 from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next here in Anaheim. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are joined by Victoria Hurtado. She is the director IT operations at Kern Healthcare Systems. Welcome, Victoria. Hi, thank you for having me. So for our viewers that are not familiar with Kern, tell us a little bit about what you do and what you're all about. Sure, so we are a health payer provider. So we are a managed care medical plan. We have a contract with the state of California to provide medical services to about 255,000 members in Kern County, located in Bakersfield, California. So if you really want to know more about this, like a Kaiser without the provider network. And so we pay the services, the bills that come in, as well as authorize the services that need to be rendered for members, yep. So talk about your decision to move from traditional storage to HCI. So really where our decision stemmed from was our roadmap. And over the last several years, we have had a three tier traditional storage. And the daily tasks of our system administrators have increased over time with integration. And as technology increases, there's more integration. And so we really wanted to focus on how do we decrease that as well as increase efficiencies so that we can provide the services that we need to for our internal customers, as well as our external customers, our members and providers. And the efficiencies, what was the project plan? How did you approach it? Sure, so our strategy was really a three phase approach. So we wanted to implement VDI for our internal employees. So we started off with VDI. Once we have transitioned to that, we will be migrating or in the process of right now, our core claims system, which is our bread and butter really. And so we'll do a month plan on that, see how that goes. And then once that is successful, which I feel will be successful, we will migrate our entire infrastructure over. Are you happy with the Nutanix so far? Yes, so the first deployment was Nutanix with Citrix and VMware, that entire combination. I've had a few consultants come in and they're like, oh, you've got the Ferrari of VDI. And I'm like, yes, we absolutely do. So, yes. When you're thinking about efficiencies, I mean, one of the things before the cameras were rolling, you were talking a little bit about what it means for employees. Can you talk a little bit about how they then structure their day, they structure which projects they work on and how they are more productive given these different changes? Sure, so an organization like us, we are always challenged with guidelines changing from the state. They have a tendency to want to change things very frequently. So we often have a lot of critical projects that we're doing on an everyday basis and that work really gets them consumed. And so what we're able to do with Nutanix is alleviate those responsibilities so that we can focus on the more critical, impacting scenarios versus managing a lawn and moving a volume and making sure the system is up and running. We're really focused on providing care to our members because our members are what count. And it also allows for a member to get the services that they need while they're sitting in the doctor's office waiting for a response from our organization. How's the IT ops world these days? Because there's so much tech out there. When you look at the landscape and you've got a unique situation, you've got care and you've got payments. People are relying on this. So you don't have a lot of room for mistakes. Correct. What do you guys see in that operations? Suppliers out there, other people you looked at? What were some of the solutions and why Nutanix? So it actually took us a while to make that decision. We made a collaborative decision with our engineers, my CIO and some of our business units. We compared different technologies that were out in the landscape of both storage and hyperconverged. What was the right path for us? We did a very thorough cost analysis of five year tenure, what that roadmap looks like for us. And like you said, mistakes, we can't make mistakes. And with growing security risk and healthcare industry and more people wanting that data, it's really important for us to protect it and have it secure. So Nutanix really offered us a lot of the key components that we were looking for in our grading system when we were looking for a storage solution. How's the event here? What have you learned? Tell us your experience to Nutanix next. Sure, so coming to this event, I really thought that we would be looking into new technologies, what other integration, like typical IT conferences, right? I think sitting in the initial keynote, I heard a lot of great positive things that are aligned with the industry, the buzzwords right now in technology, as well as our own roadmap for technology, going to the cloud, convergence, using multiple technologies for integration. So it really kind of paved what this conference was going to be. In addition, I think the sessions, having the tiered approach of you can follow a pathway throughout the conference was a brilliant idea in planning. So I think there's much to learn about how this conference was put on, so. I want to ask you about your role as the director of IT operations. I mean, you're hearing so much that these roles are really being dramatically transformed, that it's not just about keeping the lights on, it really is you're taking a much more strategic role in the business. How would you say you approach your job differently? How would you say it has changed your leadership style? And how much time do you spend thinking about being more visionary, more forward-thinking, versus this is what we're doing each day? Yeah, so I think historically, traditional technology departments and management within technology have really focused on technology only. Over the last several years, I've made it a point to learn our business units, so that we can apply good technology to a good process. I'm a true believer and an advocate for our technology department and our staff to really know the business, so that we're not putting technology on a bad process because that doesn't really help anyone to be successful. So I would say the shift in transition is being merged and converged as an IT and business entity. As far as approach, getting the business to come up hill with us has been really important, not only for technology for the underlying infrastructure, but systems today. Systems are so much ability to customize it to your heart's content, which also leads to different issues. So using technology with business process to gain efficiencies is really the road that is ahead of us. One of the things that the senior execs at Nutanix talk about is their value proposition is about helping consolidate a little bit here as one of the side benefits, but there's a new role in kind of looking for the new kind of persona, the person with Nutanix solution is a new kind of operator. Yes. What do you think he means by that? So I really think it means, and I had this challenge internally actually, is we have a lot of technical engineers that have grown up with the mentality that I have to know everything about this one siloed topic, right? I need to be the expert in this. And really where we're going is you don't have to worry about that. I need you to know about the business. I need you to know about how you can make change and efficiencies to help us be successful. And that is a transition for a lot of technologists. And we will get there. I truly believe that because we have to. It's a cultural thing. It is definitely a cultural thing. It's an old dog, new tricks kind of thing. Yes, absolutely. So how do you hire? I mean, what's, what are, what are, to you an applicant comes into your office? What do you want to see? So technology has historically been the focus of what do you know? How well can you do it? To what experience do you have enterprise grade level experience? And now that's really shifting to, are you able to participate on a project? Can you build requirements? Do you understand what your customer is asking for? As well as asking the questions of, is this the right thing to do? Not just doing what our customer asks us to do. Does it make sense? If we're going to archive data, do we need to secure it? When we're transferring that in and out of the organization, does that make sense? And so they, we're looking for people that are going to be outspoken a little bit and ask those hard questions. You know, we have always talked about ransomware because healthcare's been targeted. You mentioned security earlier, thinking broadly, you got data. You got the crown jewels, bread and butter, as you said, is the data. Are you, have you experienced ransomware? Are you guys ready for it? What's the strategy? So we've actually take a layered approach to security. Obviously in healthcare, there is no single pane of glass for security. We've really stepped into the world of having our data encrypted at rest in transit, multi-layers. We do audits every year to make sure that we're compliant. We pay people to try to hack us, you know, legally because we want to know where our vulnerabilities are. So we do that purposefully with intent to make sure that we have the technologies in place that are going to provide us what we need for our data. Fascinating. Victoria, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE.