(upbeat electronic music)
(logo sparkles)
>> Welcome back, everyone, to CUBE's live coverage
of AWS re:Inforce 22.
I'm John Furrier, my host Dave Vellante.
We got a great guest from Cisco, Eric Kostlan,
technical marketing engineer, Cisco Systems.
Great to have you on.
Thanks for coming on.
>> Hi, thanks for having me. >> Hey, Eric.
>> Of course, we've doing a lot of Cisco Lives,
Cisco events, Barcelona, U.S.,
know a lot of folks over there.
A lot of great momentum, supply chain challenges,
but you got the cloud with a lot of networking there, too.
A lot of security conversations, DevSecOps,
(laughs) the trend we're hearing here is operations,
security and operations.
What are some of the business realities
that you guys are looking at right now, focused on,
from a Cisco perspective and a landscape perspective?
>> Well, the transition to the cloud is accelerating.
And it's really changed the way we're doing business
and what we do.
This, combined with the more and more remote work
by remote users, and also the consumption
of cloud-based tools to perform your business functions,
has dramatically changed the contour
of the business environment.
The traditional trust boundary has evaporated
or at least transformed dramatically.
But you still have those requirements
for trust, for micro-segmentation.
So what we've seen is a dramatic change
in how we do business and what we do.
And this is essential
because the value proposition is enormous
and companies are able to pursue
more and more ambitious objectives.
But from a security point of view,
it's quite challenging, because on one hand,
what we call the attack surface has increased.
And the stakes are much higher.
So you have more sophisticated malicious actors
taking advantage of a broader security target.
In order to conduct your business,
in order to maintain business continuity
and achieve your objectives,
you need to protect this environment.
And one of the--
>> Sorry, just to clarify.
>> Sure.
>> You said the value proposition is enormous.
You mean the value proposition of the cloud is enormous.
>> Exactly.
>> So the business is leaning in big time,
and there are security consequences to that.
>> Precisely.
And one thing that we've seen happen
in the industry is, as these components
of the business environment have changed,
the industry has sort of bolted on more and more
security solutions.
But the problem with that
is that's led to enormous complexity
in administering security for the company,
which is very expensive,
to find people with those expertise.
And also, the complexity itself is a vulnerability.
>> And that traditional trust boundary that you talked about,
it hasn't been vaporized, has it?
It's still there, so are you connecting into that?
Is there an interoperability challenge?
Does that create more security issues?
Or are people kind of redoing?
We talk about security as a do-over.
How are customers approaching it?
>> It is a challenge because,
although the concept of a trust boundary still exists,
the nature of the hybrid multi-cloud environment
makes it very difficult to define.
Furthermore, the traditional solutions,
such as simply having a firewall and an on-premise network,
is now much more complex
because the on-premise network has to connect
to the cloud infrastructure.
And parts of the cloud infrastructure have to be exposed
to the public.
Other parts have to be protected.
So it's not that the concept
of trusted versus untrusted has gone away.
It's just become fundamentally more complex.
>> So Eric, I want to get your thoughts on this
higher level abstraction trend
because you're seeing the complexity being pushed
to the customers, and they want to buy cloud
or cloud operations from partners' platforms
that take the heavy lifting from there,
and best-of-breed products that handle the complexity.
What's your reaction to that statement?
Do you think that's happening or that will happen?
Because either the complexity is going to be solved
by the customer, or they're going to buy a platform
or SaaS product.
>> No.
It's unreasonable to expect the customers
to constantly adapt to this changing environment,
from the point of view of security.
They have to be able to focus on their business objectives,
which is to actually sell their products
and pursue their ambitions.
And it's a distraction that they really can't afford
if they have to be focused on security.
So the solutions have to take that challenge,
that distraction away from them.
And that has to be integral to the solutions.
>> So you're saying that the vendors,
the supplier has to deal with the underlying complexities
on behalf of the customer.
>> Exactly, the vendor can't do this
without a robust partnership with AWS,
with the cloud provider, working together
both at the engineering level,
to develop the products together, and in the implementation,
as well as standing side by side with the customer
as they expand their business into the cloud.
>> Dave, this is supercloud.
>> It's supercloud,
right, exactly. >> This is supercloud.
>> So give us the specifics. What are you doing?
What's Cisco doing?
How are you working with AWS?
What solutions are you talking about?
>> Well, Cisco has a wide variety,
quite an expansive portfolio,
because there's a large number of components
to the solution.
This spans both the workload protection
as well as the infrastructure protection.
And these are integrated.
And in partnership with AWS, not only integrated together
but integrated into the cloud infrastructure components.
And this is what allows comprehensive protection
across the hybrid cloud environment.
>> So we're talking about solutions
that are embedded into switches.
We're talking about software layers.
Maybe give, describe, add a little color,
paint a picture of the portfolio, if you could.
>> And it's really all of those things.
So most of the solutions, historically, you could say,
evolved from solutions that were utilized
in the physical infrastructure,
in the firewalls in the switches, in the routers.
And some of these technologies are still basically confined
to those form factors.
But some of the most important technologies we use,
such as Snort 3, which is a best-of-breed
intrusion protection system that we have adopted,
is applicable as well to the virtual environment
so that we push into the cloud in a way that's seamless,
so that if you've developed those policies
for your on-prem solutions,
you could extend them into the cloud effortlessly.
Another example of something that adapts quite well
to the cloud is security intelligence.
Cisco has Talos.
Talos is the world's leading
security intelligence operation.
This is fundamental for addressing emerging threats,
day-zero attacks.
And Talos updates are products,
approximately once every hour,
with information about these emerging attacks,
as well as informing the community as a whole of this.
And now, that architecture is very easily extensible
into the cloud because you can inform a virtual device
just as easily as you can inform a physical device
of an emergent threat.
>> But technically, how do you do that integration?
That's just through AWS primitives?
How does Cisco work with AWS
at an engineering level to make that happen?
>> So part of it is
that we have taken certain of our products
and we virtualize them.
So you could say the simplest
or more straightforward approach is to take our firewalls
and our other products
and simply make virtual machines out of them.
But that's really not sort of the most exciting thing.
The most exciting thing is working with them,
with integration, with their infrastructure and components,
and doing such things as having our management platforms,
like our Cisco Defense Orchestrator,
be able to discover the virtual environment
and utilize that discovery
to manipulate the security components of that environment.
>> Yeah, good, this is where, I think,
you're on to something big here.
Management is kind of like, "Oh yeah,
we have management software," kind of always a thing.
When you talk about large scale, multiple data point,
billions and billions of things happening a month,
Quantum, we heard that in the keynote.
We heard Kurt, who's VP of Platforms,
talking about reasoning.
This is kind of a whole nother level of technology,
next-level reasoning, knowing things.
I mean, you mentioned micro-segmentation.
So we're seeing a new era of not just policies,
reasoning around the networks, around the software,
stuff that needs to be better than just machine learning
and doing predictive, you know, analysis.
Can you share your reaction to that?
Because I see these dots connecting at a whole nother level.
>> Yes, now, as we understand artificial intelligence,
machine learning, I think we appreciate
that one of the key components there,
we think about it as data science, as data management.
But when you think about data, you suddenly recognize,
where's it coming from?
Data requires visibility.
And when we talk about the transition to the cloud
and the dispersion of the workforce,
visibility is one of the great challenges.
And visibility, even prior to these transitions,
has been one of the primary focuses of Cisco Systems.
So as we transition to the cloud and we recognize the need
to be able to interpret what we're seeing,
we have expanded our capacity to visualize what's happening.
And I think there's a significant contribution
to the (indistinct). >> Dave and I were talking
about this in context to our thesis about supercloud,
how that's going, evolving,
building on top of the hyperscalers,
CapEx investment, doing things.
Customer data control flows are a huge thing
going across multiple geographies.
It's global. You got regions.
You got networks, some trusted, some not.
And you have now applications that are global.
So you got data flows.
>> Yes.
>> I mean, data has got to move across multiple environments.
So that's a challenge.
>> And it has to move securely.
And furthermore, there's a real challenge here
with confidence, with confidence of the company,
that its data flow is secure in this new environment
that frankly can be a little bit uncomfortable.
And also, the customer and the partners of that business
have to be confident that their intellectual property,
that their security and identity is protected.
>> Yeah, Dave and I were talking also,
we're kind of old and seen the movie before.
Remember the old days of multi-vendor and OSI models
and, you know, interoperability?
We're kind of at a new inflection point
where teamwork, not just ecosystem partners,
companies working together to make sure things are secure.
This is a whole nother data problem opportunity.
Amazon sees things that other people don't see
and contribute that back.
How does this whole next-level multi-vendor partnerships,
the open source is a big part of the software piece of it,
you got custom silicon, you mentioned,
how do you view that whole team-oriented approach
in security?
>> Now, this is absolutely essential.
The community, the industry has to work together.
Fortunately, it's in the DNA of Cisco to interoperate.
I've sat next to competitors (John laughs)
at customer sites, working to solve the customer's problem.
It's just how we function.
So it's not just our partnerships,
but it's our relationship with industry
because industry has common purpose
in solving these problems.
We have to be confident in order to pursue
our objectives, our dreams.
>> Do you see this industry as a flashpoint right now?
Everyone has to partner.
>> Exactly. >> Okay.
>> How would you summarize it?
We're out of time, so give us your bumper sticker.
>> Think of it from the point of view of business leadership.
A business needs business continuity.
Its contributors have to be able to access resources
to perform their job.
And the customers and partners need confidence
to deal with that business.
You need these continuity.
You demand flexibility to adapt to the changing environment
and to take advantage of emerging opportunities.
And you expect security.
The security has to be resilient.
It has to be robust.
The security has to be simple to implement.
Cisco, in partnership with AWS,
provides the security you need to succeed.
>> Eric, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.
Really appreciate your insights and your experience
and candid commentary, and appreciate your time.
>> Thank you, thank you very much for the opportunity.
>> Okay, we're here live on the floor on the expo hall
at re:Inforce, AWS re:Inforce 22 in Boston, Massachusetts.
I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante.
We'll be right back with more coverage
after this short break.
(gentle electronic music)