 TheCube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. Welcome back everyone, happy afternoon. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante of TheCube. We are live at MGM Grand. This is Palo Alto Ignite 22, our second day of coverage. Dave, we've had some amazing conversations as we always do on TheCube. Cybersecurity one of my favorite topics. So interesting to hear what Palo Alto Networks is doing, how it's differentiating itself and how its ecosystem is growing. Yeah, well, one of the things I often use service now as a reference example, I go back to 2013. Had a kind of a tiny ecosystem and then sort of watched it grow. One of the key signs was when the global system integrators actually began to lean in, Accenture obviously, world-class, one of the, you know, definitely in the top, you know, they talk about top five QBs, Accenture, top five GSI, easy. Yep, and in fact, Accenture, we've got Rex Texton here, Senior Managing Director at Accenture Security. You guys have been the GSI partner of the year for Palo Alto Networks for four years in a row, six years plus strong partnership. Give us a little flavor and history of the Palo Alto partnership with Accenture. I think, you know, we started early, right? And they think as they've evolved, we've evolved our partnership with them. And as they've gone, you know, to more of a software footprint, you know, around cloud security and network security and SASE, we've seen a lot of growth and we're super excited about the opportunity that's ahead of us and the meaningful outcomes that we've been providing our clients as it relates to, you know, vendor consolidation, toll consolidation, tech debt reduction. There's a lot of opportunity here to simplify our clients' lives with them and that's something we're super excited about. Simplification, consolidation, been a theme of the last couple of days. Talk about some of the joint accomplishments that you guys have achieved. I know that you've developed a lot of offers across all of Palo Alto Networks GTMs. What are some of the highlights that come to mind? I think one of the things that we're most excited about, you know, not being client specific, is what we've been able to do on the network side with SASE and Zero Trust Network Access. You know, when COVID hit, there was a lot of change that happened with remote workforce and, you know, clients couldn't log in because their VPNs were crashing left and right and so we were able to go in and help stand up, you know, this Zero Trust Network's infrastructure and help our clients get back online and get their employees back to work in a productive manner. And then it's evolved with the hybrid work model over time. And so it's been a, that's probably one of the most gratifying. There was a real crisis at a certain point in time, you know, a couple of years ago. Rex, were there unintended consequences of that, you know, rapid, we were forced, you know, the forced march to digital in terms of just multiple tools, plugging holes and then sort of stepping back, you know, post-isolation economy saying, okay, hey, we got through this but now we need to take a new direction, new strategy. There is an unintended consequence. If you look at most clients have, I saw number 76, we counted as around 80 different security vendors and tools that they managed because a lot of people went and went after best of breed type capabilities. And so what we've seen now is the need to, you know, rationalize that, you know, their infrastructure and their capability and consolidate and reduce that and move to, you know, more of what I would call platform providers. If you only have 80 products, you have 80 integrations, 80 points of failure and I think it's very complex and, you know, there's a lot of finger pointing. And so as we're starting to see clients take a step back and say, hey, look, if I, you know, spend the time to, you know, I call it modernization but, you know, modernize my security infrastructure and footprint focused around, you know, automation, orchestration, leveraging the true ML and AI knows the buzzwords, but, you know, using them in the proper fashion, right? They can, you know, reduce that footprint, save a bunch of money, right? And drive that cost savings and then help scale their business because we have all these different vendors and what security is typically in the digital footprint is the slowdown, right? We've typically been the bottleneck in the past. And what we're seeing with what, you know, we've been very focused on is helping our clients scale their security footprints and their infrastructure and, you know, through automation, orchestration. I always say, some folks do it, you're mess for less with labor arbitrage and bodies but they're not enough security people in the world to do this. And so we're very focused on automation and orchestration and driving that into the market. Yeah, so you don't want to be in the business of filling those holes with labor. Exactly. You want to actually get paid for outcomes. 100%. And everything we've done is we've tried to simplify things, not only for, you know, big Accenture, but even for our clients so that we can be focused on business outcomes, not necessarily technology outcomes because doing technology for the sake of technology is that unintended consequence that you described earlier. Speaking of transformation and outcomes, I should say, what are you hearing most from CIOs and CISOs in terms of what they need now to be able to transform, to deliver the business outcomes so that they can become secure data companies regardless of industry? Yeah, I think the biggest thing we're seeing right now is the need to, you know, leverage true automation and orchestration. We have to break the head count model. There's not enough security professionals in the world to do, you know, to solve the world's problems. In order to scale that, you know, it's one of the reasons we're, you know, partnered with Palo Alto is because of, you know, the capabilities and the investments they've made in innovation to help drive that automation and orchestration through, you know, numerous capabilities from stock transformation to SASE, cloud security, et cetera. But our clients need to scale. They need to be able to go fast to net pace and they need to do it with confidence securely. And that's one of the big focuses. But the other focus is, is we're starting to see a need to, you know, vendor consolidation in the market. You've seen the acquisitions. I'm sure you've talked to people over the last couple of days. You know, there's a tremendous amount of consolidation going around. And what our clients, you know, are asking for is, hey, I need to reduce the number of vendors I interact with. I need to simplify my infrastructure. I need to focus on automation and orchestration from that perspective. What's happening with multi-cloud? What are you hearing from customers? You know, we hear a lot of the conversations about, oh, it's, you know, and I agree by the way, multi-cloud is kind of a symptom of multi-vendor. You know, Chuck Whitton's thing about multi-cloud by default versus design. You know, it's a good line and I think rings true. But what are customers telling you in terms of the real challenges generally and then specifically around security? I think it's, you know, each cloud, Service Fighter has their own security capabilities and security models and being able to train the people to be able to manage those different models. I think that's where, you know, tools like Prisma Cloud, for instance, come in and help clients be able to manage the security and compliance of those infrastructures in a way to do that and then to be able to manage application security consistently, right? It's not just the cloud itself, but it's actually the applications that may, you know, cross, you know, be for resiliency, but you know, be in multiple clouds and being able to make sure you have consistent security across those. I think, you know, one of the things that has permeated is just the, with data and identity and, you know, cloud infrastructure and tolerance management has been a big problem because it's like the wild, wild West. I always look when I look at identity in the cloud and how it's done, it looks like 1995 identity. It's ridiculously backwards. And so, you know, we've seen things like, you know, Keem that have come into play to help manage those relationships and simplify it across multiple clouds consistently. That makes sense. Yep. You mentioned Prisma Cloud. Most recently, Accenture and Palo Alto developed the Secure Cloud Express. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that is and what outcomes is it going to enable? So, great question. And we're pretty excited about this because what we did with that was we manage cloud, you know, our cloud environments for numerous customers. So we've developed hundreds of policies that, you know, we implemented in Prisma Cloud to manage, you know, multiple clients, our internal infrastructure. What we did was we said, well, most of our clients have to build those from scratch. So what we said is we will come in in the best of week of time and come in and do a data-driven exercise to show our clients, you know, where they sit from a security perspective as it relates leveraging Prisma Cloud and those policies that we've created. And what that has led to is another step which is where we're focused on auto remediation. So, you know, when you get the findings, then what do you do with them, right? If you have hundreds or thousands of some cases, we've had clients with 1,100 findings and they just sit there and they go, whoa. You know, so to speak. And so what we've done is we try to take those highest, most frequent findings and build security as code to auto-remediate those for clients so they can choose to implement that and work down those, you know, findings very quickly which helps, you know, drive more value out of their Prisma Cloud purchases. Accenture obviously has deep industry expertise around the globe. What are you seeing in terms of industries actually? So as they digitize, not just their IT transformation but a business transformation, there's a starting to see companies, financial services in particular, bring their business to their cloud, satisfy their business. And specifically, I'm interested in what's happening at the edge with operations technology. We just talked about healthcare and medical devices. What's happening there? How connected or disconnected is that to the rest of the estate, multi-cloud, on-prem, et cetera? I mean, I think OT is fairly disconnected, right? Sure. From that perspective, obviously. But I think what we're starting to see is an uptick, you know, on, I think Secure Edge and Sassy will come to OT because it's a better way because what happens is if someone, you know, gets into the network, they can traverse it, right? If they can apply those zero trust principles to OT, which is, you're talking to people that have been, you know, wearing hard hats and engineers, that's a big shift for them. And so, I think you'll start to see that play a more prevalent, you know, with the industries, like, you know, financial services, we're seeing a huge uptick in cloud adoption, right? They were slow to do it, but now they're going at pace and faster than most, right? Yeah, sure. And I think, you know, healthcare is another big one where we've seen a lot of migration and a lot of need for multi-cloud because, you know, something, they may be running their analytics on, you know, Google and their workloads on Azure or AWS. And so you're starting to see a lot of people leveraging the best of what each cloud provider does well from that perspective. And just an aside, in that Palo Alto survey, we saw construction was one of the hardest hit industries, which I was like, what? And then, of course, it's because they're not really focused on security, they're focused on building stuff. No, it's really interesting. We're working with a large builder, I can't say the name, but one of the things that they're looking to do is, you know, they're moving to the cloud and they're building the capability to manage some of the, you know, the largest skyscrapers in the world, but also manage the OT sensors and then also setting that, creating another business, not only just managing those buildings, but managing other people's buildings for them and selling security as a service for that because they built that capability around their devices and switches, HVAC, et cetera. Do you think that because, I mean, you know, the operations technology, they're engineers and they're hardcore, like don't touch my stuff. Exactly. And so do you feel like, as, I mean, I know that business has kind of done a reach around everything, you know, becoming connected, but do you feel like they're going to be more on top of it than sort of the broad commercial market has been or is it going to be Wild West all over again? My hope is that, you know, us as GSIs, you know, my fellow GSIs that we will help our clients make the better decisions this time around and not go to the Wild West. And, you know, we see a lot of it in manufacturing, you know, if you saw, you know, with the invasion in Ukraine, you know, one of the big groups that was hit was manufacturing. There was factories shut down all over the world, you know, and so, you know, and that is an OT environment, but what we've seen is that, you know, those clients take more serious steps to protect those environments because they're on, you know, Windows 10 servers running large machines. So we're starting to see a lot more care and feeding into those environments as well. I'm going to ask you a question about the conversations that you're having. That survey that Dave mentioned, it was released yesterday. There's a board behind us. What's next in cyber? That was the survey. Amazing data that came from it, like 96% of organizations have been hit by at least one attack in the last year. They were surprised that the number was that high, but we know that no industry, no company is safe. But one of the things that the survey found that surprised me was that we always say, oh, security is a board level conversation. We know that to some degree, but what they found was lack of alignment between the board and the executive level. In your eccentric relationships, I know you guys have deep relationships across organizations and their boards. Can you help bring the board together with the executives and really not just talk about cybersecurity, but really develop a cybersecurity transformation strategy that actually delivers resilience? Yeah, no, absolutely. And we actually took a step back and reorganized our business this last year. And one of those areas that we focused on was within strategy and the C-Suite agenda, right? And we actually published, looking at Ganesh, it was either the CEO handbook, I think it's what we called it, but to help them and board to be able to drive more meaningful conversations that relates to risk and whatnot. And so we're very focused on that right now. And we need to up level our conversations within the organization, because even the buyers in these large, two years ago was mainly the C-Suite. Now we're dealing with the CIO, CTO, CFO, because these are meaningful business conversations that are driving business outcomes. And security needs to be a business enabler, not a bottleneck. Is the chief data officer starting to emerge as we see, you know, Nakesh said yesterday in his keynote and we talked about it with him when he was here, security is a data problem. Yep, it is, it's a huge data problem. And we're starting to, you know, I think we've talked a lot about zero trust, but zero trust data is a significant problem, right? Because that, you talk about the Wild Wild West, is we see clients that have people that have access to, you know, what we call development environment data, right? But then you find out that they can hop four levels over into production data, and this data has been exposed to, you know, the wrong people, you know, not focused on that least privileged aspect. I think data is a real problem, you know, Purna Kesh's statement in the cloud. It's something that really needs to be addressed. And I think we're starting to see a lot of innovation around that area, because what typical data security has always been, I have all these problems that creates, I call it noise, right? I got thousands of findings, and then they just sit there and they go, what do I do, right? It's too much. And so I think there's going to be more intelligence around that and more, you know, what I call auto remediation, right? Being able to remediate those findings quickly from that perspective. I've been watching this board behind us. It's this what's next in cyber, and people come in and they write. It's just been growing, you know, all week. And somebody just wrote SOC transformation. We were just sort of talking about that earlier. What, your estimation, what percent of organizations that you target, I understand that you're not going after the mom and pop organizations, but what percent of that, you know, fat middle and the tip of the pyramid that's your sweet spot, what percent of those organizations don't have a SOC? I mean, most every organization has a SOC. You know, I talked to, you know, CISOs of large financial service organization. They said, do we even need a SOC anymore? It could be a virtual SOC, so to speak. But I think, you know, and with SOC transformation, I think we could potentially head to something like that. You know, but what's really been strange is, there's been, you know, what we call SOAR, right? Security, you know, orchestration, automation, whatever. And what- Another acronym that I have in my brain has enabled, I apologize, but you know, people have never really driven the value out of it because they build these automation playbooks. And for one company to do it and build 20 of them or 30 of them, it doesn't pay off in the long run. And what we're starting to see is people, you know, bring to the table more crowdsource these capabilities so that they can scale those SOC transformations because it's really about, you know, orchestration and automation. That's where, you know, Nirvana comes in because it's not about people with headsets on looking at, you know, 20 screens. It's not helpful, right? Humans, we make mistakes. And so if we can automate as much of that as possible, get rid of the false positives, leverage AI and ML to do that. And I think we're starting to see, you know, what I would call more advanced AI and ML. I think in the early days in security, AI and ML was very nascent. And now you're starting to see, you know, more powerful concepts come in, better learning, better outcomes out of that. Well, there's a lot of modeling in the cloud still is, but it's increasingly going toward real-time inference. And that's, you know, game-changing. Last question for you. What are some of the things that are next on the plate for Accenture and Palo Alto Networks? What's next up? I think, you know, we're very focused on Sassy right now in the market. And I think we think that is, you know, I think both of us think that's the next big wave, right? Because I think what we learned out of, you know, these last two and a half, three years, is that these concepts work, but they can actually scale out to drive significant cost savings. And if you look at Accenture, you know, we don't have a network backbone anymore. We're pure cloud land, right? We're leveraging the internet for that. And I think that in what we're trying to do with Palo Alto and driving, you know, Cloud WAN and Sassy as a Service, I think will be super, super meaningful and... Well, that's interesting. That has implications for a number of companies out there. Well, I think, you know, it's obviously the, you know, it is a big implication for a lot of, you know, our customers, you know, right? And so we have to be very careful and thoughtful about how we work to make that happen at the time. A lot of opportunity. Rex, thank you so much for joining us on the program and really dissecting what Accenture and Palo Alto are doing, all the value in it for organizations across industries. We appreciate your insights. Thank you. Thank you. For Rex Thaksten and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. Stick around, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, the leader in live emerging and enterprise tech coverage.