 From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Imagine. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine EDU event. It's a small conference. It's a second year, but it'll grow like a weed, like everything else does at AWS. And it's all about Amazon and AWS for education. And that's everything from K through 12, community college, higher education, retraining vets coming out of the service. It's a really big area. And we're really excited to have fresh off his keynote presentations where he changed his title on me from what it was this morning to what it was this afternoon. He's David Raymond, the director of what was the Virginia Cyber Range and now is the U.S. Cyber Range at Virginia Tech. David, great to see you. Yeah, thank you, thanks. So the Virginia Cyber Range actually will continue to exist in its current form. Okay. It'll still serve faculty and students in the Commonwealth of Virginia, funded by the state of Virginia. Now the U.S. Cyber Range will provide service to folks outside of Virginia. So we jumped ahead. So let's back up a step. What is the Virginia Cyber Range? So the Virginia Cyber Range provides courseware and infrastructure so students can do hands-on cybersecurity educational activities in Virginia high schools and colleges. So funded by the state of Virginia and provides this service at no charge to the schools. And even in high school? Even in high school, yes. So now that there are now cybersecurity courses in the Virginia Department of Education course catalog as of two years ago. And I mean, they've grown like wildfire. I'm just curious. So A, you know, ton of talk here about skills gap and there's tremendous skills gap. Even the machines are going to take everybody's job. There's a whole lot of jobs that aren't fulfilled up there. But what's interesting, I mean, the high school angle is really weird. Most high school kids haven't even kind of clued into privacy and security and opting in and opting out. It's got to be a really interesting conversation when now you bring security into that, a potential career into that and directly reflects on all those things that you do on your phone. Well, I would argue that that's exactly the problem. Students are not exposed to cybersecurity. You know, they don't know what the career potentials are. They really don't understand what it is. You know, we talk about, we talk about teenagers being digital natives. Really, they know how to use smartphones. They know how to use computers, but they don't understand how they work and they don't understand the security aspects that go along with using all this technology. And I would argue that by the time a student gets into college, they have a plan, right? So I have a student in college. He's going to be a doctor. He knows what a doctor is. He's heard of that his whole life. And in high school, he was able to get certified as a nursing assistant. We need cybersecurity in that same realm, right? If we start students in high school and we expose them to cybersecurity courses, they're all elective courses, some of the students will latch onto it and they'll say, hey, this is what I want to be when I grow up. And in Virginia, we have this dearth of cybersecurity expertise, and this is true across the country. In Virginia right now, we have over 30,000 cybersecurity jobs that are unfilled. That's about a third of the cybersecurity jobs in the state. And I mean, that's a serious problem, not only in Virginia, but nationwide. And one of the ways to fix that is to get high school students exposed to cybersecurity classes, give them some real hands-on opportunities. So they're really doing it, not just learning the words and passing the test. And I mean, really, again, in Virginia, this has grown like wildfire and really thinks revolutionized cybersecurity education in the state. And what are some of the topics that say at high school level, where you're kind of getting versed on the vocabulary and the terminology versus when they go into college and start to take those types of courses? Yeah, so in Virginia, there's actually cybersecurity courses across the CTE career pathways. And so CTE is the career and technical education curricula. And so there are courses like cybersecurity and healthcare where students learn about personal health data and how to secure those specific kinds of data. They learn about the regulations behind that data. There's healthcare in manufacturing where students learn about industrial control systems and how those things need to be secured and how they're different from a laptop or a phone and the way those are secured. And what feeds into all of those courses is an introductory course, cybersecurity fundamentals, where students learn some of the very basics. They learn the terminology. They learn things like the CIA triad, right? Confidentiality, integrity and availability are the three basic components of security that you try to maintain for any system. So they start out learning the basics, but still they're doing that hands-on. So they're in a network environment where they see that later on in the course during capstone exercises, they might see someone trying to attack a computer that they're tasked to defend. And as a defender, what does that look like? What are the things that I'm gonna do to that computer? I might install antivirus. I might have a firewall on the computer and how do I set that up and et cetera, et cetera. So high school will start with the basics. As students progress through their high school years, there are opportunities to take further, more advanced classes in the high schools. And then when they get to college, some of those students are gonna have latched on to cybersecurity as a potential career field and now we've got them, right? We can get them into the right majors and into the right courses. And our hope is that that's gonna sort of kickstart this pipeline of students in Virginia colleges. And then I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the support at the state level. I mean, it's pretty interesting that you had it from the state level. We heard earlier today about support at the state level and I think it was Louisiana for another big initiative. So the fact that the governor and the legislature are basically branding this at the state level, not the individual school district level, is a pretty strong statement of the prioritization that they're putting on this. That has been critical to our success. If we didn't have state level support, significant state level support, there's no way we could be where we are. So the previous governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, he latched on to cybersecurity education as one of his signature initiatives. In fact, he was the president of the state governor's association and in that role, cybersecurity was one of his key initiatives. So he felt strongly about educating K-12, educating college students, feeding that cybersecurity pipeline. And the cyber range was one of a handful of different initiatives. So there were veteran scholarships and there were some community college scholarships and other initiatives. Some of those are still ongoing. Some of them are not, but the cyber range has been very successful, funded by the state, provides a service at no cost to high schools and colleges and that's been critical. I can't help, we were at RSA earlier this year and I'm just thinking of all the CEOs that I was sitting with over the course of a couple of days that are probably looking for your phone number right now. I might make an introduction, but I'm curious are the companies, the security companies, I mean, RSA is a huge show, Amazon just had their first ever security conference. I mean, there's a lot of money being invested in this space. Are they behind it? Have you looked for, you know, kind of private company participation to help because they desperately need these employees? Yeah, definitely. So we've just started down that road really. I mean, our state funding has kept us strong to this point and our state funding is going to continue into the foreseeable future. But you're right, there are definitely opportunities to work with industry. Certainly AWS has been a very strong partner of ours since the very beginning. They really, I mean, without the help of some of their cloud architects and other technical folks, we could not have built what we built in the AWS cloud. We've also been talking to Palo Alto about using some of their virtual appliances in our network environments. So yeah, so we're definitely going down the road of industry partnerships and that will continue to grow, I'm sure. So then fast forward today to the keynote and your announcement that now you've taken it beyond just Virginia. So now it's the US cyber range. How did that come about? What does that mean? Yeah, so we've been sharing the story of the Virginia cyber range for the last couple of years and I go to national conferences and talk about it and just to sort of inform other states, other school systems, what Virginia's doing, how could you potentially match what we're doing and what the question that I keep getting is I don't want to reinvent the wheel. How can I buy what you have? And that's been sort of a constant drum beat over the last couple of years. So we decided fairly early on that we might want to try to expand beyond Virginia and just sort of the conditions were right about six months ago. So we set a mark on the wall. We set in summer of 2019, we're going to make this available to folks outside of Virginia. And so again, the Virginia cyber range will still exist funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia. The US cyber range is still part of Virginia Tech so we're within Virginia Tech, but we will have to essentially recoup our costs. So we'll have to spend money on cloud infrastructure and we'll have to spend salary money on folks who support this effort. And so we'll recoup costs from folks that are outside of Virginia using our service, but we think the cost is going to be very competitive compared to similar efforts and we're looking forward to some successes here. And do you think your kind of breakthrough will be at the high school level, the undergrad level? Where do you kind of see the opportunity? Cause you've got the whole thing covered with state support in Virginia. How does that get started in California? How does that get started here in Washington state? That's a great question. So really when we started this, I thought we were building a thing for higher ed. That's my experience. I've been teaching cybersecurity in higher ed for several years and I knew what I would want if I was using it and I do use it. So I teach class at Virginia Tech in the graduate ECE program. And so I use the Virginia cyber range in my class. And what has happened is that the high schools have latched on to this, as I mentioned, and most of our users are high schools in Virginia. We have 180 Virginia high schools using the Virginia cyber range. That's almost half- 180 high schools? 180, that's almost half the high schools in the state using the Virginia cyber range. So we think, and if you think about, higher ed has been teaching cybersecurity classes, the faculty members who have been teaching them, a lot of them have set up their own network infrastructure. They have it set up the way they want it and it ties into their existing courseware and they're gonna use that at least for now. What we provide is something that makes it so that a high school or a community college doesn't have to figure out how to fund or figure out how to actually put this network architecture together. They just come to us. They have the flexibility to use just our very basic plug and play network environments or they have flexibility to make modifications depending on how sophisticated they themselves are with manipulating systems and manipulating the network. So our expectation is that the biggest growth is gonna be in the high school market. Right, that's great. Because when you say cyber range, now it finally dawned on me. It's like a target range. It's like a place to go practice. Where the name comes from, right? Absolutely. If I finally like, oh, okay, I get it. So because it's not only the curriculum and the courseware and everything else, but it's actually an environment in which to stage things and do things and practice things. So students can do offensive, offensive and defensive cybersecurity activities. And so early on when we were teaching students how to hack essentially in colleges, there were people who were concerned about that and the military case we make for that is you can't teach somebody how to defend unless they understand how they're gonna be attacked. And the same is true in this case. So all of our courseware has lots of ethics and other legal and other discussions embedded throughout so students understand the implications of what their actions would be if they do it somewhere else. And right, these are all isolated network environments. They're places where students can get hands on in a place where they can essentially do whatever they want without causing trouble on the school network or on the internet. And it's very much akin to a rifle range. And like you said, you can have different scenarios and I would imagine there's probably going to be competitions if you think back to what's going on in the robotics world and all these things, right? It's like white hat, black hat, a hacker. Well, very, very exciting, David. Congratulations and sounds like you're well on your way. Thanks, great. All right, he sees David, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We are at Washington State Convention Center just across the street at AWS Imagine. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. Thanks.