 Welcome back, Jeff Frick here at day four at VMworld 2013, the 10th anniversary show. You're on theCUBE, we've been going wall to walls. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and now we're into Thursday. We've been here, we've been at AT&T Park, we've been at the briefings, we've been all over the place. So we're glad you're with us. We keep it rolling and we're happy to welcome our next guest, David Achu, the VP Corp Dev Strategy from SafeNet. SafeNet's a sign you've probably seen rolling up and down 101. I don't know that they've got the highest visibility or profile outside their networks, so we're going to learn a little bit more about what they're up to. And David, welcome to theCUBE. Wonderful, glad you could join us here, right there in Redwood City. You can see our logo every morning. Exactly, right there by the Evernote, the Evernote building. Exactly, right there. So tell us a little bit about, for those that don't know SafeNet, a little bit about the company. So it's actually a very exciting time for us because we're celebrating our 30th anniversary as a company, which I think there's not a lot of folks at companies that are exhibiting at the show that can claim that. So we're a company that's focused on information security and data protection solutions from identities, transactions to encryption and protection of sensitive data. And we've been out doing that for 30 years and what's exciting about, particularly about VMworld is I spend a lot of my time at security conferences. And this is one of the places where we've really been able to adapt our portfolio that when you're a 30 year old company, we clearly have some great solutions from the traditional world. But as you look at cloud and virtualized environments, we've really been able to adapt our portfolio and bring it to help people enable to do more sensitive work in virtualizing cloud environments. So it's a really exciting week for us to get out and work with the infrastructure teams on how we can enable them to take advantage of the benefits of virtualization in cloud. That's good to say. Talk a little bit about, I remember early, early cloud days before it was called the cloud. You know, the ASP days back in 97, 98 and everyone was petrified of shared infrastructure, shared databases, access via the internet. You know, all those things that obviously we've come a long, long way. But talk about what are some of the tipping points that happened for the government and sensitive information that happened to start to adopt this and then what's kind of the future look like? Yep, so one of the things that's interesting about, you know, whether it's cloud and virtualization, SaaS, ASP, whatever terminology you're using is this idea of using unified or common or shared infrastructure has made folks nervous in a lot of cases. Sometimes, potentially weren't it, sometimes not. But when if you look at our traditional security, approaches security, that a lot of those tools were applied at the network infrastructure level, that when you break down how most information security dollars are spent, they go into things like network security like firewalls and IPS, antivirus. And those are things that are fairly abstracted from the, what matters itself, the data. And so as we've shifted into these cloud or virtualized or abstracted environments we use is that you've been forced to reevaluate how you think about security because you know, VMware is doing some great things around bringing some of the security calls into the network. Once you, if you're not the virtualization administrator, it's really hard to plug a physical firewall into a virtualized environment or send one to your cloud provider. And so you've had to move up the stack and it's for a safe net is always focused is how do you attach controls to what matters itself, the identity of the data, their transaction. So things like stronger authentication, encryption key management, so you can do encryption at scale have become even more relevant than they ever have in these new environments. And we're fortunate that we saw that trend coming from your last guest, you're talking about the new role of IT. And one of the things that we see is in many cases, IT departments may be leveraging external service providers but even internally are becoming service providers themselves. And how do you separate data, whether it's from the HR department from the finance department or from two different divisions that may actually have regulatory issues while they can't work together like an investment banking community that we then take those principles we learned from the intelligence community, take those principles and apply those in these new environments. Right. So what, someone much smarter than me a long time ago said that computers are really good at capturing information and storing information but they're not so good at getting rid of it. And now you take a virtualized environment which just by its design and intention is supposed to have a lot of things distributed all over the place. So with a security-minded focus and sensitive data that the customers you guys work with, tell me, how do you get rid of stuff? What's the story there? So that's one of the beauties of encryption that is that there's a key that allows you to, if you get rid of that key you've effectively shredded the data whether that data has persisted. And so we have a solution that we launched the show last year called Protect V that allows you to encrypt all of the data coming from a VM or instance or a storage container in a virtualized or cloud environment as it goes in the underlined storage system. And so if you look at some of the benefits that virtualization provided is, you can say, wow, backup is now simple. I can snapshot things. I can plug into storage solutions that make it really easy to have highly available, well-insured data. But you can have a lot of instances of that data that we used to back up incremental backups daily, maybe a full backup once a week, ship those tapes off somewhere in a locked case. And now that data can be snapshotted every hour, every minute if there's someone who wants to find the best operational practice, but that the data trail becomes incredibly significant and in many cases, hard to control. And so when you apply encryption, that once the entire instance or your guest is encrypted as it writes in the storage infrastructure, as long as you have great key management control, those encryption keys, you don't have to worry as much about how that data flows because if you can control when that encryption key is used and granted to read that data and the ability to destroy and shred that key if at the time that data is no longer necessary, you've been able to remove the physical aspect of having to shred the data from the virtual aspect and that's something our customers are really excited about. We're very excited about. So as you've walked around the show and got to take some of the stuff in, what are some of the exciting innovations that you've seen that you can see, immediate benefit to some of your customers and your engagements? Yeah, it's great. We're part of being a 30 year old company with 25,000 customers, 100 countries as we get to work with a lot of companies and we have some great partners. So I have part of my job, I lead our partner strategy and we have about 250 different technology partners, some large ones like VMware and NetApp as well as a number at the show. So I think what's, one of the things we're really excited by is seeing the folks that have adapted their solution into these virtualized environments that there's too often conversations about security being a barrier to virtualization or cloud and we see particularly things like encryption or identity being enablers to cloud. That I don't have to worry about applying security controls at the network level when I comply them to the data of the user themselves and working with partners around who have done that is pretty exciting. Their thing that I think is exciting for all customers is that at the end of the day, the most important things you can do for security are having great IT operations practice that if you don't know what you have, how it's configured and how it changes, it's really difficult to apply security controls. Actually, part of the reason I love working at SafeNet is encryption is one of the controls that actually works well even if you don't do that stuff well. But when you look at what VMware and a number of their partners around the orchestration ecosystem have done is that they've made it easier to have great IT operations and while that doesn't report to the CISO, the security benefits of actually being able to say, hey, here's an inventory of all of my technology and all of my sensitive data. Everyone, if you talk to any CISO who's been through an audit, they had to produce some data and systems audit for, and it was probably up to date for the one minute before it was delivered to the auto. It used to be a really difficult task and now you can log into your VMware environment, have a snapshot of all the assets in your environment in many cases, the data sitting inside of them with a cloud provider, you have that same ability because if they aren't able to track what you're using, they can't bill you and so you get great inventory information. So we're seeing actually some great benefits to security just from having better operations from what this audience is bringing. Yeah, it's interesting because we talk quite often about people, process and tech and there's a whole lot of focus on the tech, certainly at these types of shows, but as we know, a lot of it has to do with the people and the process and I was doing some work with the security company once and their biggest issue was just piggybacking. They had to put a camera up at the airport and two catering trucks go through one right after the other, so no matter what some of the other technology had in place, they were just piggybacking right in and if you don't have the processes in place and now the IT makes it easier, you're still going to have a lot of those issues. Yeah, the other thing that's been fascinating to show is I think if you asked someone five years ago what technology was going to be sexy, security and storage were probably not things that would have been on top of their list and we have a great relationship, particularly with NetApp has sponsored the show with Hitachi data systems and a number of storage partners and storage is sexy again and so it's a lot of fun to work to help address the data protection, the security requirements in those environments so that this is almost as much of a storage show as a lot of the storage shows aren't out, which is pretty exciting. So the cloud and convergent infrastructure it's all becoming one of the same, right? Whether you get the whole thing or you get all these hybrid solutions. So what's down the road? What are some mountains you guys are looking to climb? What's this conversation going to be about two, three years from now? So one of the things that we're really excited about is we're the market leaders in something called hardware security modules and if you're, you know, we call them HSMs to be careful in this environment, because a lot of storage folks have HSM as a different terminology and a hierarchical storage management but an HSM is an encryption device, it's a hardware appliance that is very critical in storing encryption keys. It basically creates and vaults encryption keys and allows you to use them securely and that's the business that safety has been a leader in for years. It's, you know, we power about 80% of the interbank transfers in the world of about a trillion dollars a day of money transfers are protected by these type of technologies and you experience these things every day that without even realizing it, things like, you know, if you're using an easy pass or automated toll solution, anything that's using encryption and has a public key infrastructure behind it tends to have one of these. The, you know, one of the challenges of them is by nature is, you know, what they do, they have to be hardware. These are, you know, FIPS-validated, highly secure environments and what we've really seen is that they are so relevant in these new architectures that a lot of people refer to them as a root of trust or a trust anchor and so as you're, you know, the underlying infrastructure becomes abstracted and you have these, you know, massive conversion environments, being able to take an asset or a workload and have it tie to something that you control as the cryptographic of trust is very important, but, you know, five or 10 years ago that concept was a fairly form one and we've invested a lot. We launched earlier to what we called the crypto hypervisor, which is the ability to take one of these appliances actually partition it so you can bind things over the network so you could have an application running in a number, in a guest or a number of guests and have them connected over the network to this so you can take advantage of all the things like bursting and motioning of systems while still having this tied root of trust and then we've added things like provisioning to them. The idea of, you know, having restful APIs, a provisioning ended applications that can subscribe to these roots of trust that these things are traditionally only available to customers that had a pretty sophisticated crypto team, you know, 10 years ago and we've made these available, you know, whether in our customers' infrastructures partnering with service providers made these available to have this trust at the root of an infrastructure or application environment to a much broader audience, and it's about, you know, instead of having the conversation of how is security preventing virtualization, this is always, you know, things that people didn't think they ever could virtualize, they're now able to do so because they can show audit and control of their encryption keys and therefore their data. It's a pretty exciting story on how a traditional business, most people think of it as financial services or government encryption as really enabling cloud consumption. So are they really starting to think like those examples of the way they can actually take advantage of this virtualization trend and still maintain the security that they've become accustomed to and require based on regulations or whatever. We see some great examples, the ProtectVee product I mentioned along, you know, it talks to a key manager that has one of these hardware security modules in it, that we've talked with some, you know, particularly some financial services customers, but on the smaller side, you know, that they've had applications that they had said they couldn't virtualize, that they couldn't do it securely because they had perhaps a proprietary database where you couldn't encrypt the data inside of the database and the vendor wouldn't allow you to install local encryption inside the system because of support concerns. And so this thing was sitting in the corner as a bare metal server and not getting to take advantage of the agility and cost savings that's present in other IT environments. And when you take ProtectVee and our key management and HSM technologies, we've had customers that say, wow, I can now take that system, I can bring it into a virtual environment, know that at the lowest layers of the guest, I know that all the IO of that's going to be encrypted and I have great audit and control of those encryption keys. And so we're seeing, you know, people investing in security technology to enable virtualization of secure workloads that there's a big change in conversation from three or four years ago. Yeah, that was like, there was a great joke that we had a show and someone walked by a few years ago and said, what do you do? And we said, oh, we do encryption and security and the person said, oh, I'm interested in that. And one of the people responded, oh, you must be a VM admin. And I think that was unfortunately reality years back now. I think we're seeing at the show that people are figuring out how can we work together? You know, how do we use this enabler? What are the right tool sets? And it's a pretty exciting time. That's great, that's great. Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing some of the story with us, David. And again, David, the Shoe VP Corporate Dev Strategy at SafeNet. You'll see their sign on 101 south on the right-hand side right about Evernote. So we, again, we're at VMworld 2013. Wall to Wall coverage on theCUBE. We'll be right back after the short break. You're on theCUBE. Thank you very much. Thank you.