>> Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCube,
covering Accelerate 2017,
brought to you by Fortinet.
Now, here are your hosts,
Lisa Martin and Peter Burris.
>> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship show,
where we go out to the events,
and extract the signal from the noise.
Today we are in Las Vegas.
I'm your host, Lisa Martin,
joined by my co-host, Peter Burris.
We are with Fortinet at their Accelerate 2017 event,
and we're very excited to be joined
by one of the keynotes today, Patriche Perche.
You are the Senior Executive Vice President
of Global Sales and Support.
Welcome to theCUBE.
>> Thank you.
>> You've got a very interesting background.
You've got over 20 years of experience
in the IT security industry.
You manage Fortinet's global
sales and support organizations.
As the leader of this,
you've talked about it this morning in the keynote,
where 700 partners are here, and users here as well,
Fortinet is in 93 countries.
The theme of the event: No Limits.
What does that mean to you,
what does that mean to your partner,
and your channel community?
>> Well, definitely this event is critical for us,
and for our partners.
You can see in the background, there's a lot of people.
We have a strong representation across the world.
The theme of this event is about
the new challenge that we're all facing,
due to the digital economy, the rise of the IoT,
the rise of the virtualization, the Cloud,
whether it is public or private,
all those new premise for the digital economy
need to be secure, so security becomes a big enabler
for the future of the digital economy.
Which means, for our partners, and also for customers,
security needs to be embraced at a very high level,
to be able to evolve their business,
so that's really a critical point.
We see that the overall
network security came,
and the cybersecurity, came to an affliction point,
where, during the last 15 years,
they'd been built by adding, in fact,
point solutions, reacting to threats,
which led to a very complex environment.
We have also another major challenge,
which is the skills shortage worldwide,
so they cannot choose faith about
this new technical challenge,
so they have to find a solution where we can automate
the protection and the defense,
and also build more collaboration between the communities.
That's all about the team of No Limits,
and also the launch of Security Fabric,
which provides strong coverage, so it's very broad,
we can cover all aspects, whether it's IoT, virtualization,
and, of course network security.
It's also fed by cybersecurity regions,
because you need to have those information
pulled back to the device,
to be able to react on time to new threats.
This information, it's also very valuable for the business,
because they can return on business value,
and we know that digital age will be all about data value.
I think it's really a very exciting moment for our partners,
and we have seen that they're growing from last year.
I think we added about, roughly,
16,000 partners worldwide,
so we have a big, big number now.
I think it's really the time to reduce the complexity,
automate, elevate, of course, the knowledge,
due to the skills shortage we have,
that partners has as well,
and be able to enable the next age of the digital economy.
>> You had a panel on the General Sessions stage
this morning, of CSOs from AT&T, Lazard, and Levi's,
and one of the things that that panel was talking about,
what you talked about, reducing complexity, is,
really, we need to talk about the complexity, right?
This is really critical
to protect these critical infrastructures.
So, from a complexity perspective, Peter,
I'd love to get your thoughts on
what you've heard today so far, and what Fortinet is doing
with the Security Fabric to address that complexity.
>> Well, there's a couple of things that I think
we need to focus on, relative to complexity,
and that is that the business is complex, but then,
the individual elements that are intended to make
business possible, are themselves, individually, complex.
And I think one of the things that Fortinet's trying to do,
is say, let's reduce the complexity of the security,
so that that does not become
a problem or barrier to the business.
Because today we have data complexity,
and application complexity, and security complexity,
and organizational complexity, and financial complexity,
and we need to find strategic and targeted ways
to reduce the complexity of individual elements of that,
so that we can focus more
on the complexity of servicing the customer.
And I think that that's a key message
Fortinet's trying to bring, is,
what can we do to reduce security complexity,
or networking security complexity,
and data security complexity, so that we can liberate
more talent to focus on the business opportunities?
Is that accurate?
>> Yeah, that's definitely the case.
We see that, as soon as we were able to reduce
this complexity, we will add value to the business.
If you look from any large organization on the IT,
of course, the responsibility towards cybersecurity
is becoming very important on that side, at C-level.
And often they try to go down to the people inside,
but you cannot blame the people at the level, or whatever,
they click to an email where there's an attachment,
because they have to do, in fact, anyway.
So the complexity and the pressure that are being
putting inside the organization, has to be reduced,
and that's the purpose of building a system with
people, knowledge, data,
that can react on real-time.
That's really the value of the Security Fabric we develop.
>> So, it used to be that, as an ex IT guy,
it used to be that the security team was the Office of No.
No, you can't do that; no, we won't let you do that.
And there used to be this strong trade-off between
was the initiative going to be secure,
and how long did it take to actually execute?
I hear you saying, and I want to just confirm this, is that,
now we're working on how we can collapse the time
between opportunity and execution,
by making security go away as a barrier.
Have I got that right?
>> Yeah, exactly.
I think the behavior of the some of the
people in charge of security in the last 10 years was...
They have to face new problems, new threats, and then,
typically they have both the simple solution, and then...
We landed with almost 35 different vendors
into the security environment,
and they are not talking all together.
In fact, that's just increase the complexity.
They land into situation where they recognize
those don't work anymore, and that's, in fact,
increase, potentially, the risk,
because there is so much hold on the system.
The fact that the knowledge that they had, in fact,
is becoming more spread across the entire organization,
is also a big evolution in terms of the mentality.
>> Let's build on that, Patrice, because today,
most of the threats
take a long to develop,
they're very sophisticated.
So, someone will access, or will acquire access,
to a particular system, that may not be very valuable,
but they'll use that to get access to another system,
and they'll use that to get access to another system,
and if the business doesn't have a fabric, as you say,
that's cognizant, or aware, of how all of these
different elements play together, then you are facilitating
someone being able to move through...
Not detect, as they try to move,
and that increases the likelihood
that a company has a problem.
So, it sounds as though it's increasingly important
that you think in terms of a fabric,
that is capable of observing how people are getting in here,
trying to get in there, and has awareness of how the
different security infrastructures actually work together.
>> Yeah, definitely, I think
one of the critical points about security is knowing.
So, you have to know whatever the people,
you have to know whatever of kind device,
where they are, because we know today that
it's not limited to a country.
Cybersecurity is about world attack,
so we see a lot of attack coming from foreign countries.
You have to build a system that can
collect those information, react on time, and, I think,
the different components, they are working together,
because often the threats can come from email attachments.
It can be a different approach,
or a IPS attack, or DDOS attack.
But because those threats are always combined in the system,
so you cannot detect at the email,
so potentially they will be going through the system,
and result in a system that communicates all together,
and you don't know that this IP address has been
already flagged as potential problems,
while the email is going through.
It's all about having the system, they are automated,
and be able to have this global view.
I think this is a very important aspect,
because it's not just US-centric attack,
and be able to quickly provide the value
to the decision maker, because we have also less people
on the Security Operations Center,
due to the lack of skill, the skills shortage.
The information has to go to these people
in a very efficient way, and already highlight
the importance of the attacks, whatever they are.
That's how we can really reduce the time to detect,
and reduce the time to act.
>> You both mentioned a skills shortage,
and that was actually mentioned in the keynote
of the general session this morning.
Is it the expectation, of Fortinet and your partners,
that it has to be technology
that's going to solve for that skills shortage?
>> Yeah, I think we participate also,
to try to resolve part of the skill shortage.
We have launched, what we call, the NSE program,
which is a certification that we launched,
and we had about 60,000,
right now, certified engineers in the world.
In fact, just last year, we had about 34,000,
so it has been growing fast.
But we see there is a big requirement about
acquiring this knowledge, which is becoming very complex,
because every month, you have a new system you attack,
so you have to be trained almost ongoing.
And the level of the expertise is very high,
so it's not like 20 years ago,
where a firewall just blocking a system,
so, easy to understand, easy for an engineer to understand,
like people doing networking management.
Security is much more complex.
That requires ongoing training and knowledge transfer,
to keep the people at the highest level.
>> So one of the things, Peter, you and I were talking about,
is that the security conversation
is a board-level, boardroom conversation.
From a partner community perspective, are you seeing,
within the partner and the customer base,
that there is now an expectation that,
we're already compromised, we've got to now limit damage?
Is that a broad expectation that most
companies and industries have today?
>> Yeah, definitely, I think the people...
The company recognize that, anyway,
they are being attacked, there is an issue.
The role of the CSO inside a company
is becoming very important.
It's a kind of business enabler.
It's not just a compliance answer, where before,
they was there just to check the box on
SOX compliance, or SCADA.
So now they have to help
the other business unit managers to run the company,
and to transform the company to the digital age.
>> Yeah, let me build on a couple of points
that are being made here very quickly.
First off, going back to the question of,
is technology crucial?
The digital business means that there will be greater
demands on the security capabilities of the business.
We cannot expect most business people
to become smart about security,
because this is very technical, hard stuff.
We have to, therefore, make that capability more productive,
and the only way to do it, is through technology.
And that has become...
The board is now aware of that,
that the board recognizes, most boards recognize,
that security in a digital world
is a strategic business capability.
It's tied to your brand, it's tied to your products,
it's tied to the promises you're making to the marketplace.
And, to your point, Lisa,
they also recognize that they are constantly under attack,
that there are intrusions,
and the need is to limit those intrusions,
by taking a system approach to it.
And so, this notion of a platform is really, really crucial
to delivering on what the board needs:
a set of realistic, strategic security capabilities,
that the business can count on.
>> Yeah, definitely, and I think,
you may have learned this morning,
one of our customers, a big financial bank in the US,
which implemented, in fact,
the fabric, in fact, and
it has been able to measure
the reduction of internal threats,
which was, one of the auditors said,
"What's happened? Your system's networking?"
In fact, it was the benefit of implementing the fabric.
So, definitely, they recognized there is an
ongoing problem inside the network, because,
as we also say last year, it's no longer just the...
You have to protect the perimeter.
The threats come from inside, can be from employees.
We also, with the fabric, we are able to create,
what we call, internal segmentation, so,
try to protect the data where they are, as the closest,
and then also look about who is accessing to the data,
and then flag to the relevant people if there is anomaly,
and normal activity around those access of the data.
Because as this evolution, the value is all about the data,
so we have to protect the data,
and that's the challenge of the system, so it's complex.
That's also require collaboration.
We do collaborate with cert companies, so we exchange.
We're also the alliance founder
for the cyber threats community.
And we also expand our fabric,
because we feel that the Security Fabric
will be at the heart of the security strategy.
And then, because security has to talk about application,
about networks, you go inside all the system.
So we build this fabric-ready program,
and onboard a lot of other vendors,
and that's the value for our customers as well,
because then we can automate it, the security,
and potentially the rules that need to be implemented
after an attack, going to, potentially, the network device.
So, it's just a team effort.
I don't think that, Fortinet by themself,
we can resolve the problem.
It's combination of knowledge, people,
other peers in the industry, and then we can really try
to go against the threats that we know.
Your life's always a chase.
>> So, here we are, last word,
giving, Patrice, to you, at Accelerate 2017.
Great buzz here, you can hear and see it behind us.
700 partners here, end users.
The announcement that came out today,
what excites you most about this new year, this 2017,
for Fortinet, and being able to help customers
truly transform to a digital business, and trust their data?
What's most exciting to you?
>> Well, I think it's definitely, we all...
There is a lot of feedback where we feel that,
what we built in the last 16 years, in terms of technology,
came through a very strong value proposition today.
That's moving so fast, and there is only few vendor,
in fact, on this standards, that they can do it; in fact,
we feel that we are the only one on the security space.
That's the echo I got from both the end user,
but as well, the partner, you can see they are growing fast.
So, yes, good promise for '17, and as you say as leader,
of course we are expecting a great result.
>> Excellent, Patrice Perche, thank you so much for joining.
Peter, and thank you for joining as well.
We thank you for watching theCUBE.
We are live at Fortinet's Accelerate 2017,
and we'll be right back.
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