 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto Studios with a CUBE Conversation, with a great influencer. We haven't had him on for a while. Last had him on in May, I think of 2019, mid 2019. We're excited to welcome him back to the program. He's Kevin L. Jackson. He is the CEO of GC GlobalNet. Kevin, great to see you today. Hey, how you doing, Jeff? Thanks for having me. It's been a while, but I really enjoyed theCUBE. Yeah, I really enjoyed being on theCUBE. Well, thank you for coming back. So we've got you on to talk about Citrix. We had you last on, we had you on Citrix Synergy. This year, obviously COVID hit, all the events have gone virtual and digital, and Citrix made an interesting move. They decided to kind of break their thing into three buckets, kind of around the main topics that people are interested in in their world. And that's Cloud, so they had a Citrix Cloud Summit, they had a Citrix Workplace Summit, and now they just had their last one of the three, which is the Citrix Security Summit. Just wrapped up. So before we jump into that, I just want to get, you take how you doing, how you getting through the kind of COVID madness from the light switch moment that we experienced in March, April to, now we're like seven, eight months into this and it's not going to end anytime soon. Well, you know, it was kind of different for me because I've been working from home and remotely since I guess 2014. Being a consultant and with all my different clients, I was doing a lot more traveling, but with respect to doing meetings and being on collaborative systems all day long, it's sort of like a old hat. And I say, welcome to my world. But I find that, you know, society is really changing. The things that you thought were necessary in business, you know, being physically at meetings and shaking hands, that's all like, you know, oh, we don't do that anymore. Yeah, I used to joke, right? When we started this year that we finally got to 2020, the year that we know everything, right? With the benefit of hindsight, but it turned out to be the year that we actually find out that we don't know anything and everything that we thought we knew, in fact is not necessarily what we thought. And we got thrown into this, we got thrown into this thing. And, you know, thankfully for you and for me, we're in the tech space, we can go to digital, we're not in the hotel business or the hospitality business or, you know, so many businesses that are still suffering greatly, but we were able to make the move in IT. And Citrix is a big piece of that in terms of enabling people to support remote work. They've always been in remote work, but this really changed the game a lot. And I think as you said, before we turned on the cameras accelerated, you know, this digital transformation way faster than anybody planned on. Oh, oh yeah, absolutely. And another one of the areas that was particularly accelerated, they sort of put the rockets on is security. What I'm really happy about because of the rapid increase in the number of remote workers. I mean, historically, companies had most of their workforce in their own buildings on their own property. And there was a small percentage that would remote work remotely, right? But it's completely flipped now. And it flipped within a period of a week and a half. And many of these companies are really scrambling to make, you know, their entire workforce be able to communicate, collaborate, and just get access to information remotely. Right, right. Well, David talked about it in the security keynote, you know, that, you know, as you said, when this light switch moment hit in mid-March, you had to get everybody secure and take care of your people and get them set up. But, you know, he talked a little bit about, you know, maybe there were some shortcuts taken, and now that we've been into this thing in a prolonged duration, and again, it's going to be going on for a while longer, that there's really an opportunity to make sure that you put all the proper systems in place and make sure that you're protecting people, you're protecting the assets, and you're protecting, you know, the jewels of the company, which today are data, right? And data in all the systems that people are working with every single day. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. They had to rapidly rethink all of the work models and this accelerated digital transformation and the adoption of cloud. And it was just this huge demand for remote work, but it was also important to keep, to think about the user experience, the employee experience. I mean, there were learning new things, learning new technologies, trying to figure out how to do new things. And at the beginning of this transition, people were thinking that, hey, you know, after a few months, we'll be okay. But now, and it's starting to sink in that this stuff is here to stay. So you have to understand that work is not a place. And I think, actually, David said that, right? It's really, you have to look at how the worker is delivering and contributing to the mission of the organization to the business model. And you have to be able to measure the worker's level of output and their accomplishment and be able to do this remotely. The back to office is not gonna happen in reality. So the employee experience through this digital environment, this digital workspace is critical. Yeah, I think one of the quotes he had, whether I think it was either this one or one of the prior ones is like, back to work is not back to normal, right? We're not gonna go back to the way that it was before. But it's interesting, you touched on employee experience and that's a big piece of the conversation, right? How do we measure output versus, you know, just time punching the clock? How do we give people that experience that they've come to expect with the way they interact and technology in their personal lives? But there's an interesting, you know, kind of conflict and I think you've talked about it before between employee experience and security. Because those two kind of inherently are going to be always in conflict because the employee's going to want more access to more things easier to use. And yet you've got to keep security baked in throughout the stack, whether it's access to systems, whether it's the individual and so there's always this built in kind of tension between those two objectives. Well, the tension is because of history. Security has always been sort of a second thought an afterthought, you know, you said do the work. Oh, security, we'll catch up to it when we need to. But now, because of the importance of data and the inherently global connectivity that we have, the need for security has its paramount. So in order to attract that, in order to address that the existing infrastructures had this, where we just bolted security on to the existing infrastructures. This is when they win the data centers. And we said, well, as long as it's in our data center, we can control it. But then we, with this COVID thing, we'll just burst out of any data center. We have to rely on cloud. So this concept of just bolting on security just doesn't work because you no longer own or control the security. So you have to look at the entire platform and have a holistic security approach. And it has to go from being infrastructure-centric to data-centric, because that's the only way you're going to provide security to your data to those remote employees. Right, right. And there's a very significant shift we hear all the time. We've got RSA all the time to talk about security. And that's this concept of zero trust. And the idea that rather than, as you said, kind of the old school, you put a wall and a moat around the things that you're trying to protect, you kind of start from the perspective of I don't trust anybody. I don't trust where they're coming from. I don't trust their device. I don't trust that they have access to those applications. And I don't trust that they have access to that data. And then you basically enable that on kind of a need-to-know basis across all those different factors at kind of the least amount that they need to get their job done. It's a really different kind of approach to thinking about security. Right, and but it's a standardized approach. I mean, before a present time, you would customize security to the individual or to the organization or component of the organization because you knew where they were. And you would say, well, they won't accept this, so we'll do that. So everything was sort of piecemeal. Now that work is not a location, you have to be much more standardized, much more focused. And being able to track and secure that data requires things like digital rights management and secure browsers. And some of the work that Citrix has done with Google has really been amazing. They looked at it from a different point of view. They said, okay, where people are always working through the cloud in different locations from anywhere, but they all work through their browser. So we could, and I think this was something that the vice president at Google said, Sunil Padi, I believe, vice president of Google Cloud, they said, well, we can capitalize on that interface without affecting the experience. And he was talking about Chrome. So Citrix and Google have worked together to drive sort of an agentless experience to order to enhance security. So instead of making everything location-specific or organizational-specific, they set a standard and they support this intent-driven security model. Yeah, it's interesting. Sunil's a really sharp guy. We've had him on theCUBE a ton of times over the years. But there's another really interesting take on security and I want to get your feedback on it. And that's kind of this co-opetition, right? And Silicon Valley is very famous for a co-opetition. You might be competing tooth and nail with the company across the street and at the same time, you got an opportunity to partner. You might share APIs, it's a really interesting thing. And one of the items that came out of the Citrix show was this new thing called the Workspace Security Alliance. Because what's interesting in security, that even if we're competitors, if you're suddenly getting a new type of threat or you're getting a new type of attack and there's a new kind of profile, actually the industry likes to share that information to help other people in the security business is kind of us versus the bad guys, even if we're competing for purchase orders, we're competing kind of face to face. So they announced this security alliance, which is pretty interesting, to basically bring in partners to support a co-opetition around the Zero Trust framework. Yeah, absolutely. This is happening across just about every industry though. You're going away from point to point relationships to where you're operating and working within an ecosystem. And in security, just this week, it's been highlighted by the trick bot activity, this persistent malware that I guess this week is attacking healthcare facilities, the actual the US Department of Homeland Security put out an alert. Now, and this is a threat to the entire ecosystem. So everyone has to work together to protect everyone's data. And that improves, that is the way forward. And that's really the only way to be successful. So we have to go from this point to point mindset to understanding that we're all in the same boat together. And in this alliance, the Workspace Security Alliance is an indication that Citrix gets it, right? Everyone has workers, everyone's workers are remote, okay? And everyone has to protect their own data. So why don't we work together to do that? Yeah, that's great. That's interesting, I had not heard of that alert. But what we are hearing a lot of, in a lot of the interviews that we're doing is kind of a resurfacing of kind of old techniques that the bad guys are using to try to get remote workers because they're not necessarily surrounded with as much security or having as much baked in in their home setup as they have in the office. And apparently ransomware is really on the rise and the sophistication of the ransomware folks is very high in that they try to go after your backup and all your replication stuff before they actually hit you up for the want for the money. So it's- And absolutely, that's- Your eyes go up. Yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry. I was just saying that's indicative of the shift that most of your workers are no longer in your facilities they're now in at home where companies never really put a lot of investment into protecting that channel, that data channel they didn't think they needed to. Right, right. One of the other interesting things that came up at the Citrix event was the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to basically have a dynamic environment where you're adjusting kind of the access levels based on the behavior of the individual. So what apps are they accessing? What, are they moving stuff around or are they downloading stuff? And to actually kind of keep a monitor if you will to look for anomalies in behavior. So even if someone is trusted to do a particular type of thing if suddenly they're kind of out of band for a while then you can flag alerts to say, hey, what's going on? Is that this person did their job change? Why are they doing things that they don't normally do? Maybe there's a reason. Maybe there isn't a reason. Maybe it's not them. So I think there's so many great applications for applied machine learning and artificial intelligence and these are the types of applications where you're gonna see the huge benefits come from this type of technology. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Citrix Analytics for Security is really a security service, right? That monitors the activities of people on the internet and this machine learning gives you or gives the service this insight. No one company can monitor the entire internet and you can go anywhere on the internet. So by working together, leveraging this external service, you can actually have automated remediation of your users. You can put this specific user security risk score. So companies and organizations can be assured that they are within their risk tolerance. Right, right. And of course the other thing you've been in the business for a while that we're just kind of on the cusp of is 5G and IoT. So a lot more connected devices, a lot more data, a lot more data moving at machine speed, which is really what 5G is all about. It's not necessarily for having a better phone call. So we're just going to see kind of again this growth in terms of attack surfaces, this growth in terms of the quantity of data and a growth in terms of the rate of change that that data is coming in and the scale and the speed with the old velocity and variety and volume of the old big data means. So again. The other thing. Go ahead. The other thing is not just data. When you have 5G, the virtual machines themselves are going to be traveling over this network. So it's a whole new paradigm. Yeah, yeah. So the, once again to have kind of a platform approach to make sure you're applying intelligence to keep an eye on all these things from zero trust kind of baseline position. Right. Pretty damn important. Yeah, absolutely. With Edge computing, the internet of things, this whole infrastructure based data centric approach where you can focus on how the individual is interacting with the network is important. And another real important component of that is the software defined wide area network because people work from everywhere and you have to monitor what they're doing. Right, right. Yeah, it's really worked from anywhere not necessarily work from home anymore. I just want to, you know again you've been doing this for a while get your feedback on the fact that this is so much of a human problem and so much of a human opportunity versus just pure technology. I think it's really easy to kind of get wrapped up in the technology, but I think you've said before digital transformation is a cultural issue. It's not a technology issue and getting people to change the way they work and the change the way they work with each other and to change what they're measuring. As you said, COVID kind of accelerated that whole thing but this has always been more of a cultural challenge and a technology challenge. Yeah, the technology in a relative sense of view is kind of easy, right? But it's the expectations of humans is what they're used to is what they have been told in the past is the right thing no longer is right. So you have to teach, you have to learn you have to accept change and not just change but rapid change and accelerated change and people just don't like change. They're uncomfortable in change. So another aspect of this culture is learning to be adaptable and to accept change because it's going to come whether you want it or not. Faster than you think as well for sure. Well, that's great. So Kevin, I'll give you the final word as you think about how things have changed. And again, I think the significant thing is that we went from kind of this light switch moment where it was an emergency and quick get everything squared away. But now we're in kind of this new normal. It's going to be going for a while. We'll get back to some version of a hybrid solution at some point and you and I will be seeing each other at trade shows at some point in time in the future but it's not going to go back the way that it was and people can't wait and hope that it goes back the way that it was and really need to get behind this kind of hybrid, if you will, work environment and helping people be more productive with the tools they need. It always gets back to giving the right people the right information at the right time to do what they need to do. Yes. So just kind of get your perspective as we kind of it to the end of 2020, we're going to turn the page here rapidly on 2021 and we're going to start 2021 in kind of the same place we are today. Well, to be honest, we've talked about a lot of these things but the answer to all of them is agility. Agility is the key to success. This is like not lacking into a single cloud. You're going to have multiple clouds, not lacking into a single application. You can have multiple applications, not assuming that you're always going to be working from home or working through a certain browser. You have to be agile to adapt to rapid change and the organizations that recognize that and teach their workers, teach their entire ecosystem to operate together in a rapidly changing world with agility will be successful. That's a great way to leave it. I saw Beth Comstack, the former vice chair at GE give a keynote one time and one of her great lines was, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I think you nailed it. This is about agility, it's about change. We've seen it in DevOps where you embrace change, you don't try to avoid it. You take that really at the top level and try to architect to be successful in that environment as opposed to sticking your head in the sand and praying it doesn't come. Absolutely. All right. Well, Kevin, so great to catch up. I'm sorry it's been as long as it's been but hopefully it'll be shorter before the next time we get to see each other. Yeah, it's fine. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. Absolutely. All right. He's Kevin L. Jackson. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from our political studios, CUBE Conversation. We'll see you next time.