>> Announcer: Live, from Washington D.C.
It's Cube Conversations, with John Furrier.
>> Hello there, welcome to the special Cube Conversation,
I'm John Furrier with the Cube here in Washington D.C.
at the headquarters of Amazon Web Services
Public Sector, here in Arlington, Virginia,
right around the corner from D.C.
Our next guest is Robert Groat, with
the Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronix,
a service provider in Cloud and an IT.
Thanks for joining us.
>> Thank you John.
>> So we're in D.C. and the Cube's getting
the lay of the land, so much innovation happening
around Cloud and disruption, you got one group going,
scratching their heads, wondering what's happening,
some groups saying what happened,
and you got people making it happen, right?
>> Exactly.
>> What's the big "ah-ha" moment
people might not know looking into D.C. now?
What is the real trend?
What are the people that are making it,
what are they doing?
Is it the Cloud, is it mobile, is it data-driven?
>> Yeah, I think it's all of those components,
but I think one of the things that you're really
seeing is that the Cloud is enabling these organizations,
these traditional organizations, to really transform
in the way that they deliver and consume IT services.
IT services have been a mess in this town for a long time,
the contracting process has been a mess,
some of the things that happened, some of
the smaller organizations have had a chance to be
really innovative and take a leadership role
in delivering services to the community and not just
the large beltway bandits that we've seen in the past.
So I think some of the "ah-ha" moments are probably
around, you know, we've been working,
Smartronix has been working with the public sector and Cloud
since 2009, so really one of the early pioneers,
and we used to run across all of these issues where
security was the blocker, and it would take a long time
to convince people that the security in the Cloud
really was what it needed to be.
Now we're seeing, in terms of an "ah-ha" moment,
we're seeing that security is the enabler,
we're seeing that these organizations are really embracing
the fact that you can do things in the Cloud from
the security perspective that you could never do before.
And I think that you've got this kind of next generation
of managed service provider that embraces those tenants
of how to manage services and manage security services
and it's really disrupting the way that
the Federal Government's done business in the past.
>> You know, we were at the Public Sector Summit last June,
and we were commeters, the first time
the Cube was at an event, which we had been to other
ones before that, but it was very clear to me
that we're in a no-excuses government at this point,
cause there's a lot of forcing functions.
You have one, connected social media, and everyone's like
hey, why can't I do that over there?
It's like the old iPhone moment on the enterprise.
Why can't I bring me iPhone to work?
You know, years ago, right?
>> Exactly.
>> Now you have security looking down the barrel,
and IOT happening, and you don't have a thing,
so you have Swiss cheese called malware,
attacking every hole, every corner of the network
potentially is compromised.
>> Exactly.
>> So security is forcing, and we're at cyberwar.
>> We are!
>> You can't deny that, so why isn't the Congress
emergency funding for more security, or is it happening?
>> Well, they need to be, but if you look at,
if you look at the way traditional data centers are built
and on-premise infrastructure is built,
you had a variety of contractors coming in,
each kind of doing their own thing,
you had this heterogeneous infrastructure that was
all built and kind of tangled together,
and there wasn't this great way of being able
to look at Cloud services or be able to look
at a Greenfield environment, and have everything
that's happening in that environment aware to you.
And that's really what the Cloud is enabling.
You're actually.
>> You mean program the whole infrastructure?
>> Programmable infrastructure, exactly.
You're actually, every single thing that happens
in a Cloud environment ends up being an API call.
Each one of those API calls ends up being logged,
and when you have every event that's
happening in your environment, you don't
have that in a traditional data center.
When you have every event that's happening
in that environment, and you can apply some of
these new primatives that AWS is providing
around machine learning and AI,
now you're using those to attack those vectors
that you're talking about, to protect
critical infrastructure, really in ways
that you couldn't do before, and you can actually,
with this programmable infrastructure,
you can actually really look at being able
to respond to events, and have autonomic response
and remediation of these events.
So when something happens, you've programmatically
defined how you're going to respond
to those events, and it's repeatable.
>> Yeah, one of the things I'll share with you,
I did an interview with, I think it was the CTO
or the CSO of Fortinet, which is a security vendor,
>> Mhmm.
>> And we were talking, and we were totally geeking out,
he was like the complexity of the Cloud
actually is an advantage in the security,
and I said what do you mean by that?
He goes, most of the hackers will focus
the main payload of their vector on one particular item,
and that's where all their energy, if they have to hunt
too far, they kind of give up.6
>> It's just like on the battlefield.
The surface area of attack matters,
and when you have such a wide, vast surface area of attack,
there's no way for them to.
>> So you agree with that?
>> 100% agree with that.
>> How is that, how do I turn that complexity,
obviously there's a main range of tools
to make the Cloud easier, but complexity
of scale, how do I turn that as an IT person
or a manager, or an executive, into a security advantage?
What do I do?
>> So the security advantage is that every time you
build a rule, every time you think about
compliance and maintaining compliance
for your organization, you're actually starting
to build knowledge and a new capability.
That can be applied programmatically now,
across your entire set of enclaves that you use
for managing infrastructure, so when we develop
one thing as a manage service provider,
to make sure we're meeting some kind of compliance mandate,
that now can be shared across all of
our clients in the space, and this can start
to really help create that protective ops infrastructure.
>> So you scale more observation space to get more data,
that gives you also an advantage.
>> It does, it does.
And then when you can actually take that data
and use it to train to understand where these
advance persistent threats are, you can then really
start to do things, that this was the province
of really large organizations, only in the past.
And now AWS has democratized that ability to use
these tools around artificial intelligence
and machine learning to improve security.
>> Robert, you can't go back five years without
hearing, are you kidding me, that Cloud is insecure.
Turns out, Cloud is becoming a better security
paradigm than building on site because of
human error or other force majors or any kind of other acts.
>> That's exactly right.
Anybody who's looking at it from a security perspective
and thinks that they can have the same kind of security
that, you know, a multi-billion dollar company
like AWS can provide, they're mistaken.
And the main thing around that is, they don't have
transparency to every event happening in
that environment, and that's what you get
when you start to utilize Cloud services.
>> Yeah, I think Verizon was the first company
that notified me that this might be the trend.
I think this was like a 2011 time-frame.
Don't discount a multi-tenant Cloud.
>> Exactly.
>> Like okay, and they realized and have been tracking that
like okay, so big trends in technology,
tailwinds and headwinds.
What trends are tailwinds for the growth,
and what are the headwinds, what's the blockers?
>> Well the tailwinds is the fact that I think
everybody's kind of not resigned to the fact,
but they're seeing the Cloud first as probably
a strategy that they should take.
And, you know, we've seen the government be laggards
in the past with adopting new technology,
I think what they're seeing now, especially in
the Department of Defense, and then some of
the Federal organizations that we're working with,
they're actually seeing that perhaps
their adversaries are having a competitive advantage
by moving into the Cloud, maybe they should look at
the competitive advantages that they should have
moving into the Cloud infrastructure.
Not just security, but the ability to be innovative
and agile and deliver services much faster
than they've ever been able to deliver them before.
>> Well we had a different approach and automated
actual code bases so that you can actually
deploy services and automatically code them up
with glue instantly, so it's interesting.
>> That is one of the fundamental things, that when you
start looking at infrastructure's code, and you look
at things that you can make repeatable in these
environments, then look at how many times
the government's probably built out
a particular enterprise software staff, whether it's
Share-A-Plan or
>> Authentication.
>> It all gets repeated, once that gets cauterized
and done right with the right subject-matter experts,
then you can start to create service catalogs
that these organizations can use and rapidly deploy
things in a repeatable and manageable fashion.
>> This is an open-source ethos.
>> It is.
>> We're on the shoulders of others, why replicate
something that's already a service,
throw it in a service catalog,
make it a micro-service, make it an API.
>> And that culture's finally transformed
in the Federal Government, that didn't
used to be the culture, right?
>> People must be like, finally!
>> It used to be, I have to have my arms wrapped around this,
I have to be able to understand everything that's happening,
and you would always hear some of these larger organizations
say, you know, I don't want to have vendor lock-in.
Even now sometimes, you'll see it a little bit.
I don't want go with, maybe AWS, because I'll have
vendor lock-in, yet for dozens of years,
they've been locked into proprietary databases
to commercial enterprise platforms, these behemoth
software things that AWS again has helped to democratize
by providing these primitives and allowing people
to build things backed on open-source.
>> You're speaking our language, we talk about
this all the time, the lock-in,
there's always a lock-in spec somewhere, if it's good,
the issue is proprietary software and switching costs.
>> Yes.
>> And choice, right?
So that the dimensions to evaluate for customers
that we've seen that's successful is,
okay, I don't mind lock-in if it's a damn good solution,
I'm going to lock that in.
>> Right.
>> But I have choice.
This is going to be interesting, right?
So the multi-cloud conversation that is going on
around the DOD is interesting, we've been reporting
and out in the field, we've been getting the data
coming in, saying hey, this DOD kind of overture
is interesting, because now if they take the same route
as the CIA, we're talking about massive infiltration
of Amazon Web Services across the government,
because that CIA's kicking ass and taking names with Amazon.
>> Mhmm.
>> Now you've got the DOD looking down potentially
a single-cloud option, other vendors are crying foul
calling, we need spec in policy, which is
a hijack model of putting in multi-cloud requirement.
What's your thoughts on that?
Should it be requirement or should we jump off?
>> Well, for one, when you have innovators in a space
and they take a lead in the space, you're going to get,
that's a forcing function for other companies
to compete, and that's not a bad thing, it really isn't.
And a lot of these organizations, there might be reasons
that are very valid reasons for them
to consider multi-cloud, or even consider what they have
within their own on-premise infrastructure.
You've got, you know, tens and tens of years
of legacy technical debt in your data center,
there's not a reason to pull everything
into the Cloud environment, there might be reasons
to just let that die a slow death and sunset that.
>> Got the mainframe.
>> And, like the mainframe stuff, for them to look
at even migrating mainframe capabilities into the Cloud,
it's a lot of rewrite, it's a lot
of things that need to happen.
And maybe there's ways that you can extend that
on-premise environment, breathe a little bit of life
into the on-premise environment, while you're
building out your new infrastructure.
And that's probably the right path to take.
>> And some people choose to have Cobalt code
running banks right now, and just because
they have that process.
>> And it's working, and you know, they'll inevitably
come to the time that they have to do that migration.
>> Great commentary, great to have you on,
great to chat about the technology trends.
Smartronix, what are you guys doing,
how do you guys fit into this trend,
take a minute to talk about what you guys do,
and your opportunity.
>> Sure, Smartronix is about a 20-year-old
company, we talk about some of our competitors
will talk about being born in the Cloud,
we were actually pretty much born in the enterprise,
we helped the Marine Core establish their
network operation security command,
20 some years ago, we were first to kind of
lead virtualization technologies to help the
forward-deployed forces move in and create
kind of these tactical data centers,
mobile data centers that can move into theater,
so it's always kind of been on the forefront
of network operations and cybersecurity,
and innovative solutions, innovative use of technology,
in government.
>> The battle field's an instant case of how to deploy.
>> Absolutely.
>> You need wireless.
>> Austere environments, you know, low-power,
they used to bring trucks in to be able
to set up their mobile data center,
and we actually using virtualization
technology back in 2004, you know.
>> You got to push the envelope.
>> You have to.
>> Your job is to push the envelope.
>> And that's really where I think Smartronix
has done a really good job, is that we've
helped these large organizations that are in
very secure and highly-regulated compliance-driven
environments, and utilize technology in innovative ways.
More securely, and more optimally in these environments.
So when we had a chance in 2009, to do a solution
for President Obama at the time, they introduced
the Recovery Act, they needed a website to track
750 billion dollars worth of funding.
We came in with a pretty innovative solution.
They said they had 10 weeks to build this, you're not
going to do that in a data center environment.
We came in with a solution that said on day one,
we're going to utilize Amazon Web Services capabilities,
we're going to build out the test endeavor while
we build out the data center environment,
and we're going to make your deadline by October 1st.
And that was really the jumpstart of what we did.
>> Do you meet your deadline?
>> We absolutely did.
>> What was that other website that you didn't actually
get the deadline done, they had to bring in?
>> Yeah, the healthcare.
>> Oh, the Obama.
>> So this one was recovery.gov, a very well-documented
success, it ended up being the very first
cloud-first initiative for the Federal Government.
The very first government property running on public
Cloud infrastructure, and then from there we migrated to
>> Well, he doesn't get the credit he deserves on
open government.
>> He doesn't.
>> He opened up data sets, he changed the game.
>> He did, and again, that was, I think when you look at
historically, when you look back at the CTOs and CIOs
of the Federal Government at that time,
they were really trying to look to see how
commercial technologies could be applied in the government,
how you could get that agility and innovation,
and speed of business of commercial
and do that in the Federal Government.
And I think we embraced that at Smartronix pretty early on,
and we were kind of on the leading edge sometimes
of delivering this kind of abilities and services.
>> Literally.
So, you guys are the right group to call for IT to get
modernized, because this is is problem.
No one can hide anymore, there's no more excuses.
And again, this is the lack of innovation.
If you've been sitting around not innovating, now
there's cyberwars attacking, you got cybersecurity,
IT needs to transform, they got to do it like really fast.
>> You got all of these competing pressures, security,
you've got time, you've got cost, you've got capabilities,
all of those things competing.
You need to have a trusted advisor, a partner,
to get you through that.
What Smartronix has created, we call it our four pillars,
and these are very simple pillars, but it's really
really required for really looking
at Cloud services strategy.
You have to help the organization define what
the business outcomes are that they want in these
environments, help them think through
what the roadmap and strategy is to get there,
and then when you go to the second pillar,
which is design, there's unique ways to design
things to make it cloud-native, to utilize
cloud-native services that also, when you
get to the implementation and migration point,
you're building these in a programmatic way
that makes it easier to operate
and manage, and that's the fourth pillar.
So if you can get these organizations to think from
strategy all the way through to run,
all the way through to operations management,
you're going to have the more effective organization
and better services in your environment.
>> Robert Groat, Executive Vice President of Technology
at Smartronix, thanks for spending that time with me.
>> Thanks, John.
>> I'm John Furrier with the Cube, in Washington D.C.,
actually in Arlington, Virginia at Amazon Web Services
Public Sector headquarters, thanks for watching.
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