 If you really want to make an impact to your business, it takes more than just moving your workloads into the cloud. So-called lift and shift is fine to reduce data center footprints and associated costs, but to really drive change, you don't want to simply pave the cow path, as the saying goes, rather you need to think about the operating model and that requires more comprehensive systems thinking. In other words, how will changes in technology affect business productivity? Or you know what, even flip that, what changes in my business process could lower cost, cut elapsed times and accelerate time to market, increase user productivity and lower operational risks, and what role can technology play in supporting these mandates through modernization, automation, machine intelligence and business resilience? And that's what we're here to discuss today. Welcome to driving business results with cloud transformation made possible by Dell and DXC. My name is Dave Vellante and today we're going to zoom out and explore many aspects of cloud transformation that leading organizations are acting on today. Yes, sure, we're going to look at optimizing infrastructure, but we'll also dig deeper into cloud considerations, governance, compliance and security angles, as well as the impact of emerging opportunities around edge and industry 4.0. Our focus will be on how to remove barriers and help you achieve business outcomes. Now to do this, our program features the long-term partnership between Dell and DXC. And we bring to this program six experts in three separate sessions who are working directly with top organizations in virtually every industry to achieve high impact results. We're going to start with a conversation about cloud, the cloud operating model and transforming key aspects of your infrastructure. And then we'll look into governance, security and business resilience. And in our third session, we'll discuss exciting transformations that are occurring in smart manufacturing, and facilities innovations. So let's get right into it with our first session. Enjoy the program. Hello and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud transformation. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for Cloud and Infrastructure Services and Jay Dowling, America's sales lead for cloud and infrastructure services, both with DXC technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today. Welcome to theCUBE. Great, thanks for having us. Thank you Dave, appreciate it. So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeros to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift. You really got to think about modernizing the application portfolio. You got to think about your business model and really think about transforming your businesses, particularly the operating model. So my first question, Jim, is what role does the cloud play in modernization? Well, there are really three aspects that the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeros. One is cost optimization, and that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social and governance, also being more efficient with your IT investments, but that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation, and that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience, and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment, which the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience, and I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience, to be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry, and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these three aspects, cost optimization, agility and innovation, and resilience. So thank you for that. So Jay, I got to ask you in the current climate, everybody's still concerned and there's not great visibility on the macro. So Jim mentioned cost optimization. That seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are consolidating redundant vendors and optimizing cloud costs. So that's top of mind today. I think everybody really understands the innovation and agility piece, at least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different, and then the business resilience piece is really interesting because prior to the pandemic, people, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, wow, my business may not be that resilient. So Jay, my question to you is, what are you hearing when you talk to customers? What's the priority today? You know, the priority is often overused term of digital transformation. People want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, how they engage with their clients and what their branding is. And what we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that, but with DXC's philosophy, not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized, for instance. In many cases, you can run applications in your own data center or on-prem or in other environments, in a hybrid environment or a multi-cloud environment and still be very optimized from a cost spend standpoint and also put yourself in position for modernization and be able to bring the things to the business that their clients are looking for, like the CMO and the CFO, et cetera, trying to use IT as a lever to drive business and to drive business acceleration and drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it. And we advocate for, there's not a single answer to that. We'd like to evaluate clients' environments and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model, so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. So let's talk about some of the barriers to realizing value in a context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility and resilience, but there's a business angle and there's a technical angle here. We always talk about people process and technology. Technology, oftentimes, CIOs will tell us, well, that's the easy part. We'll figure that out, whether it's true or not. But I agree. People and process are sometimes the tough ones. So, Jay, why don't you start? What do you see as the barriers, particularly from a business standpoint? I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are out there in the market from the standards that are being built by best-in-class models. And there's many people that have got on cloud journeys and been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So, there's a change management aspect that you need to look at with the environments. There's a skill set environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people to deliver with the tools and the skills and the models that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now. There's just a lot of different elements. It's not just that this price is better or this can operate better than one environment over the other. I think we like to try to look at things holistically and make sure that we're being as much of a consultative advocate for the client for where they wanna go, what their destiny is, and based on what we've learned with other clients, and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked across such a broad spectrum of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own challenges if you would. So, they need advocacy to help bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through technology advances which Jim is really good at doing for us. Yeah, Jim, is it a big barrier skills issue, bench strength, are there other considerations from your perspective? Well, we've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of customers. One is thinking it's only a technology change in moving to cloud when it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers and you have to be flexible enough to determine which providers you want and it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation. I want to move everything and I want to move it all at once. That's not necessarily the best approach, a well thought out cloud journey and strategy and timing your investments are really important to get it maximizing your business return on the journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your cost savings and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. You know, I mentioned multi-cloud just then. We had in January 17th, we had our super cloud two event and super cloud is basically, it's really multi, what multi-clouds should have been I like to say. So it's just creating a common experience across clouds and you guys were talking about, you know, there's different governance, there's different security, there's different pricing. So, and one of the takeaways from this event and talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you could talk about your partnership strategy, what are partners bring to the table and what is DXC's unique value? I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. Great. I, you know, we've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC given the size and the history of the company. I can use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell Technology, right? They're a great, you know, partner for us across many different areas of the business. So it's not just a storage and compute play anymore. They're on the edge. They're, you know, they've got intelligence in their networking devices now. And they've really brought, you know, a lot of value to us as a partner and, you know, there's somebody who could look at Dell Technology as somebody that might, you know, have a victim, you know, effect because of all the hyperscale activity or the cloud activity, but they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and say, listen, not all things are destined for cloud or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment. And they'd like to be part of those discussions to see how they can, you know, how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, you know, both private and public, you know, to clients and let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and what's, you know, what's the best optimal running environment, you know, for us to be able to bring, you know, the greatest value to the business with speed, with security, you know, and, you know, the things that they want to keep closest to the business are often things that you want to kind of, you know, keep on your premise or keep in your own data center. So they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced as well, partners with us well in the market and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate, you know, their support of our strategy and we like to also compliment their strategy and work, you know, work together hand-in-hand in front of our clients. Yeah, you know, Jim, Matt Baker, who's the head of strategic planning at Dell, talks about it's not a zero-sum game and I think, you know, you're right, Jay. I think initially people felt like, oh, wow, it is a zero-sum game, but it's clearly not. And this idea of whether you call it super cloud or Uber cloud or multi-cloud, clearly Dell is headed in that direction and I've, you know, look at some of their future projects, their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint, Jim, what your role is, is it to make it all work? Is it to, you know, end to end? I wonder if you could help, you know, us understand that. Help us figure this out, Jim, here. Yeah. Glad to expand on that. One of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners, where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table. And we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customers' changing needs over time. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers and work with our partners to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now, predates, you know, the name DXC and that transformation. I'm curious as to how you would respond to what's unique. You know, you hear a lot about partnerships. You guys got a lot of competition. Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? I think- I would say our unique approach, we call it cloud right. And that approach is making the right investments at the right time and on the right platforms. And our partners play a key role in that. So we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach, but a cloud right approach where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective, and even a security and governance perspective. And the right approach might include mainframe. It might include an on-premises infrastructure. It could include private cloud, public cloud and SaaS components all integrated together to deliver that value. Yeah, Jay, please, it was a complicated situation that a lot of customers would chime in here. And if you were speaking specifically to Dell here, like they also walk the talk, right? They invest in DXC as a partnership. They put people on the ground that their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell in arm and arm in front of clients. And it's not a winter take all thing at all. It's really true partnership. They brought solution resources. We have an account CTO. We've got executive sponsorship. We do regular QBR meetings. We have regular executive touch point meetings. It's really important that you keep a high level of intimacy with the client, with the partners and the GSI community. And I've been with several GSI's and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell technology. I'm really extremely impressed on the engagement level that we've had there and continue to show a lot of support, both for them. There's other OEM partners of course in the market. There's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients. But this has been a particularly strong element for us in our partnership and in our go-to-market strategy. Well, I think too just my observation is a lot of us about trust. You guys have both earned the trust kind of over the years, taking your arrows over decades. And that just doesn't happen overnight. So guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting cloud right, isn't it? That's right. Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. JJ. Thank you. Great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on theCUBE. Right back. Welcome back to the program. My name is Dave Vellante. And in this session, we're going to explore one of the more interesting topics of the day, IOT for smart factories. And with me are Todd Edmonds, the global CTO of smart manufacturing edge and digital twins at Dell Technologies. That is such a cool title. I want to be you. And Dr. Aditi Banerjee, who's the vice president general manager for aerospace defense and manufacturing at DXC Technology. Another really cool title folks. Welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Great to be here. Nice to be here. Todd, let's start with you. We hear a lot about industry, 4.0, smart factories, IOT. Can you briefly explain like what is industry 4.0 all about and why is it important for the manufacturing industry? Yeah, sure Dave. You know, it's been around for quite a while and it's gone by multiple different names. As you said, industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, industrial IOT, smart factory, but it all really means the same thing. It's really applying technology to get more out of the factories and the facilities that you have to do your manufacturing. So being much more efficient, implementing really good sustainability initiatives. And so we really look at that by saying, okay, what are we going to do with technology to really accelerate what we've been doing for a long, long time? So it's really not, it's not new. It's been around for a long time. What's new is that manufacturers are looking at this not as a one-off, two-off individual use case point of view, but instead they're saying, we really need to look at this holistically, thinking about a strategic investment in how we do this, not to just enable one or two use cases, but enable many, many use cases across the spectrum. I mean, there's tons of them out there. There's predictive maintenance and there's OEE, overall equipment effectiveness and there's computer vision. And all of these things are starting to percolate down to the factory floor, but it needs to be done in a little bit different way. And really to really get those outcomes that they're looking for in smart factory or industry 4.0 or however you want to call it and truly transform, not just throw an industry 4.0 use case out there, but to do the digital transformation that's really necessary and to be able to stay relevant for the future. I heard it once said that you have three options. Either you digitally transform and stay relevant for the future or you don't and fade into history like 52% of the companies that used to be on the Fortune 500 since 2000. And so really that's a key thing and we're seeing that really, really being adopted by manufacturers all across the globe. Yeah, so Aditya, it's like digital transformation is almost synonymous with business transformation. So is there anything you'd add to what Todd just said? Absolutely, so I would really add that what really drives industry 4.0 is the business transformation, what we are able to deliver in terms of improving the manufacturing KPIs and the KPIs for customer satisfaction, right? For example, improving the downtime, or decreasing the maintenance cycle of the equipments or improving the quality of products, right? So I think these are a lot of business outcomes that our customers are looking at while using industry 4.0 and the technologies of industry 4.0 to deliver these outcomes. So Aditya, I wonder if I could stay with you and maybe this is a bit esoteric, but when I first started researching IoT and industrial IoT, 4.0, et cetera, I felt while there could be some disruptions in the ecosystem, I kind of came to the conclusion that large manufacturing firms, aerospace, defense companies, the firms building out critical infrastructure actually had kind of an incumbent advantage and a great opportunity. Of course then I saw on TV somebody now they're building homes with 3D printers and it's like blows your mind. So that's pretty disruptive, but they got to continue, the incumbents have to continue to invest in the future. They're well-capitalized, they're pretty good businesses, very good businesses, but there's a lot of complexities involved in kind of connecting the old house to the new addition that's being built, if you will, or this transformation that we're talking about. So my question is, how are your customers preparing for this new era? What are the key challenges that they're facing in the blockers, if you will? Yeah, I mean, the customers are looking at industry 4.0 for greenfield factories, right? That is where the investments are going directly into building the factories with the new technologies, with the new connectivities, right? For the machines, for example, industrial IoT having the right type of data platforms to drive computational analytics and outcomes as well as looking at edge versus cloud type of technologies, though those are getting built in the greenfield factories, however, for the install-based factories, right? That is where our customers are looking at, how do I modernize these factories? How do I connect the existing machine? And that is where some of the challenges come in on the legacy system connectivity that they need to think about. Also, they need to start thinking about cybersecurity and operation technology security, right? Because now you are connecting the factories to each other, right? So cybersecurity becomes top of mind, right? So there is definitely investment that is involved. Clients are creating roadmaps for digitizing and modernizing these factories and investments in a very strategic way, right? So perhaps they start with the innovation program and then they look at the business case and the scale it up, right? Todd, I'm glad you brought up security because if you think about the operations technology folks, historically, they air-gapped the systems. That's how they created security. That's changed. The business came in and said, hey, we got to connect. We got to make it intelligent. So that's got to be a big challenge as well. It actually is, Dave. And you can no longer just segment that because really to get all of those efficiencies that we talk about that IoT and industrial IoT and IndustryFog4.0 promise, you have to get data out of the factory, but then you got to put data back in the factory. So no longer is it just firewalling everything is really the answer. So you really have to have a comprehensive approach to security, but you also have to have a comprehensive approach to the cloud and what that means and doesn't mean a continuum of cloud all the way down to the edge, right down to the factory. It absolutely does because no one approach has the answer to everything. The more you go to the cloud, the broader the attack surfaces. So what we're seeing is a lot of our customers approaching this from kind of that hybrid right once run anywhere on the factory floor down to the edge. And one of the things we're seeing too is to help distinguish between what is the edge and bridge that gap between like Dave, you talked about IT and OT and also help that what Editi talked about is the green field plants versus the brown field plants that they call it that are the legacy ones and modernizing those is it's great to kind of start to delineate what does that mean? Where's the edge? Where's the IT and the OT? We see that from a couple of different ways. We start to think about really two edges in a manufacturing floor. We talk about an industrial edge that sits or some people call it a far edge or a thin edge sits way down on that plant consists of industrial hardened devices that do that connectivity the hard stuff about how do I connect to this obsolete legacy protocol? And what do I do with it and create that next generation of data that has context? And then we see another edge evolving above that which is much more of a data and analytics and enterprise grade application layer that sits down in the factory itself that helps figure out where we're gonna run Does it connect to the cloud? Do we run applications on-prem? Because a lot of times that on-prem application needs to be done because that's the only way that it's gonna work because of security requirements because of latency requirements, performance and a lot of times cost. It's really helpful to build that multiple edge strategy because then you consolidate all of those resources applications, infrastructure, hardware into a centralized location makes it much, much easier to really deploy and manage that security but it also makes it easier to deploy new applications new use cases and become the foundation for DXC's expertise and applications that they deliver to our customers as well. Todd, how complex are these projects? I mean, I feel like it's kind of the digital equivalent of building the Hoover Dam. I mean, so how long does a typical project take? I know it varies, but what, you know what are the critical success factors in terms of delivering business value quickly? Yeah, that's a great question in that and that we're, you know, like I said at the beginning we, this is not new smart factory and industry 4.0 is not new. It's been, people have been trying to implement the holy grail of smart factory for a long time and what we're seeing is a switch, a little bit of a switch or quite a bit of a switch to where the enterprise and the IT folks are having a much bigger say and have a lot to offer to be able to help that complexity. So instead of deploying a computer here and a gateway there and a server there maybe you go walk into any manufacturing plant and you can see servers sitting underneath someone's desk or a PC in a closet somewhere running a critical production application. So we're seeing the enterprise have a much bigger say at the table, much louder voice at the table to say we've been doing this enterprise all the time. We know how to really consolidate bring hyperconverged applications, hyperconverged infrastructure to really accelerate these kinds of applications really accelerate the outcomes that are needed to really drive that smart factory and start to bring that same capabilities down into the factory floor. That way, if you do it once to make it easier to implement, you can repeat that, you can scale that, you can manage it much easily and you can then bring that all together because you have the security in one centralized location. So we're seeing manufacturers, yeah, that first use case may be fairly difficult to implement. We got to go down in and see exactly what their problems are but when the infrastructure is done the correct way when that think about how you're gonna run that and how are you gonna optimize the engineering? Well, let's take that what you've done in that one factory and then set, let's make that across all the factories including the factory that we're in, but across the globe. That makes it much, much easier. You really do the hard work once and then repeat almost like a cookie cutter. Got it, thank you. Aditi, what about the skill sets available to apply to these projects? You got to have knowledge of digital, AI, data, integration, is there a talent shortage to get all this stuff done? Yeah, I mean definitely different types of skill sets are needed from a traditional manufacturing skill set, right? Of course the basic knowledge of manufacturing is important but the digital skill sets like IOT having a skill set in different protocols for connecting the machines, right? That experience that comes with it, data and analytics, security, augmented virtual reality programming, again looking at robotics and the digital twin. So it's a lot more connectivity, software, data-driven skill sets that are needed to smart factory to life at scale. And lots of firms are recruiting these types of resources with these skill sets to accelerate their smart factory implementation as well as consulting firms like DXC technology and others. We recruit, we train our talent to provide these services. Got it, Aditi, I wonder if we could stay on you. Let's talk about the partnership between DXC and Dell. What are you doing specifically to simplify the move to Industry 4.0 for customers? What solutions are you offering? How are you working together Dell and DXC to bring these to market? Yeah, Dell and DXC have a very strong partnership and we work very closely together to create solutions, to create strategies and how we are going to jointly help our clients, right? So areas that we have worked closely together is edge compute, right? How that impacts the smart factory. So we have worked pretty closely in that area. We're also looked at vision technologies. How do we use that at the edge to improve the quality of products, right? So we have several areas that we collaborate in and our approach is that we wanna bring solutions to our client and as well as help them scale those solutions with the right infrastructure, the right talent and the right level of security. So we bring a comprehensive solution to our clients. So, Todd, last question, kind of similar but different. You know, why Dell DXC? Pitch me, what's different about this partnership? You know, where are you confident that you're gonna deliver the best value to customers? Absolutely, great question. You know, there's no shortage of bespoke solutions that are out there. There's hundreds of people that can come in and do individual use cases and do these things and just, and that's where it ends. What Dell and DXC technology together bring to the table is we do the optimization, the optimization of the engineering of those previously bespoke solutions upfront together, right? And so, we're gonna be able to use that as a power of our scalables, enterprise grade, structured, you know, industry standard infrastructure, as well as our expertise in delivering packaged solutions that really accelerate with DXC's expertise and reputation as a global trusted advisor, be able to really scale and repeat those solutions that DXC is so really, really good at and are what, 30,000 people across the globe that are really, really good at that scalable infrastructure to be able to repeat. And then it really lessens the risk that our customers have and really accelerates those solutions. So it's, again, not just one individual solutions, it's all of the solutions that not just drive use cases but drive outcomes with those solutions. Yeah, you're right, the partnership has gone. I mean, I first encountered it back in, I think it was 2010, May of 2010, we had you guys both on the queue. I think we were talking about converged infrastructure and I had a customer on and it was actually a manufacturing customer. It was quite interesting. Back then, it was how do we kind of replicate what's coming in the cloud and you guys have obviously taken it into the digital world. Really want to thank you for your time today. Great conversation and love to have you back. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure speaking with you. I agree. All right, keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire on theCUBE. Welcome back to the program and we're going to dig into the number one topic on the minds of every technology organization that's cybersecurity. You know, survey data from ETR, data partner, shows that among CIOs and IT decision makers, cybersecurity continues to rank as the number one technology priority to be addressed in the coming year. That's ahead of even cloud migration and analytics and with me to discuss this critical topic area are Jim Schuch, who's the Global Director of Cybersecurity and Compliance Practice at Dell Technologies and he's joined by Andrew Gonzalez who focuses on cloud and infrastructure consulting at DXC Technology. Gents, welcome. Good to have you. Thanks, Dave. Great to be here. Thank you. Jim, let's start with you. What are you seeing from the front lines in terms of the attack surface and how are customers responding these days? It's always up and down and back and forth. Bad actors are smart. They adapt to everything that we do. So we're seeing more and more kind of living off the land. They're not necessarily deploying malware, makes it harder to find what they're doing. And I think though, Dave, we've adapted and this whole notion of cyber resilience really helps our customers figure this out. And the idea there goes beyond cybersecurity. It's let's protect as much as possible so we keep the bad actors out as much as we can. But then let's have the ability to adapt to and recover to the extent that the bad actors are successful. So we're recognizing that we can't be perfect 100% of the time against 100% of the bad actors. Let's keep out what we can, but then recognize and have that ability to recover when necessary. Yeah, thank you. So Andrew, I liked what Jim was saying about living off the land, of course, meaning using your own tooling against you, kind of hiding in plain sight, if you will. But, and as Jim was saying, you can't be perfect. But so given that, what's your perspective on what good cybersecurity hygiene looks like? Yeah, so you have to understand what your crown jewel data looks like, what a good copy of a recoverable asset looks like when you look at an attack, if it were to occur, right? How you get that copy of data back into production. And not only that, but what that golden image actually entails. So whether it's networking, storage, some copy of a source code intellectual property, maybe seem to be data or an active directory or DNS dump, right? Understanding what your data actually entails so that you can protect it and that you can build out your recovery plan for it. So, and where does that live? Where does that gold copy put in a yellow sticky? No, it's gotta be somewhere safe, right? So you have to think about that chain as well, right? Absolutely. Yeah, so a lot of folks have not gone through the exercise of identifying what that golden copy looks like. Everyone has a DR scenario. Everyone has a DR strategy, but actually identifying what that golden crown jewel data, let's call it actually entails is one aspect of it and then where to put it, how to protect it, how to make it immutable and isolated. That's the other portion of it. If I go back to sort of earlier part of last decade, cybersecurity was kind of a check off item and as you got toward the middle part of the decade, I'd say clearly by 2016, it security became a boardroom issue, it was on the agenda, every quarter at the board meetings. So compliance is no longer the driver is my point. The driver is business risk, real loss of reputation or data or money et cetera, what are the business implications of not having your cyber house in order today? They're extreme, Dave. I mean, the bad actors are good at what they do. These losses by organizations, 10s hundreds of millions into the billions sometimes plus the reputational damage that's difficult to really measure. There haven't been a lot of organizations that have actually been put out of business by an attack, at least not directly if they're larger organizations, but that's also on the table too. So you can't just rely on, oh, we need to do A, B and C because our regulators require it. You need to look at what the actual risk is to the business and then come up with the strategy from there. You know, Jim, say with you, one of the most common targets we hear of attackers is to go after the backup corpus. So how should customers think about protecting themselves from that tactic? Well, Dave, you hit on it before, right? Everybody's had the backup and DR strategies for a long time going back to requirements that we had in place for physical disaster or human error. And that's a great starting point for a resilience capability, but that's all it is as a starting point because the bad actors will, they also understand that you have those capabilities and they've adapted to that. In every sophisticated attack that we see, the backup is a target, the bad actors want to take it out or corrupt it or do something else to that backup so that it's not available to you. That's not to say they're always successful and it's still a good control to have in place because maybe it will survive, but you have to plan beyond that. So the capabilities that we talk about with resilience, let's harden that backup infrastructure. You've already got it in place. Let's use the capabilities that are there like immutability and other controls to make it more difficult for the bad actors to get to. But then as Andrew said that gold copy that critical systems, you need to protect that in something that's more secure, which commonly we might say a cyber vault or there's a lot of different capabilities for cyber vaulting some far better than others. And that's some of the things that we focus on. You know, it's interesting, but I've talked to a lot of CIOs about this as prior to the pandemic, they had their, as you're pointing out, Jim, they had their DR strategy in place, but they felt like they weren't business resilient and they realized that when we had the forced march to digital. So Andrew, are there solutions out there to help with this problem? Do you guys have an answer to this? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm glad you brought up resiliency. We take a position that to be cyber resilient, it includes operational resiliency. It includes understanding at the C level what the implication of an attack means as we stated and then how to recover back into production. When you look at protecting that data, not only do you wanna put it into what we call a vault, which is a Dell technology that is an offline immutable copy of your crown jewel data, but also how to recover it in real time. So DXC offers a, I don't wanna call it a turnkey solution since we architect these specific each client needs, right? When we look at what client data entails, their recovery point objectives, recovery time objectives, what we call quality of the restoration. But when we architect these out, we look at not only how to protect the data, but how to alert and monitor for attacks in real time, how to understand what we should do when a breach is in progress, putting together with our security operation centers a forensic and recovery plan and a runbook for the client and then being able to cleanse and remediate so we can get that data back into production. These are all services that DXC offers in conjunction with the Dell solution to protect and recover and keep bad actors out. And if we can't keep them out to ensure that we are back into production in short order. You know, this discussion we've been having about DR kind of versus resilience and you were just talking about RPO and RTO. I mean, it used to be that a lot of firms wouldn't even test their recovery because it was too risky or maybe they tested it on July 4th or something like that. But I'm inferring that's changed. I wonder if we could double click on recovery. How hard is it to test that recovery and how quickly are you seeing organizations recover from attacks? So it depends, right? On the industry vertical, what kind of data? Again, financial services client compared to manufacturing client are going to be two separate conversations. We've seen it as quickly as being able to recover in six hours, in 12 hours. In some instances, we have the grace period of a day to a couple of days. We do offer the ability to run scenarios once a quarter where we can stand up in our systems, the production data that we are protecting to ensure that we have a good recoverable copy. But it depends on the client. I really like the emphasis here, Dave, that you're raising and that Andrew's talking about. It's not on the technology of how the data gets protected. It's focused on the recovery. That's all that we want to do. And so the solution with DXC really focuses on generating that recovery for customers. I think where people get a little bit twisted up on their testing capability is you have to think about different scenarios. So there are scenarios where the attack might be small. It might be limited to a database or an application. It might be really broadly based like the NotPetya attacks from a few years ago. The regulatory environment would call those attacks severe but plausible. So you can't necessarily test everything with the infrastructure, but you can test some things with the infrastructure. Others you might sit around on a tabletop exercise or walk through what that looks like to really get that recovery muscle memory so that people know what to do when those things occur. But the key to it, as Andrew said before, have to focus down what are those critical applications? What do we need? What's most important? What has to come back first? And that really will go a long way towards having the right recovery points and recovery times from a cyber disaster. Yeah, it makes sense. Understanding the value of that data is going to inform you how to respond and how to prioritize. Andrew, one of the things that we hear a lot on theCUBE, especially lately is around, IOT, IIOT, Industry 4.0, the whole OT security piece of it. And the problem being that traditionally operations technologies have been air-gapped, often by design, but as businesses, increasingly they're driving initiatives like Industry 4.0 and they're connecting these OT systems to IT systems. They're driving efficiency, preventative maintenance, et cetera. So a lot of data flowing through the pipes, if you will. What are you seeing in terms of the threats to critical infrastructure and how should customers think about addressing these issues? Yeah, so bad actors can come in many forms. We've seen instances of social engineering. We've seen a USB stick dropped in a warehouse. That data that is flowing through the IoT devices as sensitive now as your core mainframe infrastructure data. So when you look at it from a protection standpoint, conceptually it's not dissimilar from what we've been talking about where you wanna understand, again, what the most critical data is. Looking at IoT data and applications is no different than your core systems now, right? Depending on what your business is, right? So when we're looking at protecting these, yes, we want firewalls, yes, we want air-gap solutions, yes, we want front end protection, but we're looking at it from a resiliency perspective, putting that data, understanding what data entails to put in the vault from an IoT perspective is just as critical as it is for your core systems. Graham, anything you can add to this topic? Yeah, I think you hit on the key points there. Everything is interconnected. So even in the days where maybe people thought the OT systems weren't online, oftentimes the IT systems are talking to them or controlling them, SCADA systems, or perhaps supporting them. Think back to the pipeline attack of last year, all the public testimony was that the OT systems didn't get attacked directly, but there was uncertainty around that and the IT systems hadn't been secured. So that caused the OT systems to have to shut down. It certainly is a different recovery when you're shutting them down on your own versus being attacked, but the outcome was the same that the business couldn't operate. So you really have to take all of those into account and I think that does go back to exactly what Andrew's saying, understanding your critical business services and then the applications and data and other components that support those and drive those and making sure those are protected, you understand them, you have the ability to recover them if necessary. But guys, I mean, you made the point, I mean, you're right, the adversary is highly capable, they're motivated, because the ROI is so lucrative. It's like this never-ending battle that's cyber security pros go through. It really is kind of frontline sort of technical heroes, if you will. And sometimes it just feels daunting. Why are you optimistic about the future of cyber from the good guy's perspective? I think we're coming at the problem the right way, Dave. So that focus, I'm so pleased with the idea that we are planning that the systems aren't going to be 100% capable every single time and let's figure that out, right? That's real world stuff. So just as the bad actors continue to adapt and expand, so do we. And I think the difference is there, the common criminals, it's getting harder and harder for them. The more sophisticated ones, they're tough to beat all the time. And of course, you've raised the question of some nation states and other activities, but there's a lot more information sharing, so a lot more focus from the business side of the house and not just the IT side of the house that we need to figure these things out. Yeah, to add to that, I think furthering education for the client base is important. You brought up a point earlier. It used to be a boardroom conversation due to compliance reasons. Now, as we have been in the market for a while, we continue to mature the offerings. It's further education for not only the business itself, but for the IT systems and how they interconnect and working together so that these systems can be protected and continue to be evolved and continue to be protected through multiple frameworks as opposed to seeing it as another check the box item that the board has to adhere to. All right, guys, we got to go. Thank you so much. Great conversation on a really important topic. Keep up the good work, appreciate it. Thanks, Dan. Thank you. All right, thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more excellent discussions around the partnership between Dell Technologies and DXC Technology. We're talking about solving real world problems, how this partnership has evolved over time, really meeting the changing enterprise landscape challenges. Keep it right there. Okay, we hope you enjoyed the program and learned some things about cloud transformation and modernizing your business that will inspire you to action. Now, if you want to learn more, go to the Dell DXC Partner page shown here or click on the URL in the description. Thanks for watching, everybody, and on behalf of our supporters, Dell and DXC, good luck, and as always, get in touch if we can be of any assistance.