 Live from the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at AWS ReInvent 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Amazon and Trend Micro. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for Amazon ReInvent. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by Steve Powes, the GEM of security at Barracuda Networks. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks, John. So we'd like to break down all the action, and we can't not talk about security. Every single show for the past year and a half that we've been to, whether it's been enterprise or cloud, security's always the hot button. And it's been that way forever. We've interviewed Illumio yesterday, hot startup that's burning the boats, as they said. They're in it to win it, going big or going home, around perimeterless security. So you guys are in this game with a lot of customers from the heritage of Barracuda, with the appliance from spam filtering and firewalling now to fully baked out technologies now. Where are you guys with security vis-a-vis this big cloud trend, which is perimeterless? That's right. Well, I think that the big thing, as you mentioned, is that we really stand for total threat protection. And really what that's about is securing all the network threat factors and whether those threat factors come in over email, from a web application, through remote access, from browsing, by users on the network, by mobile users, or even network itself. It's been very, very important to protect all the threat factors, which changed as we've gone to this perimeter less network here, is that the attack surface has changed pretty dramatically. And so we've seen a lot of the attack surface move from physical networks to virtual networks. And now, as we've seen, we've seen a lot of the virtual networks. And now, as we've moved out the SaaS and the public cloud, it's just a much broader attack surface and we're committed to protecting that. So I got to ask you about application security because you can lock the front door and put all the defenses on the perimeter, but applications are calling out with API notifications, the firewall rules are huge, all these policies have been around. So there's a legacy on let's just say firewalling, and then now you've got apps coming out inside the firewall, shooting out notifications. So how do you do that? How do you guys deal with that? And what's your advice to your customers? Yeah, well I think the first thing is awareness. The first thing is awareness. A lot of people in the old days of spam actually said, hey, I have a firewall in front of my email server. And I think what people actually recognized was that firewalls don't block spam. It's not what they were designed to do. And what's interesting is that web application attacks also don't get blocked by firewalls. You need a special kind of technology for that. And just like how a spam firewall isn't really a firewall, it's an email server, what people have to recognize is to protect web applications. You really need web reverse proxies. A firewall won't block those. And where is those proxies being native? Are you binding it right in the application? And with virtualization, what changes with this? Is there, I mean, it kind of gets complicated, sounds complicated, is it? It can be, I think, but that's one of the real powers that something like an AWS environment provides. I think in historical data centers, a lot of people look to reverse proxies as another bump on the wire, another thing that would need to be, you know, scaled and another thing that would be kept operational. But I think that one of the things that really is the power of the cloud is that rolling out sort of this new service-oriented architecture where different functions are distributed, you know, throughout different compute loads and, you know, throughout different virtual servers, is something that just becomes day reger. And so we're seeing a lot more openness in this whole cloud environment to doing that. Okay, so I got to ask the question. Barracuda has this great business. Now you see Amazon making moves. Cloud is obviously happening. How do you guys approach? What's the partnership motion look like with Barracuda and Amazon? How do you guys work with them? I mean, you guys have your groove swing business. They got their machine that's being built and built and built. Just kind of, you know, new services being announced. It's certainly all cloud. But what's the motion? What do you guys do? How's the value? What's the conversation link? Well, you know, one of the things is, is that we are just, you know, at the show, obviously, we've been spending time meeting with our counterparts at Amazon. And I think that one of the things that we both feel really passionate about is the end customer. So there's a whole bunch of machinations in terms of how you go to market. But at the end of the day, I think that we're really aligned is around the customer. And for us, that is, for Barracuda, that's the mid-market IT professional who wears lots of hats, who can't really be a specialist in every area. And as Amazon has looked to its customers, they often use the term into the whole stack engineer. And so it's the same kind of principle that, in fact, you got to do what's actually right for the customer to facilitate new paradigms. And so we've already started working through a set of initiatives with Marketplace, you know, obviously. So we have a number of customers who want to go download Barracuda products as AMIs. And that's certainly one path to market. And I think that one of the things that we're both looking forward to is increasing ways that we can both leverage partners like managed services providers, traditional IT resellers, and others who can really partake in this overall go-to-market type of ecosystem. So talk about for the folks out there, I'd like you to share your opinion about why is Amazon so disruptive? I mean, honestly, they're doing well. Some say they're hiding the ball in the numbers. This black box, the Andreessen Horowitz, tried to unpack it recently in a blog post that they did. Remember who wants to know what Andy Jassy has under the hood? We all know it's scaling. But why are customers going there? What's your take and what's the landscape look like for the folks that are trying to understand Amazon, the forces of Amazon, good and bad? Why is Amazon so compelling? Well, I think that what it really is, it's democratizing very, very large-scale operations. And so it used to be that you had to be a large Fortune 500 company to be able to afford to have the data center operations with the level of sophistication that Amazon is providing. One of the things that I think it's very compelling for Barracuda's segment of the marketplace is that now all of a sudden, Barracuda-style managed services providers and even Barracuda-style end customers can actually begin to appreciate the kinds of SLAs and the kinds of scalability and the kinds of infrastructure that was previously just reserved for the big guys. And that's a great point. You now have more creativity, more available to you with Amazon. So I got to answer the question. So I was talking last night at the press dinner, a press event with Jeff Barr who's the chief evangelist for Amazon. It's been around for a long time. I've known him back in the day when Amazon just started. He was just doing blogging basically. We were talking about some projects that we were developing kind of together and separately at the same time, which was around the whole blogging revolution. And he had one of the ping servers back in the day. And he made a comment that he said, if Amazon had existed then, I would have blown it out and basically would have done all these things. But at the time, as an entrepreneur, you couldn't, it was out of reach. It was risky because you had to spend some money, right? That's right. The vision wasn't totally big so there was no risk-free way to get in there. So now we have a new model where, as you said, you can do things now like a large company. So the question is with that kind of a backdrop, what is it that customers can do now that you see them with Barracuda using Amazon for? Because if that premise was then and still now, there are some things where you say, you know what? I never could have had that go for that ask because it's too big of a reach. I need a data center. But now with Amazon, what's gettable for business? What can they do? Right. Well, I think that one of the things that it really provides is the scalability. I think one of the real tricks, particularly in Barracuda's segment of the market is the cost of over-provisioning. You know, for example, we have a number of customers who operate. You mean customers over-provisioning for headroom or pre-pay? Absolutely. Well, a good example is just very, very seasonal businesses. You know, there are a lot of Barracuda business, Barracuda customers who operate, for example, in retail where there's obviously seasonality within retail where you get big during certain buying seasons and small during others. Even in environments like higher ed, as an example, the school registration system needs a lot of availability during the end of quarter and beginning of quarter, not so much in between. And so you really run into, you know, across a wide variety of customers. And it's not just high visibility. You know, we had Coca-Cola, for example, up at the APN summit doing a keynote. We had Condon asked. Very, very high visibility brand names. But, you know, there are very many ordinary businesses that have the exact same kinds of requirements. And really the costs of over-provisioning, the costs of trying to anticipate scale are just prohibitive for the typical business. And so I think Amazon presents a really interesting way to get much, much bolder about how you want to take forward your online presence. It allows you to do some more innovative things with your marketing and your commercial angles. And it's able to do that in a way that's paid as you go and doesn't require such huge upfront capital or funding to get done. So what kind of synergies do you see with Amazon, say marketplace? I mean, obviously, Barracuda, you guys have been that kind of business model. Don't overspend, low-cost appliance. I remember the early days, and even now that's a real mandated company. But now with the marketplace, customers have choice. They're going to buy and try new things. Is your value proposition with that integration? How do you guys see the opportunity for a business, the business model side of it? Well, it'll give you a four-part answer. So I apologize in advance if it's a long one. But the first is I think that there's a lot of folks that we're seeing who just want to do the lift and shift. So some of the things that we're actually doing there is making that really easy. So we've got a lot of folks, for example, who have looked at things like email security and liked the privacy that a non-premises appliance would give them, and simply allowing our spam and virus firewalls to actually be run up in AMIs, up in the cloud, actually allows that lift and shift to happen transparently. The second is, as people are actually looking... Explain lift and shift for the folks that we don't know what lift and shift is. Sure, sure. It's basically taking something that used to do on-premises and just moving it in place out into the cloud so you can get the management benefits of the cloud without changing your workflows. And you don't need a forklift to do that, do you? You don't, you absolutely don't. It happens very, very transparently. In fact, our customers spin up the AMI off the marketplace. They move their configuration from their on-premises system up to the cloud and change DNS records and you go. It's simple. The other aspect here is is folks who want to actually take their public-facing applications and improve the security. You know, in this past year's Verizon Data Breach Report, the 2014 Verizon Data Breach Report, it was shown that 35% of the breaches were actually related to web application attacks. And so we're definitely seeing that as sort of the threats continue to evolve, organizations wanting to start taking advantage of new protections. And as mentioned earlier, the cloud makes it so easy to go do that we're seeing a number of customers who as they're moving their applications to the public-facing applications of the cloud, having an opportunity to very easily improve their security there. So that's one area we're playing. A third area is really as people want to extend their internal applications for more capacity or availability off in the cloud. And one of the big powers of the cloud is just the geographic dispersion. And we have a lot of customers who, in physical data centers, just couldn't afford to set them up where they may have had all their customers or where they had all their employees. And so with this whole ability with the cloud to be geographically dispersed, you know, there are a number of advantages. So you see the customers redefining architecture based upon what's available in the cloud? Absolutely. It was always sort of desired architecture but impractical. So one of the things that Barracuda's doing is helping customers provide connectivity, primarily through our next generation firewall and VPN technologies to get across multiple locations. And really the last element, which is the area that we really talked about, is that you want to really start taking advantage of new cloud economics, not just to take advantage of geographic dispersion, but also around the compute elasticity and the ability to grow the environment. That's an area that we're very excited about. Yeah, so lift and shift is, okay, my existing business, and then the re-architecture using the cloud is fulfilling a dream. Basically, I can do more with the scale and as Andy Jassy likes to say, experiment. I find it interesting that he used that word experiment because what he's saying is, he's trying to mitigate the risk management in an entrepreneurial way by saying, yeah, do an experiment. If it fails, it's the same as an experiment. But that's good. You can do that at low cost and go out and test an architecture with that thesis. So that's awesome. So I've got to ask you on the show, explain to the folks out here, what's your observation? And if you had to, as Jeff Frick just tweeted, put a bumper sticker on the show, what would it be? You know what I think it might be is old concepts become important to revisit. And what I mean by that is that when I look at the show, I see so many things that those of us who've been through many cycles in the industry have seen before. So for example, all of a sudden, consulting firms are at it again because people want to actually understand how to take advantage of new architectures. System management is becoming an important topic again. Log management. Containers. Yeah, log management is becoming an important concept again. And it's because we have to revisit a lot of the old concepts. And certainly, you know, for us, we see the security. It's definitely been a hotter topic than many of these other topics as of late. But definitely, it's sort of revisiting old concepts as we start to really rethink old things. You know, I'm an old Oracle guy, so the whole Aurora announcement to me is very, very intriguing. It's revisiting old concepts. What do you think about that announcement? It kind of had an Oracle undertone to it. You know, I think it really did. You know, certainly, you know, I was... It didn't come out. I don't know. I didn't hear him say the word Oracle. He didn't really say the word Oracle. But I think that really when you look at Oracle, Oracle was really an attack on the old flat file ISAM databases of the past. And I think when you look at this sort of horizontally scaled database architecture, I mean, there are certainly going to be some questions to be asked, particularly with things like MySQL, compatibility in an API layer. So it's going to be pretty interesting. So the old becomes the new again. So I would agree with you. It's interesting. David Vonte is not here. My co-host always and I have talked about this. The mainframe is back again, but it's just broken down and reassembled with modern off-the-shelf distributed components. Well, and it's a more horizontally scaled mainframe. And you got open source in there. So, you know, same concepts, new tooling, new platforms, but no one really owns the platform anymore, right? So you're seeing this kind of commoditization, the flattening of the ownership of the quote platform. Yeah. Well, it's interesting to me, even at the show here, even thin clients are being revisited again. I was over and we're looking about how to do, you know, NVIDIA and ViewSonic with their thin clients. I mean, jeez, that reminds me of the days of the X-Terminal. And so, you know, many old concepts are being revisited, but in much more evolved ways. What do you think is the concept that people aren't seeing yet that's an old concept that will be big? That will be a big part of this narrative, of this inflection point and shift that we're seeing? Yeah. Well, I think that the, probably the biggest part of the narrative is that, is that we all, we all need to become IT generalists again. I think that we went, we definitely went through an area of massive specialization where you had, you know, for example, people who would get certified very, very deep on Cisco. And people get certified very, very deep on Database. People get certified very, very deep on Storage. And so I think that, you know, even in the Microsoft environment, you see a lot of people getting very, very deep certifications in the Microsoft environment. And I think that one of the things that, that really does, does emerge with all of these things just becoming building blocks is that, that the level of, I believe that the level of specialization that's going to be expected of IT professionals is going to diminish. And then in fact, the breadth is what's going to become very important. And a lot of the automation on the services side will become abstracted away. That's right. That's right. And so, and that's, you got to remember that we're, we're kind of all started in the IT industry. IT people had to be experts across a wide variety of services to kind of make everything work. And we ushered in this era of specialization. And I think that, that now we're going to be working at this less component level and more at a system level. And I would totally agree with that. I would also add that they're also being required to be much more of a savvy aware business person. That's right. Because now they have to look up and bring the front lines of the business into IT closer. Meaning they have to respond to business outcomes. And we can give it back. I mean, one of the things I really appreciated about the, the APN keynote yesterday with Coca-Cola is the CIO for Coca-Cola. She actually gave the money that she saved back to marketing, you know, for branding. Yeah. And that's the new normal. It's actually lower cost and better performance. I got to ask you about the show. Give us a quick, give us a quick plug. Thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it. Love Barracuda. But I'll give you the last word. Give us the update. Put the plug in for Barracuda. You guys part of the test drive program. What are you doing with Amazon? That's right. So the business, give us the quick pitch. Absolutely. So here at the show, we remain very, very active in the AWS community. We launched our test drive of the Barracuda web application firewall that launched just yesterday so that the people who just want to give the products a try actually get their own instance to play with. They actually, we provide instructions as to how to go run attacks against a vulnerable website and how to protect that in a web application firewall. We actually announced at this show an AWS AMI version of our load balancer ADC. So what that enables is for organizations that actually want to maintain a hybrid environment between physical and AWS data centers. They can actually maintain the same traffic management policies across both their physical and their cloud infrastructures. We have continued to push forward in our other product areas, both with the Barracuda spam firewall in AWS as well as the Barracuda ng firewall in AWS. And we're continuing to march forward to really provide this total threat protection in the AWS infrastructure. Steve, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Steve Powell, the general manager of the security group at Barracuda Networks. Here inside theCUBE, we're getting all the action on the ground here at Amazon re-invent. Again, Andy Jackson took the stage today. Great demos, great partners. And again, tons of breakout sessions. We got a lot of guests coming. Stay tuned. Wall-to-wall coverage here on theCUBE. We'll be right back. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stay tuned.