 down in San Francisco at the RSA conference, RSA sees the hashtag 40,000 security professionals talking about how to keep us all safe from the bad guys out there. And we're excited to be joined by a longtime industry veteran, Tom Cornese, the SVP security products from VMware. Tom, welcome. Thank you. So you've been coming to this show for a while. You've been in the business for a while. Yes. What's kind of your take on the vibe of how this industry is changing? You know, it's funny that thing that strikes me when you come to the RSA conference is at once, how big the industry is and how small the industry is, right? Massive amount of people and it's incredible you walk through the floor if you've been around the industry for any amount of time. How many people you actually know? It's a small world in a very small community. Because they're all here. All 40,000 of them are here. They are, they are. So big thing that's changed over the last couple of years is cloud, right? And the adoption of cloud and really AWS kind of driving the public cloud piece and Salesforce really driving kind of the, I'm happy with an enterprise application for a cloud-based application. That wasn't the way before. So how's kind of cloud impacted the way you think about security? Well, I think most of the dialogue in cloud has been how do we secure the cloud? And I think that's a very valid set of questions in any environment. How am I going to secure this environment? I think the interesting thing that hasn't been talked about as much is, is there a way to use the unique properties of the cloud to secure things, right? We look to the cloud and we say there's all these interesting unique properties, automation, a single fabric across a virtualization layer in between applications that are sitting above and the infrastructure to the below. There isn't a lot of dialogue until the last maybe year or so in, could we use the cloud? And could we use virtualization to secure things? And I think that's actually an enormous opportunity. And I'll tell you why. I think that one of the biggest gaps we have in security now, is actually an architectural one, right? We're trying to protect applications and data. We're doing it by putting controls and products from around this show floor on machines and on network links, right? And those are not the same thing. Aligning controls to the infrastructure is not helping us align them to the applications and data we're trying to protect. And there's I think an enormous opportunity to leverage cloud and virtualization, which is actually a translation layer between the two, to really solve this problem in a very, very meaningful way. So from hearing you right, it's really virtualizing the protection of the data, virtualizing the protection of the, I don't know, devices is the right word, right? Because you want to virtualize the devices. You're not really protecting devices. You're protecting the image of a device, I guess. Yeah, it's actually allowing us to create, for example, logical boundaries around critical applications and critical data to allow us to align controls to the thing we're protecting. And that's the whole idea behind, for example, microsegmentation, which is a very, very big move today. This is maybe the best analogy I've heard so far, which is if you think of a data center as a city, when we used to have monolithic stack applications, it was kind of like having an entire application on a skyscraper and that was the only tenant, right? And when you had that, the front door of that building, no one in the city could touch any part of that application without going through that door. So access policy was very simple. And if I wanted to look at, well, what looks weird here? It looked normal or weird. Someone passing through this door or activity happening there. There's only one tenant. It was a very simple picture. Applications don't look like that. Applications are distributed systems. It's like parts of floors of different buildings and different parts of the city. We've lost the front door. And they're all API based too, right? They're all connected to one another. Absolutely, absolutely. So that, more than anything, has changed the equation, making it, despite the fantastic innovation we have across this show floor, makes it very difficult for them to do the great job they're capable of doing, which is we need somehow to put them in a position to focus them, to create a skyscraper, a virtual skyscraper, if you will, around these critical applications and data. That's one of the biggest opportunities of using the cloud, of using virtualization to secure things. And frankly, what a lot of this whole movement towards microsegmentation is doing. So what does that look like extending your skyscraper analogy? If it was a skyscraper before, what's it going to look like in the future? Well, as an example, it's about saying this critical application, SAP, or some third gen application is composed of these pieces, these machines, these containers. It's about using the fabric, the overlay, the virtualization or cloud fabric, to create a logical boundary around those. A logical boundary that moves with it, that expands with it, that shrinks with it. If it changes clouds, it moves with it. And it allows you to then say, I want to take the products, whatever security products I want, and align them around that boundary. I create a skyscraper again, not by changing my network, not by changing my servers, but by creating sort of using just the virtualization layer to create that logical boundary. And it's really, it's having a really significant impact. It's one of the reasons, I think, as we look to the coming year, this notion of aligning security to applications and the notion of more security innovation coming out of not security companies, but infrastructure players and cloud players, I think it's going to be a thing we're going to see a lot of. All right, well, I look forward to digging more into this because it's always a great innovation when you kind of turn the lens, right? And reshape the problem in a different, from a different point of view, and that's when you can really see some new opportunities. But I know you got to get to your booth. So here's Tom Korn, I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE from RSA. Thanks for stopping by, Tom. My pleasure. All right, see you next time.