 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, and welcome to the CUBE studios for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host Peter Burris. One of the dominant considerations that every business faces today is how do they work through the complex outcomes associated with cybersecurity as they find new ways to use their data and apply it to new classes of customer and market problems? This is not a small problem, especially given that so many bad actors out there are now also seeing a company's data as a potential enormous source of value. Now to see what businesses are doing to try to achieve those complex outcomes while at the same time lowering their overall security risk, we've got a great conversation. First off, welcoming back Eric Herzog, who's a Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Worldwide Storage Channels from IBM Storage, Eric, welcome back to the CUBE. Peter, thank you, love to come. And Eric, you've brought with you a really distinguished individual. Kaylene Sanchez is Vice President of IBM Worldwide Systems Lab, Service and Technical Universities. Kaylene, welcome back to the CUBE. Thank you. So let's get the quick update. Where are we in this world of the outcomes of businesses? Kaylene, let's start with you. What are businesses trying to do with cybersecurity today? Protect data and ensure that we provide a certain level of security levels to enable the overall end-to-end protection holistically. So it's really important that we enable a full stack, hence the strong partnership with Eric and I, to end also the global team, to pull together solutions that enable data protection. So let's talk about the reasons why it becomes that much more acute, or the needs become that much more acute, because we've got the reality that everybody's going to get penetrated in the next year of any size, that it takes a long time often to figure out that you have been penetrated. You've got new types of attacks, the old ones of just kind of fishing and whatnot. Well, still a problem. Now we've got ransomware, we've got a lot of new types of actions that bad people are taking. What are some of the things that we're trying to protect ourselves from these days? So the biggest thing, as you mentioned, ransomware, it's like this idea that we want to protect and also act as a worm, so to speak, to provide an abstraction layer to enable protection holistically of any given solution, because data can be everywhere and nowhere. So yeah, there's discussions about it's the new oil, it's not the new oil necessarily, it's pervasive, it's everywhere. So our data from our perspective can be in any device, any immediate type, and we need to figure out how to protect it at its core. And so you see it as a full stack, that just means we have to go lower in the layers in order to protect the overall data. So kind of what you're saying is that the more the security is closer to the data, the more the data itself is secure. The less reliant we are on policy, which can lead to human error or human mistakes, which could allow folks to come in. Have I got that right? You're correct, it's smart data. It's this idea that it's multiple pieces and multiple owners of a maker checker policy that keeps the overall solution accountable. That doesn't diminish the need for policy, but Eric, it certainly raises the specter or the spectrum of the fact that increasingly the smart folks within a business that are ensuring or trying to diminish risk and ensuring assurance of the data need to start looking at how storage or the role that storage plays in this overall security framework. Have I got that right? Yeah, if you think about a traditional company, their approach is we need to get security software to keep the bad guys out, and they need security cover for when we are breached to track them down. Talking to several CIOs at even mid-sized companies, let alone the Fortune 500, is sometimes it takes them days, even weeks, as you said, to know they've even been penetrated to get track it down. While they're doing that, imagine someone coming into your house and the police don't show up for 10 minutes, even though your alarm went off and by the time the police go, your house is totally empty. At IBM Storage, you make sure that that doesn't happen. It's as if everything is bolted down, everything is locked, and if they do steal something, for example, let's say right once, read many technology, they can't really use it, right? Because it's worm, they can't change it. So it's almost as if your TV required a fingerprint, and even if they stole it, they couldn't use your TV. And that's the kind of thing you want to do is be pervasive and get enterprises as well as even small and medium-sized, to realize an overall cyber resiliency and security strategy involves keeping the bad guys out, the email will track them down, but when they are in the house, making sure everything is secure and essentially nothing can be stolen or utilized of your incredibly valuable data. So using your metaphor of making sure the TV is bolted down or whatever it is bolted down, that however doesn't diminish the business's ability to move the TV if they want to, if they have the rights and privileges to do so. So let's talk about how the new tooling of storage is being bought together with some of the new services approaches to achieve these complex outcomes. How is IBM looking at storage and storage-related technologies as a foundation for achieving the new outcomes that the businesses want? So from a services perspective, we go in and partner with our core technologies within the storage portfolio to enable something like bare metal, to enable the armor around the overall solution. We work with the client to understand their pain points, et cetera, and how we optimize the solution to substantiate that we provide highly resilient, flexible access to data, but at the same time it's protected. Now this is a fast changing world and there's an enormous expertise both on the good side and the bad side. Obviously, you've got a development background. Talk a little bit about how IBM is relying on customers, relying on universities, other sources of deep knowledge about security issues, and then translating that into IP that then finds itself into places like Eric's storage portfolio. So we have processes like, for instance, the technical universities. So we have discussions with an extended set of worldwide engineers and scientists to talk about specific important pain points related to cybersecurity. So when we obtain that data, we provide the training, we collect information, and then we provide or funnel that back into Eric's portfolio from an IBM storage perspective. So Eric, look, you're an old mainframe hack, as am I, as am I. And so that is one area where security has not been an afterthought. It's not been that separate. How to what degree has that relationship between security and data and storage permeated the way that you think about solutions, solution directions, and engaging your customers with your value propositions? So one of the big things we've done is make sure that our security is across the entire portfolio. Primary data, flash, disk, secondary data, disk or tape. And in fact, as you know, IBM is known for its hybrid multi-cloud storage technology capable of easily and transparently tearing out to multiple public cloud providers. When that data is in flight, it sure as heck better be encrypted. So we've made sure that whether it's ransomware or malware protection, data encryption that rests across the entire portfolio, write once, read many technology, things like FIPS 140-2, which is a very important federal specification around security, malware and ransomware protection with air gapping both to tape, but also to cloud. So we've made sure that the security aspect of storage is pervasive. Primary storage, secondary storage, cloud storage, whatever you're doing, your storage will always be secure. So when they do breach the wall until they track the bad guy down, as they're rooting around your file, your block, your object storage, it's secure and they can't get any value from the data. You still can, but they can't steal that data from you. And that's a critical capability of spreading it beyond just the mainframe. We have great technology with our new safeguard copy product we brought out last year that does incredible things to secure data. But in fact, we make sure that all sorts of security and resiliency technologies from an IBM perspective are spread even into our lowest end product, our store-wise 5010E has full data rest encryption, encryption in flight. So all those technology won't from the very entry products all the way up to our high-end product, the DS family and everything in between. Yeah, well, one of the things about digital business is we're discovering new ways of leveraging data in unanticipated avenues to try to generate additional business. And one of the things we've seen as we talk to customers is that increasingly that means that the weakest link in your security chain is going to be instrumental at defining your overall security policy. So treating security as an option is because you can secure something over here is increasingly difficult as you find new ways of integrating data. So how is IBM helping to get customers to see that? So I would say two points. From a lab services perspective as well as our business partners, we take on a consultative discussion or partnership. So we learn from our clients and partners and users as much as they learn from us. And we provide offerings to really explore that full stack to make that data smarter as we discussed before. So digital business is happening, it's transforming very rapidly. IBM talks about the rise of the incumbents as they bring some of these digital native capabilities into their business. I'm going to ask each of you for the one thing that you think is going to be most important for customers to think about this relationship between data, storage and security. Eric, I'll start with you. What do you think is the one thing that people need to start thinking more about over the course of next year? Storage is not an afterthought in your security strategy. Killene, how about you? Co-create with our end users to enable the full end-to-end protection as you mentioned before. And as you co-create, don't forget that storage is intrinsic to whether or not it's secure or not. Great conversation. Thank you both for being here. Eric Herzog is the Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Worldwide Storage Channels at IBM Storage. Killene Sanchez is the Vice President of IBM Worldwide Systems Lab, Services and Technical Universities. Once again, thank you both for being here and talking about this crucially important area. Thank you for having us. Thank you. All right, and once again, I'm Peter Burris and until next time, this has been a CUBE conversation.