 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are coming to you from our Palo Alto studio with our continuing coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, digital this year, like everything in 2020, but we're excited to welcome back to theCUBE. He's been on a number of times. He's Russ Curry, the vice president, enterprise strategy for Netscalf systems. Russ, great to see you. Great to see you, Jeff. Thank you. Absolutely. So before we jump into just so many things going on in 2020, what I do want to do is reflect back a little bit. You were first on theCUBE at AWS re-invent 2017. So it's been about three years. And I remember one of the lines you had said, I believe that was your guys first AWS show as well. So I wonder if you could reflect on kind of how the world has changed in terms of your business and the importance of AWS and public cloud within the infrastructure systems of your clients. Yeah, well, it was interesting, right? We were just getting our feet wet at that point and just introduced some of our technology for use in AWS. And it was kind of an interesting little adventure as we were looking at it and saying, okay, where's this going to lead us? And ultimately now we're just really waist-deep in it really having a great partnership with AWS and delivering new technologies, new capabilities. And our customer base also is becoming so much more reliant on public cloud, in particular AWS and the services that they can provide. So as we've gone and they've gone, it's been a journey that we've taken together and it's been quite fruitful and exciting. Right, right. And it really reinforces this concept of, I think you've mentioned it before, a blended, you know, kind of a blended infrastructure approach. So there's a lot of conversations about public cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, from a customer perspective, as you've mentioned, it's really kind of a blended network, right? And it's really application-centric and you put the applications where those applications need to be to be the most appropriate. And that might even change over time from test dev to early rollout to scale. So you're seeing that consistently, consistently. Absolutely. Yeah, the blended environment, and it's so incredibly complex for our customers as they take a look at the way that the world has changed, right? When we take a look at what has happened with people working remotely, working from home and having to come into access services and such a completely blended and hybrid environment, as you say, not only to move to the cloud, but the move to Colo and bringing all of this together for Interconnect. It's definitely a complex environment that they have to have their fingers on the pulse of, right? Yep, yep. And then, of course, there was this little thing that happened this year with COVID. And really, right, in March, April timeframe, light switch moment, everybody worked from home, whether you're ready or not. And that was a very different kind of situation because we had to get people secure and safe and get them up and operating. So I'm sure you saw a lot of interesting stuff at your business there, but I'm even more interested in how that's evolved over time. Here we are at the end of 2020. There's going to be some version of this for the foreseeable future. And a lot of companies are saying that there'll be a lot of work from anywhere, pieces that continue forward. So again, with your customers and looking at the change between what happened in the spring and now what's happening is they really put in the systems that'll enable them to continue to support people working from anywhere, not even really working from home but working from anywhere. Right, exactly. I mean, as our customers had to bring up more connectivity, new connectivity and start to add licenses for virtual desktop or for their VPN connectivity. Ultimately, they got it done. Most of our customers said, we're running hot but stable. And I think that that was great for most folks but now they're leaning into it and saying, okay, how do we continue to make this happen? And how do we provide the visibility that we need to ensure that the services that we're delivering are making it possible for their users to be productive and successful? A user doesn't want to feel that they're not contributing as much as someone else that may be able to make it into the office. And it's a challenging time but with that being said, technology has really stepped up and in particular, the way that they're able to stand up services in the cloud and the automation and potential cost savings that they get from standing up in the cloud has really been a boon for most of our users. And some of the users, high-end enterprise that were a little bit slow to adopt. Now we're just turning it on as fast as they possibly can. Yeah, it's pretty wild. And then we had another representative off from Netscad on earlier this year, one of the kind of recurring themes that we've seen is changes in the threat landscape. So clearly the increased attack surfaces as more and more people are working from home, they're not working from the secure environment at the office, but you guys noticed some interesting things about what's happening and we've seen a little bit too in terms of kind of ransomware and the increase in ransomware as a particular type of attack that seems to be growing in popularity. And these people are a little bit more thorough in the badness that they cause before they throw in the ransom request and that they're looking for a little bit more fundamental disruption to enable them to basically extract that ransom as which they hope to do. Yeah, I mean, the amount of DDoS attacks that we've seen has just grown incredibly over the past several months and these extortion attacks, they come in and they often hit the customer quickly and hard and then turn it back for a bit and say, pay us or we're gonna shut you down. And they're really coming in more towards the back office aspects of things. So going in and attacking that part of the business is kind of a new environment for a lot of folks. But one of the other interesting challenges here with this is that oftentimes those extortion notes don't make it through to the people that really need to act on them because they get caught in spam filters or the like. So they're fighting these DDoS attacks and don't necessarily understand that they're under an extortion attack. So it's a real challenge for folks and we've seen a good uptake with our on-prem capabilities to provide that kind of protection right at the top of the security stack with our Arbor Edge defense products. So it's been something that we're trying to get out there and help our customers as much as we can and even that new folks. Yeah, it's an interesting environment. And we found out from somebody too that sometimes if you actually pay the bad guys you can be breaking other rules for doing business with countries or people that we're not supposed to be doing business with. Like that's the last thing you need to think about when you're trying to get all your data and your company back online. Right, I mean you're trying to make sure that you're keeping yourself stood up, right? And it's tough and kind of the rule one is never pay the extortion, right? But you kind of got to take a look at it and say, hey, what do I do? Right, right. So you guys been around for a while. I wonder if we could dive in a little bit. We're at Reinvent. Some of the things you guys are doing specifically on the product side to basically increase your AWS capabilities. Sure, thanks, yeah. We've been working really closely with AWS as they start to roll out new technologies last year, we were fundamental in the VPC Ingress Routing announcement that they had. We've been working with them with their traffic mirroring capabilities. So technology-wise, we keep in close touch with them in terms of everything that they are delivering. But also on the business side of it, we have our networking competency and just last week got our migration competency. So what we're really doing is trying to both work the technical and the business relationship as much as we can to try and expand our overall capabilities of footprint with AWS and having that visibility and being able to kind of provide that same level of control and capability that you had on-prem in your enterprise network as you move into the public cloud is a great benefit to a lot of our customers. They really have the ability now to deliver services the way they have been delivering it for years and years. Now, what do you mean specifically when you say migration competency or networking competency? So they have these different competency programs for their technology partners. And the networking competency is that you've demonstrated capabilities in your ability to provide network monitoring or network management capabilities or network connectivity. In the application migration side, you've really provided the ability to show that you have the tools and solution set to drive and help people have successful migrations into AWS. As you can imagine right now, a lot of folks are just lifting and shifting putting stuff into AWS as quickly as they can to try and take advantage of the automation and the operational efficiencies that you get when you move into public cloud settings. And as you make those migrations, you want to ensure that you're not either leaving something behind that needed to move with it or building a dependency onto something that's in the background that's going to have an adverse effect on user experience. And ultimately it really all comes down to the user experience that you're delivering to your customers and or your user base, right? Right. So one of the things you talked about in a prior interview was kind of the shifting dynamic in terms of network traffic as there's more and more kind of SaaS based applications and there's more kind of an application centric and this kind of API interface between all the applications that the North-South is still significant but the growth in the East-West traffic, meaning kind of inside, if you will, and that some of the unique challenges that come from that from kind of a network monitoring. I wonder if you can share a little bit more color on that as to, and are you continuing to see this increase in East-West relative to North-South and what kind of special opportunities and challenges that presents? There's an absolute growth in terms of the East-West connectivity and traffic that exists out there. In particular, when we take a look at the way that people are implementing software defined networks, NSX, for example, NSXT has now provided the ability to blend your environment, whether you're going to any cloud, any vendor. As you move between these environments, having that ability to deliver network services under the same framework is really beneficial to our customer base. And we've also been partnering very closely with VMware and a lot of our customers are implementing VMware Cloud on AWS. So they have that ability to stand up services in a consistent manner, whether it be in their legacy environments or into the public cloud environments and have that same ability to provide visibility down into the East-West traffic. So that you can see that. So when you're a part of the NSX framework, what you're able to do is really leverage the service framework that they have, the service and search it and be part of the clusters and host groups that are exchanging traffic East-West. And our ability to see into that really exposes not exposes challenges, but exposes potential issues that our customers might be having in delivering high-quality services. So that visibility is really what we've been keying on. Right. I'm just curious to get your take, as people kind of, as you said, make this move to public cloud. And you talked about wholesale migrations and wholesale lifts and shifts. There's kind of a couple of trains of thought. One is using cloud for just pure economics and trying to save money and the flexibility. The second one is to add this automation as things grow and these great opportunities to automate and try to reduce air. But the third one, right, the big one is to drive innovation and to unlock innovation and enable better innovation and speed of delivery and moving at the speed of business, pick your favorite buzzword. I'm curious whether your customers, as you've seen them all jumping in, how much of it is still to save money or to kind of use the basic cost-saving economics versus people really embracing the opportunity to use this as a method to drive innovation and change within their own business? So I think the realities of 2020 have been forcing people to look at primarily from operational and cost efficiency perspectives. However, with an eye towards innovation and as they start to get themselves into a zone where they're comfortable, they look to see how they can leverage the cloud to provide new services and new ways in which they provide their services and avail themselves of the underlying technologies that are there to build something that's new and exciting in their overall portfolio. So I think that 2021 is probably going to be a little bit more of where can I innovate as opposed to how do I get there? It's probably an unfair question here in 2020 because priorities certainly got turned upside down in the middle of the year. So maybe innovation got pushed down a little bit from let's get people up, let's get people safe and let's make sure they can access all the systems and all this crazy stuff that we've got available to them from wherever they are, not just within the home office. I was listening to a panel from federal government a couple of weeks ago and it was really interesting the way that they've adopted kind of commercial capabilities to meet some of these challenges, things that they wouldn't normally look at, but now it's a set of innovation that they're looking at to try and make sure that they can avail themselves of the services that are out there and available in the public cloud. Yeah, well, that's great, Russ. Well, it's great to catch up. I'm sure you must be as amazed as anybody as the rapid acceleration of this. You know, since the short time you went to your first reinvent and clearly AWS and Amazon generally is an execution machine, so I think they'll keep doing it. So I think you're probably sitting in a good spot. I think so, thank you. All right, thank you, Russ, for stopping by and sharing your insight. Look forward to catching up next time. Thanks a lot, Jeff, really appreciate it. Alrighty, he's Russ, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS Reinvent 2020, the virtual event. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.