 Hi everybody, we're back, Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. We're covering Falcon 22, this is CrowdStrike's big user conference, CrowdStrike is a very hot company as you probably know, started on endpoint security, expanding into another, a number of other areas. Trying to build the next great generational company in cybersecurity, Michael Sherwood is here. He's the Chief Innovation and Technology Officer for the city of Las Vegas. Got to love that. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Yeah, we got to love that. I mean, if it weren't for Las Vegas, I'm not sure where we would have our CUBE events, but so thank you for hosting us. Thank you for being here, this is awesome. It's a great day and a lot of people are just exciting to see everything that's going on here. Yeah, the city is booming, obviously the convention, the conference business is booming, tech is a big part of that, but there are so many other industries that come to Las Vegas. Talk about your role, really interesting, Chief Innovation, Technology Officer, CTO, tell us about what you do day to day. Kind of all over the place, but a lot of it has to do with day to day technology within the organization, so managing all the different technology components. When you start looking at any city, it's a lot of different companies inside of it. Think of Fire Service as a different company. They all have different missions, and so our technology needs are expansive. So while we have operational IT, we also have our innovation unit. Innovation unit works on next generation technology, so Las Vegas was one of the first cities in the United States to have an autonomous vehicle drive in mixed flow traffic, meaning it was out there with driving along cars. We're also the first city to have an accident in an autonomous vehicle that happened on day two. So there's always a lot of firsts in Las Vegas, but- Despite the grid. Despite the grid, you know. But even today, so that was in 2017 when we first started working with autonomous vehicles up until today where you have the ability, anybody in Las Vegas, including yourselves right after the show, can go ahead and use Lyft, go outside and hail an autonomous taxi to come pick you up and drive you up and down the strip. Those vehicles actually communicate with our infrastructure. So the innovation is, how do cities work with private companies to start building next generation amenities, next generation technologies? And so that happens a lot of times. People don't realize, they come to Las Vegas for entertainment, and now we're known for sports, but we do have a lot of technology here that permeates through the entire community. So I'm from Boston. We're trying to get the smart traffic lights, we're not quite there yet. But I was at a session, Dave, I appreciate it, it was John Rose, who's the CTO, he was the CTO of, he's the CTO of Dell Technologies now. And the mayor of Boston, we were talking about the vision for a smart city, but Boston, I mean, talking about a challenge for building a smart city. So when I come out here, it's like amazing to me to see the technology that's there. So as a CTO and innovation officer, you know, you've got a playground, now of course you have legacy infrastructure, you've got technical debt, but you also have, in certain cases, an opportunity and more latitude to get creative. So what are some of the cool things that you're working on that you're really excited about? There's a lot of things I'm excited about. It's just great being in this city, but a lot of the things that we're excited about here in the next year to two years, we have an innovation district. So not a lot of cities have this, but downtown around the Fremont Street experience, there's a corridor there that covers government, covers entertainment, medical, and so this innovation district is where we test out new technology. So some of the things we're testing out, computer vision, so where our smart parks program is how do we provide better security and enjoyment of those amenities without providing physical labor to constantly patrol? And so we're using cameras and vision and different types of AI algorithms to kind of manage the park. And while we're doing that, we're also getting data back on how often is the park used? Are the sprinklers going on during the day? Water's a big deal here. And so types of those type of projects, again, autonomy is still huge, vehicle autonomy, still working on driving those next generation changes where you'll actually have a driverless vehicle. Right now there's a safety driver in a lot of the autonomous vehicles, even the one I talked about earlier. You have all the vehicles driving itself for safety reasons, there's still a human driver in the seat. But as we go forward in the next year or two, that is going to change. I believe that soon. You can quote it here, you heard it here first. But that would be coming up. You got drones as well. We've already started looking at a few types of drone delivery systems. It may not be too far away. Your pizza or maybe some other item that you want is delivered in the general area. Probably not in the hotel corridor, but in the outside areas of the city. I just think there's a lot of, again, we're building amenities for the future. We really want people to understand that Las Vegas is not just a place to come visit, but it's a place to live and have fun and be part of a community. So from an academic perspective, what you just described is a highly ambidextrous organization, right? Yes. Because you're not just worried about keeping the lights on, you're also looking at innovation. How did your organization get to this place? What you're describing is sort of the gold standard that any organization, public or private, would seek to implement. How did you get there? Baby steps, small steps, it all started back when there was the Smart Cities Challenge. So we were not selected as the finalist. We were in the, I think, top 15 at the time. But we didn't give up on it and we continue to move forward. I mean, the pandemic helped us do things. When you ask, you know, what do I do? Well, my normal job is running the day-to-day infrastructure. I also see my role as economic development to help bring companies here and bring new ideas. We have a great community, diverse and ready to do things. But when you take, you know, talk about the innovation and the technology and what we're doing, like I said, during the pandemic, we came up with the idea of, hey, we don't want to send our building inspectors or our inspectors into people's homes. One for the inspector's health and one for the citizen's health. So we used normal tools. We took an iPhone and made it a virtual inspector. So now if you get a new water heater, you can actually do your inspection via like a FaceTime and you hold your phone up around the water heater, we can view it, we record the video, save it, and boom, give you an inspection remotely. And so you build on it. So how do you get, I wouldn't quite say where the gold, I appreciate, you know, we're moving, that's the bar. You've laid out the bar for us, but you know, we're moving in that direction, but it's building on one win and not all of our things that we've deployed. We can talk about those as well. Some of the things like trash can sensors we looked at doing, which would monitor when the trash can was full or empty, just didn't pan out. So a lot of the times I talk about the wins a lot, not as much about the things that didn't pan out. So what are the big challenges, you know, generally of building out a smart city and then specifically around cyber? So there's, I mean, community acceptance number one, Las Vegas, I'm very lucky, cameras are everywhere. So there's not as much resistance to using video technology. But a lot of times it's just getting the constituents and getting people to understand the value of what we're trying to do. Not everybody is interested in autonomous vehicles or believes they're ready for that. But when you start looking at the increments, you know, more than any other city I know, the community here is so robust and so supportive of bringing on these technologies. I mean, look, what other city do you know that builds new buildings and knocks them down five years later to build something new again? Or who has a volcano, you know, in the middle of their downtown? So different things like that. But when you start looking at all the advancements we're making, you brought up one of the biggest concerns when people ask me, you know, what keeps you up at night? It's not the autonomous vehicle not performing. It's the cyber issues that go along with becoming more advanced. And as you bring innovation in, you start bleeding the lines of what's government, what's private, and then how do you continue to have the data transmission between these multiple entities? How do you keep the end point secure? And that is something that, you know, you learn as you go, but, you know, it's always out there and end point security and security in general is a huge, huge area. How about the data you were talking before about you can get actually approval for an inspection? That's data, that's video data. How have you changed the way in which you're using data? What are you doing with that data? How do you leverage it? How do you secure it? It's all great questions. You know, we, one of the things we've undertaken is called an open data initiative. So we have an open data portal. It's opendata.losvegasnovata.gov where we publish a lot of the data sets that we collect with its air quality, if it's ambulance runs, and we make that data available. A lot of that is one for the public firm transparency. Two though, it's, we hope enables the private sector to build apps off of the data that we have. A lot of times, you either you have the data but you don't have the app or you have the app but no data. So in our way, it's trying to help the community build up new ideas. Our push has been moving to the cloud a lot. So we're pushing a lot more data into the cloud where before, I think a lot of governments keep a lot of that internal. But obviously, look, the cloud's here to stay. It's not going anywhere. And so now it's more about, as we migrate, using our partners, our relationship with CrowdStrike, to start securing not only our endpoints but start looking at the cloud space as well. And then we have this new technology. It's not really new, but Edge Compute. You've heard a lot of, there's different people talking about it. You start talking about autonomous vehicles, autonomous delivery, drones. We own a large private wireless network. A lot of data now is computed at the Edge and we're only taking the metadata and sending it up to the cloud. So it becomes rather complicated with security being at the forefront. Yeah, so that very small portion of the actual amount of data that's created goes back, but it's such a massive amount of data. It's not to trivialize it. It's still a lot. And some of it is probably ephemeral. Do you persist at all or probably not, right? Not always, I mean, a lot of it. What we're learning is, it's a learning process. As you go through this smart city, or what we call just basically emerging into, because I believe all cities are smart. Not one city's smarter than another necessarily. So I'm not really a fan of the term smart city. It's more in line with me is we're building amenities for the future and building amenities for people. And a lot of that is built upon data and then built upon providing things that citizens want. And we all know, we all live somewhere and we live there because it's a safe community. It has good education, good infrastructure, whatever it might be. And so we're trying to build out that smart community to be as many things as we can to as many people. Yeah, that's fair. And there's automation. There's certainly machine intelligence that's heavily involved, of course, you talk autonomous. Now I understand your work transcends the city of Las Vegas into the broader state of Nevada, helping make Nevada a safer state. What's that all about? So we have a great partnership. I mean, one of the great things, I come from California, so a rather large state. Here in Nevada, it's a very close knit state. So we have a lot of communications with the state. We get to work with them very closely. One of the initiatives we've been working on is how do we, a lot of organizations spend a lot of time doing cybersecurity for just their organization. So it's focused internal on the employees that might work in that organization. We're kind of now looking outwards and saying, how do we not only do that for our internal government employees, but how do we involve the entire community? You know, one of the things is, is Las Vegas over 40,000 conventions per year. You're here a lot. You know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas and a lot of people bring malware with them and it stays here. And you know, we're trying to educate people. We do a lot in government to help people with police and fire and services. What is local government doing to help the community prepare for the next generation of cyber threats and issues? So our initiative is really working with the community, bringing in CrowdStrike and other partners to help us not only work with small business, but work with those entrepreneurs as well as the mid-sized businesses. So what do you do with CrowdStrike? You got the cool little CrowdStrike, not CrowdStrike, but you got the red splash in your lapel. Very cool cufflinks, I noticed that you have it. I love the red. Little poker chips there. Very nice, very nice. Very cool. So what do you do with CrowdStrike? So CrowdStrike is one of our major components in our security posture. We use them as endpoint protection. I can tell you a quick story. I know my CISO is listening. Probably it was going to cringe now when I tell this story. But you know, our journey with CrowdStrike has been amazing. We deployed the product and when that first week of deployment, we had a malicious actor and CrowdStrike was able to catch it. I would probably would not be here today with you two gentlemen if it wasn't for CrowdStrike. That's not an endorsement. It's just that's a fact of how things rolled out. But we depend on CrowdStrike and their capabilities to ensure the safety of our digital assets. You wouldn't be here because it used to be failure means fire. Is that what you mean? That's what I mean. I'm not going to, I don't like to use that word in my terminology, but you know, basically failure is not an option in my job. I mean, there's not, you know, it's just not there. What is funny, we had Kevin Mandion earlier. He was like, look, I started my company in 2004 with the assumption that breaches will happen. You are going to get breached. So that's why I say, I think there was a day when, you know, if you got breached, oh, you're fired. Well that, then everybody got breached. So I think that that sentiment is changing. Of course, CrowdStrike saying that the unstoppable breach is a myth. Well, we're not there yet. I'd say damage control now. I mean, at least we have a little bit more control, but I mean, again, look, government is about trust. And so when you have that, that trust level, you know, from my perspective, I keep a high standard and try to prevent any, any loss of data or any type of malicious activity from happening. I hope the mayor is listening and she doesn't fire me if anything would happen, but, you know. Yeah, you got a fun job. How'd you get into this? You know, it was a great opportunity. I worked in law enforcement prior to here. I was a deputy police chief in a city of Irvine. I oversaw technology as part of that role. I've always loved Las Vegas. Always liked the energy of the city. And I had a great opportunity to apply and I applied and was lucky enough to be selected. Great team that supports me. Deputy police chief, it's not like what you just described, technology role, you had an operations role, essentially, is that right? Correct. Yeah. So kind of gave me a lot of insights and really helped me as, you know, as you progress in government, having different roles in your portfolio makes you a little bit more adaptive. And it helps in, especially now with so much video and cameras prevalent in cities, having that law enforcement role, understanding a little of the legal aspects and understanding some of what law enforcement wants kind of makes that bridge from technology to the actual end user. A really interesting story, Michael. Thanks so much for sharing on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me here. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante will be back from Las Vegas at the ARIA from Falcon 22. You're watching theCUBE.