 Hello, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of the CUBE here in Palo Alto, California. We're still remoting in, getting great guests in. Events are coming back. Next week we'll be at a bunch of different events and you'll see the CUBE everywhere. But this conversation is about network challenges in a distributed hybrid workforce era. We've got Atif Sayi, principal product manager, Edge Networking Solutions at Dell Technologies and Rob McBride, channel and partner sales engineer at Versa Networks. Gentlemen, thanks for coming in this CUBE Conversation. Thank you, John. Thank you, John. So first of all, I was sleep with the pandemic and now we're moving out of the pandemic. Even with Omnicron out there, we still see visibility into kind of back to work and events and it's, but it's clear hybrid environment, cloud hybrid work. This has been a huge opening of everyone's eyes around network security, provisioning, you know, unexpected disruptions around everyone being worked at home. Nobody really forecasted that, the fact that the whole workforce would be remote coming in. So again, put a lot of pressure on the network challenges over the past two years. How is it coming out of this different? What's your guys take on this? You know, to that, when we start looking at this, you know, kind of focus a little bit on challenges, you know, when this all kind of started off, you know, obviously as you stated, right? Everyone was kind of taken by surprise in a way, right? What do we do? We don't know what to do at this moment. And you know, I go back and I remember a customer giving me a call, you know, when they were at first looking at, you know, your traditional WAN transformation and one of the change their branches to do something from an SD-WAN perspective into the pandemic. And their question to me was, Rob, what do I do? Or what do I need to start thinking about? Now, all of a sudden, to your point, right? Everyone now is no longer in the office and how do I get them to connect? And more importantly, now that I can maybe figure out a way to connect them, how do I actually see what they're doing and be able to control what they're actually now accessing because I no longer have that level of control as of them coming into the office. And so a lot of customers, you know, we're beginning to develop kind of homegrown solutions, look at various different things to kind of quick hot patches if you will, to address the remote workers coming in and things of that nature. And what we see in kind of progression through all this is as opposed to just solving, getting a user to connect into an environment that IT can provide continuity for, they started coming up with other challenges to the point of security. They started, you know, I have other customers calling me up and saying, you know, I've now got a ransomware problem, right? So, you know, what do I do about that? And what are the things I need to kind of consider with respect to now I'm much more vulnerable because my branch estate has basically become much more diversified. And solutions and things that they're looking for regards obviously around security, connectivity. They've been challenged with addressing how do they unify their levels of visibility without over encumbering themselves and how they actually manage now this kind of much more kind of distributed kind of network, if you will, right? So things around, you know, looking at, you know acronyms around from like a ZTNA or, you know cloud security and all this fun stuff start coming into play. But what it points to is that the biggest challenge I think is had is how do they converge networking and security together and provide a ubiquitous and uniform policy architecture to identify their users to connect and access the applications that are relevant to the business and be able to have that uniformity between whether it's the branch for them being remote. And that's part of what we've kind of seen as this progression to the last two years and kind of solutions that they're looking for to kind of help them address that. It's almost like it's a good thing in a way it actually opens up the kimono and say, hey, this is the real world. We've got to prepare for this next generation. A tiff, I want to get your take because, you know, remember the old days we were like, oh yeah, we got to prepare for these scenarios where maybe 30% will be dialing on the VLAN or remotely. You know, it's not 30%, it was like 100%. So budgets aren't out of whack. And yet they want more resiliency at the edge, right? So one, I didn't budget for it, they didn't predict it. And it's got to be better, faster, cheaper and more secure. Yeah, yeah, so John, the difference is is that, you know, Dell, for instance, has already was already working towards this distributed model, right? The pandemic just accelerated that transformation. So when customers came to us and said, oh, we've got a problem with our workforce and our users being so geographically suddenly dispersed, you know, we had some insight that we could immediately lean on. We had already started working on solutions and building those platforms that can help them address those problems, right? Because we'd already done studies before this, right? We've done studies and we've come back on this whole work from home or remote office scenario. And the results were pretty unanimous in that customers or users were always complaining about, you know, application performance issues and, you know, connectivity issues and things like that. So we kind of knew about this and so we were able to proactively start building solutions. And so, you know, so when a customer comes, that's like Rob was talking about, you know, their infrastructure wasn't set up for everybody to suddenly move on day one and start accessing all the corporate resources where the majority of the organizations is accessing corporate resources away from campus, right? So we have solutions, we've been building solutions and we have guidance to offer these customers as they try to modernize their network and address these problems. Well, that's a great segue to the next talk track is, you know, what is a network, what is network modernization, right? So let's define that, if you don't mind, but while I got you guys here, you're both pros, get that sound bite, but then let's get into the benefits of the outcomes from what that enables. So if you guys want to take a stab at defining what is network modernization mean? I think there's a lot of definitions where it kind of depends on your point of view where you're responsible from a network or within the stack. You know, from a take obviously, you know, working from a vendor and with solutions that we provide, modernizations really around solutions that begin to look at more software-defined architectures and definitions to begin a level of decoupling between, you know, points of control, hardware and software and other kinds of points of visibility and automation. To the point where things are, let's kind of put an air quotes in a sense of being more digitized in a sense, like even how we're looking at things from a consumerization perspective, but looking at things that are much more cloud aware, cloud specific, cloud native, in-built automation, as well as in-built kind of analytics, where things are much more in a broader SDN kind of a construct would be a form of a definition from a modernization perspective. Now, to the other element of your kind of a question in regards to kind of the benefits that come as a result of this. So as customers have been in the last 24 months, looking at different solutions to address part of what we've been talking about, part of it is when you're looking at, whether it's like using a word like sassy, to kind of define, you know, how our enterprise is looking for ZTNA based solutions or cloud security to augment their overall needs, the benefits that they're finding are simplicity of management because they're now looking for more uniform solutions that can address secure access for remote workers, in addition to their own kind of traditional access as it relates to their offices, to better visibility, because as this uniformity of this kind of architecture, they're now able to actually really see the level of context, right? I can see you, John, as far as where you're coming in and accessing what applications on what devices. And now I have a means to actually apply a policy that matters to me as a business from an IT perspective to protect me as the business, but also ensure that you're actually authorized and accessing things that I have from an IT regulations perspective. So benefits in the summary are kind of like, in-bill automation better, you know, things get done faster, things repair on their own in a different way as a result of automation. Greater visibility now they have much more greater insights into what we are doing as users of the overall IT infrastructure and better overall control that's been ultimately simplified as a result of consolidation and unification. That's awesome insight, Tiff, what's your take on the benefits of network modernization? So I'd like to sort of double down on, you know, something Rob said, right? So the visibility, right? So enhanced visibility in layman's terms, that just means more insight. More insight means the ability to implement best practices around application usage, application performance. More insights means control that IT departments are needing. They need that to manage and address security threats, right? To be able to identify an abnormal traffic pattern or unauthorized data movement to be able to push updates and patches quickly. So it's really about, you know, that manageability, that level of control gives them the ability to offer a resilient and secure underlying networking infrastructure. And then, you know, finally, one of the key benefits is cost savings. You know, everybody is trying to be more efficient. And so from our perspective, it's really about building an open platform. You know, we've built a platform on the X86 based platform. We've, we chose that because we wanted to tap into a mature ecosystem that, you know, customers can leverage as they, you know, as they build their, build towards their modernization goals. And so we're like leveraging technologies like UCPs, so universal customer premise equipments. And so that's really just an open hardware platform. But what you get by consolidating your network functions like routing and firewall and WAN optimization, you, and when you consolidate it all onto a single device, you get hardware savings, cost savings. You get operational savings as well, right? So you've, a common hardware infrastructure means a common deployment model, means a streamlined operations, means fewer truck rolls, right? So there's a tremendous amount of benefit from the cost standpoint as well. Because from our perspective, it's really that what customers are looking for, they need enterprise-grade solutions that can scale in a cost-effective manner. That's awesome. You guys mentioned Sassi earlier, first of all, software as a service is very Sassi. Big modern application movement, so I always get right here Sassi, I think, you know, a kind of term around Sassi, software as a service. But for you guys, it's talking about secure access service edge, which is a huge category growth right now where, you know, for security and networking, it's a huge discussion. SD-WAN fits into that somehow, because it used to be campus networking before, now it's everyone's world is the same, now it's connected. So Sassi's huge. How does that fit into SD-WAN and the trend of the Sassi the same? What's the difference? Because SD-WAN has been booming for the past decade as well in terms of trends. How are you guys seeing those converging in? What's the difference? You know, I like to also agree with you that SD-WAN has been booming the last couple of years, right? You know, kind of bread and butter part of what we've been doing. But, you know, to your question regards to kind of its linkage relative to Sassi, right? You know, as you articulate rights, Sassi secure access service edge from a definition of the acronym, so in support. It's first kind of good to kind of define it a little bit, maybe for some of those that may not be overly familiar with it. And I like to kind of dumb it down a little bit to the point of Sassi is really an architecture that is around, you know, the convergence of networking and security being put together in a uniform platform or service that is delivered from both the cloud as well as addressing, you know, their kind of traditional WAN requirements. Now digging in, Sassi is broken into little buckets, right? It's broken into a network layer and a security layer. And by its definition, right? By a particular analyst, the network component, the big portion of that is SD-WAN. And so SD-WAN providing that value associated to what it does, you know, dynamic length steering, automation, application attachment and so on and so forth is a core element of the foundation of the network layer associated to Sassi. And then the other element of Sassi is around the security bit. And so they're very much intrinsically linked whether, you know, for example, like Versa, just to kind of, you know, mention this here, the Sassi cloud that we've built for our customers to leverage for private access, public access, you know, secure internet, CASB, DLP type of services is built upon SD-WAN in addition to our customers that are using SD-WAN for their traditional WAN or using SD-WAN to connect to that cloud. So it's very, very much linked. And they kind of go hand in hand depending on your approach to the broader architecture. And, you know, another point I'll bring into that, what it also highlights is that whether it's around Sassi or not, when we pertinent to everything we've been other, we kind of been talking about, the other thing that's coming with SD-WAN intrinsically and natively is really the concept of security. It's around whether it's security at the branch or whether it's around some form of identity management or a point of improving posture for the enterprise to, you know, obviously inspect traffic at the branch or remotely. But what we're seeing at a trend-wise, which, you know, in part by customer adoption from our own platform, if you will, is basically security and SD-WAN coming together, whether for your traditional WAN transformation or as a result of Sassi services for a hybrid needs of connectivity, right? Remote workers, hybrid workforce going into the cloud for their connectivity needs and optimizations in addition to obviously the enterprise's branch transformations. I like that native aspect of it. We used to joke and call SD-WAN, SD-Cloud because we're all using cloud technologies. Talk about the security impact real quick, if you don't mind. I want to just double click on what you mentioned there because I think the cloudification plus the security piece seems to be a key part of this dynamic. Is that true or did I get that right? What's this all mean with cloudification? Yeah, I agree with, I guess, kind of where you're leading into that is, you know, review all of us here right now exactly in talking with you right now, right? John is, as you stated in the beginning, we're all remote. And so from a business perspective, right? We are accessing or from an engagement, we're accessing a cloud service. Now, what's critical for us as, you know, obviously enterprise employees is that our means of accessing this cloud service needs to have some level of hardening. We need to protect, right? Not only our own asset that we're using, right? Our laptops or other machinery that you're using to connect to the network, but in addition to protect our company, right? So our company also needs to protect it. So how can we do that, right? How can we do that in a very fast and distributed way? Sure, we can put security endpoints at every location with every user and every home. And that's one means of a particular solution. So your point about cloud is now take all of that and bring into the cloud where you have a much more distributed means, right? And much more dynamically scalable approach to actually doing that level of inspection, posture and enforcement. And so that's kind of where, you know, the rubber meets the road, right? It's for us to access those cloud applications. The cloud that we're using as a conduit for security as well as network also is now even connected and optimized paths to applications like what we're using right now, right? To do this conversation. So that's kind of where it meets together and the security element is because we're so diverse, we just need, we need to ensure, right? We're all much more vulnerable, right? My home network is, you know, maybe arguably maybe not as secure as when I go into an office, right? It's much more secure than most people because you get to work for personal networks. I could make that argument, yes, right? But, you know, the average, most of us remote workers, you know, our homes aren't as hard. And so we point a point of risk, right? And so as we go to cloud apps, we're more connected to the internet, right? You know, the point of being able to do this enforcement from a sassy concept helps provide that improved posture for enterprises to secure their traffic and get visibility into them. Joking aside, all my network engineer friends are secure as you read about. And I always joke to the malware, you missed the wrong network engineer by going after them, their house, spearfishing you, trying to get into your network. I'd say if I want to bring this back because what we're bringing up here is cloud is actually enabling more on-premises because you're working at home, that's a premise, right? So you're also edge is a premise. Edge and cloud, and cloud kind of eliminates all this notion of what is cloud and edge, but at the end of the day, it's where you are, right? So having the performance and the security and the partnership that like Safe with Dell, I know you guys have been on this for a while because I've been covering it, but the notion of edge completely changes now because what does that even mean? A home's edge is the campus data center's an edge, the car's an edge, the telco monopoles an edge. This is a big deal, this is about the unification. This is all about making it all work. What's your take on this from the Dell perspective? Yeah, and I think, I mean, you kind of summarize it, right? I mean, what does edge mean to you, right? It's, I mean, so every time I have a conversation with somebody, I always start with, let's define what your edge is. And so, from our perspective, from the Dell perspective is, we believe that we want to provide enterprise-grade infrastructure. We want to give our customers the right tools. And we're seeing that with this trend of a hybrid workforce, a geographically dispersed user base, we're seeing a tremendous need from IT departments for tools for solutions that can give them the control that they can sort of push out into their networks to ensure a safe and secure external access to corporate resources, right? And so that's what we're committed to, is making sure that that management layer by either developing the solutions in-house, bringing the right partners to the table and just ensuring that our customers have the right tools because this sort of trend or this new normal is not going away. And so we have to adapt. Great insight. Thanks for coming on. Rob, I'll give you the final word. What's changed the most in your opinion with customers' environments around how they're handling their networks as we come out of the pandemic, which has proven kind of which projects are working, which ones aren't, where to double down on and what was screwed up. I mean, come on, this is, we're kind of seeing that they all play out. What's your take on as we come through the pandemic and people come out of this? What's the big learning? Well, that you need partners, right? Okay, so it's not even from a vendor perspective. What I mean by partners is what we're finding and what I think a lot of either customers I've engaged with and others is this ain't easy. For even as much as we can within the technology vendor market, right? It's to make things easier to do. There's a lot of technology and the enterprise IT is recognizing you need a lot of these building blocks, right? To accomplish a lot of different things whether it's around automation too in other tools as Autif was leading into. And so we're finding that, a lot of our base or our interactions are really trying to identify an appropriate partner that can help not only talk to the technology but help them actually understand all the various different multi-colored legal blocks they got to put together but also help them actually put that into a realization, and then be able to then give the keys to them so they can eventually drive the car, right? And so the learning that we're seeing here is there's a lot of tech, there's a lot of new tech new approaches to existing technology of things that they've actually done and they're looking for help, right? And so they're looking for kind of let's call it like trusted advisor kind of status of people that can help explain the technology to them and then help them understand how do they put it together so they can then ultimately accomplish their overall kind of other kind of objectives from an IT perspective. And the other learning that I'll just say and then I'll stop here is SD-WAN isn't dead, right? SD-WAN is actually still driving and it's actually an impetus for a lot of other things that enterprise is actually doing whether it's around sassy oriented services, remote access, private access and other things of that nature. I totally agree. I think the networking stuff is still going to be so much innovation going on but the edge exploding as well that's the really great amazing stuff happening. Thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation, great conversation, taking it to the edge. Network challenges in the distributed hybrid workforce era is about moving things around the internet and making them secure. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.