 We're back in Boston, the Cube's coverage of Reinforced 2022. My name is Dave Vellante. Dave Hatfield is here. He's the co-CEO of Lacework. Dave, great to see you again. Have a nice day. If you still go by hat, it's good for me. That's good, all right. When you call me Dave, I'm in trouble for something. So just call me hat for now. Yeah, like my mom, David Paul. Exactly. All right, so give us the update. I mean, you guys have been on a tear. Obviously the TechLash, I mean a company like yours that has raised so much money. You got to be careful, but still, I'm sure you're not taking the foot off the gas. What's the update? Yeah, now we're super focused on our mission. We want to deliver cloud security for everybody, make it easier for developers and builders to do their thing. And we're fortunate to be in a situation where people are in the early innings of moving to the cloud. So our customers, largely digital natives and now increasingly cloud migrants, are recognizing that in order to build fast in the cloud, they need to have a different approach to security. And it used to be that you're either going to be really secure, really fast. And we wanted to create a platform that allowed you to have both. Yeah, so when you first came in theCUBE, you described it, we're the first company and the time I think you were the only company thinking about security as a data problem. Explain what that means. Well, when you move to the cloud, there's literally a quintillion data sets that are out there and it's doubling every several days or whatever. And so it creates a massive problem in that the attack surface grows. And different than when you're securing a data center or device where you have a very fixed asset and you're going to put things around it and you're going to know how to do it. When you move to the shared, ephemeral, massive scale environment, you can't write rules and do security the way you used to do it for data centers and devices. And so the insight for us was you, the risk was the data, the upside was the data. And so if you can harness all of this data, ingest it, process it, contextualize it in the context of creating a baseline of what normal is for a company and then monitor it constantly in real time, figure out, identify abnormal activity. You can deliver a security posture for a company unlike anything else before. Because it used to be you'd write a rule, you have a known adversary or a bad guy that's out there and you constantly try and keep up with them for a very specific attack service. But when you move to the cloud, the attack surface is too broad. And so the risk of the massive amount of data is also the solution, which is how do you harness it and use it with machine learning and AI to solve these problems. So I feel like for CISOs, the cloud has now become in the first line of defense, the CISO is now the second line, maybe the auditing is the third line, I don't know. So how do you work with AWS? You mentioned quadrillion, we heard, I think it was Steven Schmidt who talked about in this keynote, a quadrillion data points of a month or whatever it was, that's 15 zeros, mind boggling. How do you interact with AWS? Where's your data come from? Are you able to inspect that AWS data? Is it all your own first party data? How does that all work? Yeah, so we love AWS. I mean, we ultimately started out our company building our own service on AWS. We're the first cloud native built on the cloud for the cloud, leveraging data and harnessing it. So AWS enabled us to do that and partners like Snowflake and others allowed us to do that. So, but we are a multi-cloud solution too. So we allow builders and customers to be able to have choice, but we go deep with AWS and say the shared responsibility model they came up with with partners in themselves to say, all right, who ultimately owns security? Like, where's the responsibility? And AWS has a great job on database, storage, compute and networking. The customer's responsible for the OS, the platform, the workloads, the applications, et cetera, and the data. And that's really where we come in and kind of help customers secure their posture across all of their cloud environments. And so we take a cloud trail data. We look at all of the network data. We look at configuration data. We look at rules-based data and policies that customers might have. Anything we can get our hands on to be able to ingest into our machine learning models. And everybody knows the more data you put into a machine learning model, the finer grain is going to be, the more insightful and the more impactful it's going to be. So the really hard computer science problem that we set out to go do seven years ago when we founded the company was figure out a way to ingest, process and contextualize massive amounts of data from multiple streams and to make sense out of it. And in the traditional way of protecting customers' environments, you know, you write a rule and you have this linear sort of connection to alerts. And so you, you know, if you really want to tighten it down to be really secure, you have thousands of alerts per day. If you want to move really fast and create more risk and exposure, you could turn the dial the other way. And, you know, we wanted to say, let's turn it all the way over, but maintain the amount of alerts that really are only the ones they need to go focus on. And so by using machine learning and artificial intelligence and pulling all these different disparate data systems into making sense of them, we can take, you know, your alert volume from thousands per day to one or two high-fidelity critical alerts per day. And because we know the trail, because we're mapping it through our data graph, our polygraph data platform, the time to remediate a problem. So figure out the needle in the haystack and then the time to remediates 95% faster than what you have to do on your own. So we want to work with AWS and make it really easy for builders to use AWS services and accelerate their consumption of them. So we, one of the first to really embrace Fargate and Graviton, we're embedded in Security Hub, we're embedded in all of the core platforms. We focus on competencies, you know? So, you know, we've got container competency, we've got security and compliance competencies, and really just want to continue to jointly invest with AWS to deliver a great customer outcome and a really integrated seamless solution. I got a lot to unpack there. My first question is, you just described that needle in the haystack. You're essentially doing that in near real time? Yeah. Or real time even with using AI inferencing? Yeah. And you're processing all of this data, you know, how do you do so efficiently, you know? And so we're the fastest, we do it in near real time for everything. And, you know, compared to our competitors that are doing, you know, some lightweight side scanning technology, maybe they'll do a check or a scan once a day or twice a day. Well, the adversaries aren't sleeping, you know, after the other period of time. So you want to make it as near real time as you can for certain applications, you know, you get it down into minutes. And ideally over time, you want to get it to actual real time. And so there's a number of different technologies that we're deploying and that we're putting patents around to be able to do that as much data as you possibly can as fast as you possibly can. But it varies on the application and the workload. And double click in the technology, like tell me more about it. What is it? Is it a purpose built data store? Is it a special engine? Yeah, there's two primary elements to it. The first part is the polygraph data platform. And this is this ingestion engine, processing engine, you know, correlation engine that has two-way APIs, integrates into your workflows, ingests as much data as we possibly can, et cetera, and unifies all the data feeds that you've got so you can actually correlate and provide context. And security now in the cloud and certainly in the future, the real value is being able to create context and correlate data across the board. And when you're out buying a bunch of different companies that have different architectures that are all rules-based engines and trying to stitch them together, they don't talk to each other. And so the hard part first that we wanted to go do was build a cloud-native platform that was going to allow us to build applications that sat on top of it and that handled a number of different security requirements. You know, behavior-based threat detection obviously is one of the first services that we offered because we're correlating all this data and we're creating a baseline and we're figuring out what normal is. Okay, well, if your behavior is normal behavior is this, what's abnormal? So you can catch not only a known bad threat, you know, with rules, et cetera, that are embedded into our engines, but zero-day threats and unknown unknowns, which are the really scary stuff when you're in the cloud. So, you know, we've got, you know, applications, you know, for behavioral threat detection, you have vulnerability management, you know, where you're just constantly figuring out what vulnerabilities do I have across my development cycle and my runtime cycle that I need to be able to keep up on and sort of patch and remediate, et cetera. And then compliance, and as you're pulling all of these data points in, you want to be able to deliver compliance reports really efficiently and the Biden administration, you know, is issuing, you know, all of these, you know, new edicts for regulations. Obviously, countries in, you know, in Europe have been way ahead of the U.S. and some of these regulations. And so, they all point to a need for continuous monitoring of your cloud environment to ensure that you're, you know, in real time or near real time complying with the environments. And so, being able to hit a button based on all of this data and, you know, deliver a compliance report for X regulation or Y regulation saves a lot of time, but also ensures customers are secure. And you mentioned your multi-cloud, so you started on AWS. My observation is that AWS isn't out trying to directly, I mean, they do some monetization of their security, but it's more like security here it is, you know, use it, it comes with the package. Whereas, for instance, take Microsoft, for example, I mean, they have a big security business. I mean, they show up in the spending service, like, wow, they're off the charts. So, sort of different philosophies there, but when you say you're multi-cloud, you're saying, okay, you run on AWS obviously, you run on Azure, you run on GCP as well. We coined this term super cloud, Dave. It's like multi-cloud 2.0. The idea is it's a layer above the clouds that hides the underlying complexity. You mentioned Graviton. You worry about Graviton, your customer don't necessarily have to. Right, but that's going to be different than what goes on with Microsoft primitives or Google primitives. Are you essentially building a super cloud that adds value, a layer on top of those hyperscalers? Or is it more, we're just going to run within each of those individual environments? We definitely want to build the security OS, you know, that sort of goes across the super cloud as you talk about it. I would go back on one thing that you said, you know, if you listen to Andy or Adam now talk about AWS services and all the future growth that they have, I mean, security is job one. Right, so AWS takes security incredibly seriously. They need to, you know, they want to be able to provide confidence to their customers that they're going to be able to migrate over safely. So I think they do care deeply about it and are delivering a number of services to be able to do it for their customers, which is great. We want to enhance that and provide multi-cloud flexibility, deeper dives on Kubernetes and containers and just want to stay ahead and provide an option for companies, you know, when you're operating in AWS to have better or deeper, more valuable, more impactful services to go later on top and then provide the flexibility like you said of, hey look, I want to have a consistent security posture across all of my clouds if I choose to use other clouds and you don't, the schema are different on all three, you know, all of the protocols are different, et cetera. And so removing all of that complexity, I was just talking with Assiso at our event last night, we had like 300 people at this kind of cocktail event. Boston's pretty cool in the summertime. It's pretty, it's pretty great. They're like, well look, we don't want to hire a Azure specialist and a AWS specialist and a, you know, a GCP specialist. We don't want to have somebody that is deep on just doing container security or Kubernetes security. Like we want you to abstract all of that, make sense of it, stay above it, continue to innovate. So we can actually do what we want to do, which is we want to build fast. Like the whole point here is to enable developers to do their job without restriction. And they intuitively want to have and build secure applications, you know, because they recognize the importance of it. But if it slows them down, they're not going to do it. And so we want to make that as seamless as possible on top of AWS, so their developers feel confident they can move more and more applications over. So to your point about AWS, I totally agree. I mean, security's job one. I guess the way I would say it is from a monetization standpoint, my sense is AWS right now anyway is saying, we want the ecosystem to be able to monetize. We're going to leave that meat on the bone for those guys. Whereas Microsoft is, they sometimes, they're certainly competitive with the ecosystem sometimes endpoint. They compete with CrowdStrike, no question about it. Are they competitive with you in some cases? Or they're not there yet? Are you- You can talk to George about what he thinks about CrowdStrike versus Microsoft. Well yeah, good point in terms of the depth of capability. So there's definitely opportunities for the ecosystem there as well. But I think on certain parts of that, there's higher competitiveness than less. I think in the cloud, you know, having flexibility and being open is kind of core to the cloud's premise. And I think all three of the hyperscalers want to provide a choice for customers and they want to provide flexibility. They obviously want to monetize as much as they possibly can too. And I think they have varying strategies of those. And I do think AWS is the most open. And they're also the biggest. And I think that bodes well for what the marketplace really wants. You know, if you are a customer and you want to go all in for everything with one cloud, all right? Well then maybe you use their security stack exclusively. But that's not the trend on where we're going. And we're talking about a $154 billion market growing at 15% for you. It's a $360 billion market, one of the most fragmented in tech. Customers do want to consolidate on platforms. Absolutely. If they can consolidate on CSPs or they consolidate on the SuperCloud. I'm going to steal that from you for the SuperCloud. You know, to be able to, you know, have a consistent security posture for all of your workloads, containers, Kubernetes, applications across multiple clouds. That's what we think customers want. That's what we think customers need. There's opportunity for us to build a really big iconic security business as well. I'm going to make you laugh because so AWS doesn't like the term SuperCloud. And the reason is because it implies that they're just the infrastructure kind of commodity layer. And my response is you'll appreciate this is pure storage is 70% gross margin. Yeah, right? You look at Intel, you've got Graviton. You control, you can have Graviton, you can have Intel like gross margin. So maybe your infrastructure, but it's not necessarily commodity. But it leaves to me, it leaves the ecosystem value companies like Lacework. Amazon offers 220 something services for customers to make their lives easier. There's all kinds of ways where they're actually focusing on delivering value to their customers that is far from commodity and always will be. I think when it comes to security, you're going to need security and your database, your storage, your network compute, they do all of that, monetize all of that. But customers also want to be able to have a consistent security posture across the SuperCloud. I mean, they don't have time. I think security practitioners and security hiring in general hasn't had unemployment for like seven or 10 years. It's the hardest place to find quality people. And so our goal is if we can up level and enable security practitioners and Dev SackOps teams to be able to do their job more efficiently, it's a good thing for them. It's a win for them. And not having to be experts on all of these different environments that they're operating in, I think is really important. Here's the other thing about SuperCloud. And I think you'll appreciate this. You know, Andreessen says all companies are software companies. Well, all companies are becoming SaaS and cloud companies. So you look at Capital One, what they're doing on Snowflake, you know, Goldman, what they're doing with AWS, Oracle, Bicernar, you know that. And so industries, incumbents are building their own SuperClouds. They don't want to deal with all this crap. They want to add their own value, their own tools, their own software, at their own data and actually serve their specific vertical markets. 100% and they also don't want tools. You know, I think when you're in the security business it's so fragmented because you had to write a rule for everything and they were super nuanced. When you move to a data-driven approach and you actually have a platform that removes the need to actually have very nuanced specific expertise across all these different because you're combining it into your baseline and understanding it. And so customers want to move from, you know, one of the biggest banks in North America has 550 different point solutions for security. Thousands of employees to go manage all of this. They would love to be able to consolidate around a few platforms that integrate the data flows so they can correlate value across it. And this platform piece is really what differentiates our approach is that we already have that built and everybody else is sort of working backwards from legacy approaches or from acquired companies. We built it natively from the ground up which we believe gives us an advantage or our customers an advantage of time to market, speed, efficacy and a much lower cost because you can get rid of a bunch of point solutions in the process. You mentioned devs. Did you, you know, that continuous experience across clouds. Do you have like the equivalent of a super pass layer that is specific to your use case or you kind of using, I mean, I know you use off the shelf tooling or you allow your developers to do so but is the developer experience consistent across the clouds? That's really what I'm asking. Well, I think it is. I mean, I was talking to another CEO of a company, you know, on the floor here and it's focusing on the build side. You know, we focus on both the build and the run time. And we were talking about, you know, how many different applications or how fragmented the developer experience is with all the different tools that they have. And it's phenomenal. I mean, I can see a through acquisition or by business unit and developers like to have choice. Like they don't like to be told what to do or be standardized, you know, by anybody, especially some compliance organization or security organization. And so it's hard for them to have a consistent experience that they're using a bunch of different tools. And so yeah, we want to be able to integrate into whatever workload, a workflow a customer uses in their dev cycle and then provide consistent security on top of it. I mean, for our own company, you know, we got about a thousand people and a lot of them are developers. We want to make that as consistent as we possibly can so they can build code to deliver security, efficacy and new applications and new tools for us. So I think where you can standardize and leverage a platform approach, it's always going to be better. But the reality is, especially in large existing companies, you know, they've got lots of different tools. And so you need to be able to sit above it, integrate with it and make it consistent. And Securee is one of those areas where having a consistent view, a consistent posture, a consistent read that you can report to the board and know that your efficacy is there or whatever environment you're in, whatever cloud you're on is super, super credible. And in your swim lane, you're providing that consistency for dense, but you're right, you've got to worry about containers, you've got to worry about the runtime, you've got to worry about the platform. The DevSecOps theme is, you know, becoming the new line of defense, right? I mean, they're becoming security experts. Absolutely, well, we have one customer that we've just been working with for four years ago and it's a, you know, a Fortune Global 2000 company, bunch of different industries, Brewthrough Acquisition, et cetera. And four years ago, their CTO said, we're moving to the cloud because we want to drive efficiency and agility and better service offerings across the board. And so he has engineering, so he has Dev, you know, he has operations and he has security teams. And so organizationally, I think that'll be the model as companies do follow entries and sort of, you know, quote, become software companies and move on their digital journeys, integrating the functions of DevSecOps organizationally and then providing a platform and enabling platform that makes their jobs easier for each of those personas is what we do. You want to enable companies to shift left. And if you can solve the problems and the code on the front end, you know, before it gets out in the runtime, you're going to solve, you know, a lot of issues that that exists, correlating the data between what's happening in your runtime and what's happening in your build time and being able to fix it in near real time and integrate with those joint workflows, we think is the right answer over the long, over the long haul. So it's pretty exciting time. Yeah, shift left, the ops team shield right. A hat, great to see you again. Good to see you, Dave. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks a lot. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back, reinforce 2022. You're watching theCUBE from Boston.