 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with our continuing coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, the virtual event. We're excited to be back. We've been coming to re-invent for years and years and years. I think since 2013, first year it's virtual, but that's the way it is and we're going to jump into cloud and government and DOD and we're really excited to have our next guest who knew a lot about the topic. We have Robert Grote. He is the EVP of technology and strategy from Spartronics coming to us from Virginia. Great to see you, Robert. Great, thank you. And joining him is Anthony Voltagio, the CTO of Spartronics. Anthony, good to see you as well. Thank you, you as well. Great, so let's jump into it. I think, Rob, we had you on a couple of years ago. I looked it up. It was early October 18 and you guys were getting a lot of success with cloud and government. And I think it was before the Jedi and all that other stuff was going down. Two years is forever in cloud time. I wonder if you can just share a little bit about how the market has changed since, I think it was February or March of 2018 to now late November, 2020, in terms of cloud and government and Department of Defense and your highly regulated customers. Sure, I think one of the things that's changed is that security certainly used to be a headwind. And now we're actually seeing it more of a tailwind where our customers, especially our heavily regulated, compliance-driven customers in the public sector and the DoD are really looking at new ways of embracing the value of the cloud. So one of the things that has changed is that maybe two years ago, we were looking at how do we move digital estate from on-premise into a cloud environment? We're now we're looking at how do we actually achieve value in the cloud? How do we allow our customers to optimize their portfolio? How do they modernize their application footprint in a secure way? And some of the things that we've focused on, particularly at Smartronics, is how do we remove that friction that exists when a new kind of legacy customer really wants to transform the way that they deliver services? So we built capabilities that really allow them to more rapidly migrate their services into the cloud environment. We created and have an ATO now for a cloud-assured managed services, which means that our customers who want to meet the rigorous security mandates now have that ability to utilize our services when they're deploying these services. And it really enables them to focus on the development and the modernization, versus having to do the cumbersome components of security compliance and operation. And if you look at what we're trying to build and trying to intersect with where our customers are going, they really want to get to that pace of innovation that the cloud provides. I think I've said this before to theCUBE that the slope of disruption is correlated to the pace of innovation. And if you continue to build technical debt, like our customers may have done in the past, they're going to fall behind. And it might be okay for Blockbuster to fall behind in Netflix or for Uber to disrupt an industry, but for our customers, there's national security consequences when they fall behind. So we've got to create a platform and a capability that enables them to innovate and deliver very agile services rapidly. Right. Anthony, I want to go to you because I think Robin in your last interview, you talked about your customers, very secure, highly regulated, compliance-driven environments, right? And to be clear, you guys sell a lot to the Department of Defense and all the various branches of the US military, et cetera. You know, Anthony did a lot of talk of digital transformation on the commercial side and people going, right? And then of course, all the jokes and memes about COVID, you know, being the accelerator to that. For your customers, the accelerators to app modernization and the digital transformation are very different. It's not about necessarily the competitor down the street, but it's about some nasty competitors that want to cause us real harm. How have they adopted, you know, kind of this digital transformation and what's different in terms of accelerating it in your customer base? Well, looking at our defense customers and national security customers, absolutely the velocity and scale of cloud is becoming an enabler. Again, looking at those information work was that they have looking at the nation state adversaries that we're facing right now. Information is information warfare. So if we're not ready to scale and innovate at a much higher velocity than we have in the past, we're going to become victim to those attack methodologies that these foreign actors are using. So that the scale and power of the cloud, as well as that tailwind of all these authorized services that are offered by Amazon that are already at the federal high and DOD impact those foreign higher up to impact level six, really enable them to go ahead and meet that mission but mad in speed and agility, they need to match that form adversary. Right. So you just talked about impact level and I want to dig into that for a little bit because in doing research on you guys and a lot of the solutions that customers you talk about, there's constant conversation about these impact levels, impact level four, impact level five, impact level six. Again, it's highly regulated industry. You guys have a very, very high bar that you have to hit in your solutions. What does impact level mean and why is it important and how are you basically working your way up the chart which I assume is a much more impactful and not no pun intended but much more significant solution delivery. So impact levels really have to do with information risk. So what is the level of information that that system is processing? So as you move up the impact levels, that information becomes more and more critical to national security. So an impact level four system may have to do with standard mission operations, administrative tasks, et cetera, where when you go up the stack to impact level five and even to impact level six or higher, you're really dealing with, let's say in the DOD perspective, the war fighter. So now you're dealing with where that war fighter is deployed, the capabilities of the war fighter that they're leveraging to fight that battle against the adversary. So you have to put more and more rigorous controls around that information to ensure that adversaries can gain the tactical advantage over our war fighters. It's really interesting how all these systems are really designed to work together. And as you said, kind of for that war fighter, if you watch anything on defense, it's kind of the pointy end of the stick but there's a whole lot of support behind that, behind that person at the very end to help them get the information to be successful in their job and support them, et cetera. But I'm curious if you've seen a change in attitude in terms of not only the data and the information in the systems as a support for the war fighter, but in fact that data itself being a significant asset as well as a significant target, probably bigger and more valuable than an aircraft carrier or any other kind of traditional defense assets. Yeah, I would say we've definitely seen that change. Our customers are really looking at data and aggregate and when you're building a cloud profile, when you're building a portfolio of systems and it's all in a single type environment or an enclave where you can unlock the value of that data, the aggregate of all of those applications, the aggregate of that data has increased value and that allows you to do a lot more things with it, it allows you to innovate a lot more to learn more about that data. And we're seeing our customers really looking at how can they unlock that value, whether it's looking at improving the supply chain, looking at data feeds that they're able to aggregate from commercial sources as well as sources that they're getting in a distributed fashion or whether it's just looking at how can they improve the efficiency of delivering services to the war fighter. It really is about unlocking that value of data. So that's why it's also important that we have capabilities that protect that data and then we provide more capabilities that allow our customers to be able to leverage as the CSPs, as AWS innovates, allow them to leverage these new capabilities much more rapidly than they could in the past. Right, right. Well, and Rob, you're talking about technical debt and there's kind of technical debt and there's application debt and there's kind of application portfolio, stuff that you have, right, that may or may not work well, that's probably running and has been running for a year, that doesn't necessarily all have to be modernized. You said sometimes, you know, it's the best to leave it as it lies. How are you helping people figure out, you know, what to modernize, what to leave it as it is, and then, you know, or, you know, how much effort should really be spent on new applications and new development, you know, taking advantage of the latest, because that's kind of a tricky portfolio strategy. And as you said, there's a whole lot of legacy stuff that's still running in those old data centers. You mentioned the keyword there and that strategy. Our customers are looking to us to help them evaluate their portfolio, determining what things that they should be doing next, the sequencing events and how they can unlock some of those values in the cloud. So, you know, one of the things that we talk about is that ability to, even if you're taking stuff from a legacy environment and moving that estate into the cloud, there's certain things that you can do to opportunistically refactor and get value out of the cloud. You don't have to rewrite the application every time. There's things that you can do to just refactor. And one of those components is that when you look at cloud and you look at the API nature of the cloud, transparency is the gift of the cloud and automation is how you get value out of that gift. And when you look at how automation and transparency are kind of tied together for our customers and you look at the fact that again, everything's an API based, you know, with full non-repudiation, who made that call, when they made that call, you've got an ability to create this autonomic response system. And this is a key part of application modernization. Giving that customer the ability to rapidly respond to an event, create automation, create runbooks, use advanced technologies like machine learning for anomaly detection, create security orchestration, all of those components. When you can build that framework, then your customers can even take some of their legacy assets and be able to utilize the high value of the cloud and respond to events much faster and in a more automated and autonomic manner. I love that, transparency and automation. And I want to go back to you, Anthony, you've been doing this for a long time. You didn't have these tools that you're disposable for and you didn't have necessarily the automation that you have before. And I think more importantly, understanding that Rob, you touched on on your earlier interview, couple of years back, kind of this scale learning, something identified by Bill Schmarzo once in terms of calling it out, where you learn something in one place and you can apply that learning across many, many places. And then the other piece I want you to comment on is automation. Because as we know, a lot of errors happen from silly things, fat fingers, bad copy paste, putting in a wrong config code, this, that and the other. So by adding more and more automation and continuing to kind of remove potential little slip-ups that can cause big, big problems, it's a really different world that you've got and the tools that you have in your portfolio to offer these solutions up to your clients. Absolutely. And again, as we've learned more and more about these repeatable patterns that have happened across our different customers, that allows us to create that runbook automation library that then allows our team and our capability to scale across multiple workloads. And kind of like Robert identified earlier, it's a lot of these cognitive services and I'll take Amazon as a specific example. GuardDuty is a very innovative capability with ML and AI behind it that allow you to look at these access patterns and communication patterns of these application workloads and quickly identify threats. But this automation and runbook and orchestration that you can build behind this then allows you to leverage that library to immediately respond to these events. When you see a threat and you see that pattern, your ability to rapidly respond to that and mitigate that threat is what allows your business and information systems to continue providing another primary business use case. And again, in our DOD customer and national security system customers the value to the warfighter to complete their mission. Yeah. Well, I want to go ahead and let you give a plug for some of your processes and techniques. You have something that you call FAST to help people go through this decision process. And I think as you said, Rob, you got to have some strategy before you start making some decisions. And also this thing that we're seeing out there called the shift left. What does that mean to you? What does it mean to your customers? Why is it important? Why should people know about it? Start with you, Rob. So what we noticed, we've been doing cloud services since 2009, really one of the first AWS public sector partners delivering the first capabilities to that market. And what we noticed is that a lot of organizations found it easy to move one or two workloads into the cloud but they struggled in making a cloud a true enterprise asset. So we took a step back and we created something that we call foundational agile strategic transformation. And that's FAST. It's a program that we developed that allows complex organizations, security-minded organizations, understand what are all the foundational things that need to be in place to really treat cloud as an enterprise asset. And it covers much more than just the technical components. It covers the organizational components. It covers all the stakeholders around security. But one of the key things that we've changed in the past couple of years is how do we not only look at leveraging the cloud as an enterprise asset but how do we allow them to accelerate how they can get the value out of the cloud, modernize their applications, create these capabilities. And the shift left component of FAST is providing as much capability all the way down to where the developer is where you have maybe DevSecOps when it used to be a developer on one side and operations on the other and security is kind of a binding function. Now we're talking about how can we create more capability right at the point of development? How can we shift that capability? And I think the role of the managed service provider is to enable that in an organization, provide capability, provide operations capability but also help them in a, you know, we use the term SRE quite a bit, Site Reliability Engineering. How can we really help them continuously optimize their portfolio and build a set of capabilities and services? So when they're building new applications they're not adding to their technical debt. That's great and so, so important. And it's just been so interesting to watch again as security specifically for public cloud and AWS has become from, you know, what was potentially a concern and a headwind to now being a tailwind and all you have to do is go to some of the the architectural key notes, some of my favorites and see the scale and massive investments that they can put into infrastructure and they can put into security that no single company, unless you're of the biggest, biggest ones, you know, can possibly invest so to be able to leverage that opportunity and obviously Teresa Carlson and the public sector team have done a really good job in giving you guys the solutions that satisfy the very tight requirements that your very important customers have. So it's really a great story and I really enjoy learning more and continued success to you guys and your teams and your important, your customers and all the important stuff that they protect for us. So thank you very much. All right, thank you. All right, well, signing off. That's Robert and Anthony. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE ongoing coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Thanks for watching. See you next time. Thank you.