When I was in industry working for some large banks,
I think we were basically taking a very slow approach
to Cloud adoption until probably two or three years ago.
And then we got very, very serious
about what services we could offer to the Cloud,
how we could leverage Cloud in terms of just overcoming
some of our own inability, our own inertia,
in terms of providing on-demand, compute,
and those kinds of things.
I think the challenge for a lot of organizations,
though, is COVID forced our hand.
And so you were made to essentially look
at what you could and what you couldn't
do via Cloud because you had to be much more nimble than you
would have been pre-COVID, let's say.
So I think the challenge that I see with digitalization overall
is just still finding our way and still trying
to determine what it is that we want to run in Cloud, what
services we want to consume, and how we want to consume them,
and ultimately making sure that we're doing so in a secure way.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yeah, and I think
that's a great segue into talking about security
because many might think that the surface area may increase.
And so with regards to security, it's top of mind.
So is security a blocker for customers?
And is there a skills gap when figuring out
how to manage security in the Cloud?
John?
JOHN MURPHY: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Stephanie.
I think one of the challenges that we have, first of all,
if you're an enterprise today and you're
looking to do business with anybody, Cloud provider
or service provider or vendor, is there is a lot of overhead
now with making sure that we understand
what risks are in those environments
that we're going to go to.
And so from that perspective, I don't
think security is a blocker.
But I do think it's a necessary skills review process that we
have to go through to make sure that not only do we understand
what tooling and technology is available from the Cloud
providers, but also do we know how to use them,
how to make sense of them all?
It's a big transition when you go from managing your own data
network, and you're on-prem, and you understand the network
constraints that you're dealing with,
to suddenly opening things up a little bit
and allowing applications to be developed in that Cloud
environment.
There's a great opportunity there for innovation.
There's no doubt about it.
I think organizations, though, are looking
at that from a security perspective, and rightly so,
assuming things like, what if I was breached?
What is there in terms of an exposure for me?
And how do I build those processes
into my build process overall, so that the SDLC for Cloud
doesn't introduce more risk than, let's
say, the development lifecycle for internally-developed
applications.
There's without a doubt a skills gap in terms of those toolings.
But I think those things will go by the wayside pretty quickly.
I think really what it comes down
to is organizations making conscious decisions about what
goes to Cloud and in what priority.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yeah, yeah, and what
about from your perspective, Chris?
CHRIS STEWART: Not too dissimilar.
We do see security as obviously a heavy-duty stakeholder
when organizations are looking to accelerate their Cloud
journey.
John talked about the applications.
Ultimately, businesses need to understand--
do their business.
And they feel they can do so better in the Cloud.
But then they need to also do a bit of a gut check on,
is this secure?
And we get those questions a lot-- not just to us.
Our customers are asking these questions about every Cloud
service, whether it be Compute or actual Cloud native
services-- so not so much a blocker,
but very much an interested party,
let's say, as far as leveraging Cloud and Cloud service
providers.
So there's also, with that, the fact
that organizations, as I mentioned
in my previous answer, are on a journey.
And some of them do have hybrid work environments
where they do have applications living
inside their own virtual four walls
and looking to move some of the services,
some of the applications leveraging the Cloud.
So with that comes, obviously, some things like a skills gap.
There's a huge skills gap right now in the current way
that enterprises are running security--
L1, L2, L3, CSOs, et cetera.
We know that it's well-documented.
You can't open up a security blog without understanding
the skills gap.
But also, the new aperture of security
risk that is either real or perceived via the Cloud, that's
something we need to get a better handle on and educate
people who are making these decisions.
In a lot of cases, people who do have the final say
are not security experts.
They're business executives who are helping
trying to drive that digital transformation that we
talked about at the start.
And they need to do so knowing that they understand the risk.
And I think the great thing is that there's
a lot of answers around the power
and security of the Cloud.
It's just that we need to do a better
job as an industry explaining that, and making
the key stakeholders in an enterprise
comfortable with that, and also on-boarding people
with those skills who do understand
how to work within containers and those types of environments
where Cloud native services are critical to help
drive and propagate an enterprise
and their core business.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yeah, I agree.
I think with a potential skills gap,
there might be some challenges presented.
But I also do think that, with the Cloud,
there's many opportunities presented, too.
And so I'm wondering, how are Exabeam, Rubrik, and Google
Cloud really well-poised to address some
of these challenges with maintaining security
in these more complex or containerized environments?
Chris?
CHRIS STEWART: Yeah, so that's also
another good and challenging question.
I think what customers are really
wrestling with at the core foundation, where we come in,
is around data and data management
and making sense and leveraging their data
for good versus the evil that hackers would love to exploit.
So if we look back to just the growth of data over, let's say,
the last decade, it's hard to wrap your head
around the amount of data that organizations, enterprises, are
working with every day.
As I mentioned, we are in the business
of helping bring in all these disparate data sources
and trying to make sense of it so that humans
don't have to make really hard and un-scaleable decisions.
We want machine learning to help in that process.
So when we decided to make the pivot to a fully Cloud native
organization, we did do a good survey of the field,
of all the different CSPs and others
that could really help us drive our own digital and Cloud
transformation.
So by partnering with Google, we saw a great alignment
of where we are as a security organization,
but also the core Cloud native services inside, say,
BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Run, the data and analytics stack.
We saw an amazing partner that aligned incredibly well
with both our analytics-driven approach,
but also the scale and need of customers
around managing these vast amounts of data coming
from all different shapes and sizes,
to really help thwart the modern attack of today
and also going forward.
So we looked at Google as a great partner--
and you've been a great partner--
to help us power our security operations center customers
to really lock down their environment
so they can get back to the business
of really powering their business.
They shouldn't be necessarily concerned about security.
That's our job.
But they really can confidently go to the Cloud,
knowing that we're working with world-class technology is
incredibly future-proofed.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yeah, are you experiencing something similar
from Rubik's perspective, John?
JOHN MURPHY: Yeah, we certainly are.
There's so much goodness in Chris's answer there.
But I think the key thing that we
see is just the volume of data that's being created globally
by organizations now.
It's just-- to Chris's point, it's
very difficult to comprehend.
If you think about 2018 or so, I think
we were doubling the amount of data globally every four years.
That's now down to every two years.
And not all data is created equal.
So I think part of the challenge that organizations
have as they look to Cloud, and certainly, this
is the challenge that we have as an organization,
is how do we scale?
How do we get into the business of doing the thing
that Rubrik does best, and leverage the things
that Google Cloud provides best?
And that really comes down to making sense of the data,
giving us the ability to scale, and to make sense
of a billion events coming into a SOC
on a daily basis is absolutely the right way
to start to think about new models-- not
human-based models, but AI and ML models
that would allow you to understand
what that data really is, and how much of it
really is important to me from a business perspective,
as opposed to how much of it is just
noise on the baseline, and sort of separating those things out
to really power businesses to be able to protect themselves
and to keep their business going, obviously.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yeah, wow, a billion plus events
for some security teams, it might
be hard to grapple with the first step
that they might want to take in this journey towards security
in the Cloud.
So what can customers do to take full advantage of the Cloud
ecosystem in order to simplify their Cloud operations
and keep costs low?
John?
JOHN MURPHY: Yeah, I think it comes down to--
one of the challenges that all organizations face, depending
upon just how large they are or how long they've
been in business, is we tend to accrete applications
as we go, meaning that we have an application that
provides some business service.
Maybe it's critical.
Maybe it's not.
And because we run it in our data center,
we keep that going for an extended period of time.
And over time, the number of those applications
increases greatly.
And I think part of the challenge
that every organization has is to understand,
what should be in my priority applications?
In other words, what am I known for?
What services do I provide that really
are critical to the market and that the market pays
the premium for?
And so by prioritizing those applications,
it gives you the ability now to make some rational decisions
around what goes to Cloud and what perhaps either stays
in your data center or becomes serviced by a SAAS application
of some kind, that provides that same capability at a lower cost
and without the overhead that you're currently
accruing for it.
So I think part of this is really
coming down to understanding what
those key applications are.
And if, for simplicity's sake, you had 10,
you know that number one is probably the greatest
contributor to revenue, also the greatest
contributor to identity with your Marketplace.
And those are the applications that you'd
want to invest in from a Cloud perspective because
of the ability to scale very quickly
and take advantage of those things
that happen when you have the ability to software-define
a network very, very quickly, and then get infrastructure up
and running so that you can provide greater services
to meet excess demand, or scale down when demand isn't there.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yeah, great, and what advice do you have, Chris?
CHRIS STEWART: I think the evolution
I've seen in security over the last two plus decades
is that now security is a boardroom
discussion, hard stop.
Back in the day, it was not.
Now we have a seat at the table with the C-suite and the board,
which is great.
So part of that is consolidating spend.
And we see things like CSP Marketplaces,
like Google Cloud marketplace, as being something,
where not only can an enterprise leverage
the Cloud from a Storage, Compute or Cloud
native services.
But also, they can go and acquire
the various technologies they want.
So this is a great avenue for enterprises to consider,
is I'm going to go to the Cloud.
I'm going to select my primary and secondary Cloud.
But also, how can I add to the value
that I'm getting from a CSP through things
like a Marketplace?
So it's just a smarter way of handling the limited budgets
that enterprises have by effectively gluing
their spend together, both from a compute storage,
but also from an application acquisition or technology
acquisition perspective.
It's going to really empower enterprises
to stretch their dollars, their euros, their yen, much,
much further than they currently do today.
So we're seeing that a lot.
And we're seeing it really pick up
as a great way for enterprises to really consolidate
their buying power and get more out of it so they
can get to the Cloud faster.
STEPHANIE WONG: Well, I think those
are great words to end on.
And I encourage everyone watching
to go ahead and check out the Exabeam and Rubrik Solutions
on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
And I just want to give a huge thank you
to Chris and John for joining us today on this panel.
Thank you.
CHRIS STEWART: Thank you, Stephanie.
JOHN MURPHY: Thank you.
CHRIS STEWART: Good to have a chat.
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