 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today for a CUBE Conversation. Again, it's a little bit of a letdown in the crazy conference season, so it gives us an opportunity to do more studio work and check in with some folks. So we're really excited to have our next guest. We'd love to talk to practitioners, people out on the front lines that are really living kind of this digital transformation experience. So we'd like to welcome in all the way from Toronto, the NBA champion, Toronto, home of the other Raptors. He's Philip Armstrong, Global CIO and EVP from Great West LifeCo. Philip, great to see you. Thanks, Jeff. Good afternoon. And I got to say congrats. You know, you took the title away from us this year, but job well done and we all kind of rejoiced in Canada's happy celebration. So I'm sure it was a lot of fun. So lots of excitement here in Toronto for sure. Great. Let's jump into it. A lot of conversations about digital transformation. You're right in the heart of it. You run in a big company that's complicated, it's old. So first off, give us a little bit of background just for people that aren't familiar with Great West LifeCo in terms of how long you've been around, the scale and size, and then we can get into some of the challenges and the opportunities that you're facing. Sure, I'd love to. Actually, one of the probably the world's best kept secrets. Great West LifeCo is a holding company and underneath that company, we have a number of companies. So for example, in the US, you may have heard of Putnam Mutual Funds out of Boston or Empower Retirement Services, the second largest pension administration company in the United States out of Denver. We have companies called Canada Life and Irish Life. We operate in Europe, the US and Canada and we were formed in 1847. So we're 170-odd years old, very old established company. In fact, the first life insurance company to get its charter in Canada. So we were certainly not born digital, we were not born in the cloud. In fact, we weren't even born analog. I think our history goes back to parchment, green ink and eye shades. So this has been quite the digital transformation for our company. So when you think about digital transformation, insurance companies are always interesting, right? Because insurance companies, by their very nature, they created actuarials and you guys have always been doing math and you've always been forecasting and building models. What does digital transformation mean for you and kind of that core business in the way that you look at insurance and the products that you offer your customers? It's been massive. It's had a massive impact right across that company. We have 30 million customers around the globe customers and expectations are rising every single day. They want online access to their information. We're an insurance company but we're also a wealth management company. So we're open to market timing and exposures to the market. Our pace in our businesses accelerated dramatically. And so just the expectation that other companies, digitally native companies are setting with our customers as forced us to completely reexamine our traditional business models that have served us so well. Almost to the point where you have to take a hand grenade and just blow it up and start again. And this is very, very difficult when you've got actuarial tables that are working that are built on hundreds of years of experience. We're moving into a completely new world now. I mean, we've come from a world where a security has always been very important to us. We manage $1.4 trillion over other people's money. We have traditional business models and traditional data centers and we operate at a certain level, a certain pace and all of that, all of that now has to change. We have skill sets and people who are very, very technical in nature, in their jobs. And have we got the right skills to take us into the future? Can we future proof our business? This has been not just a technology transformation but a massive cultural transformation for our company. A reinvention of all of our business models, the way we look at our customers. And a lot of our business is done through advisors. We have half a million advisors around the world that give financial planning and advice to people and allow them to have some financial security. Our relationship with them has to change and their expectations in using technology has to change. So this digital transformation is only a thin sliver of the transformation that our company has been going through globally over the last few years. That's interesting. You talked on so many topics there. I want to break it down into three. One is the consumerization of IT that we've talked about over and over and over. And people's experience with Yahoo and Amazon and shopping with Google and Google Maps really drives their expectations of the way they want to interact with every application on their phone, when they want to, how they want to. So that's interesting in terms of your customer engagement. The other piece I want to go in a little bit is your own employees. You've been around since 1847. The expectations of the kids that you're hiring out of college today and what they expect in their work environment also driven in a big part by the phones that they carry in their pocket. And then the third leg of the stool are these, I forget the word that you used, but your partners or associates or these advisors that you are enabling with your technology stack, but they're, I assume, independent folks out there just like you see at the local insurance office that you need to enable them in a very, very different way. You're sitting in the middle. How do you kind of break down the problems across those three kind of groups of people or contingencies or constituencies? That's the word I'm looking for. Yeah, well, let's start with our advisors. So we have many relationships with advisors. We have a relationship with an advisory force that is almost like a tied sales force that is positioned just to sell our products. We have advisors who are quite independent and yet they sell our products. And then we advise us that occasionally sell our products and everything in between companies that are advisors, sort of managing general agents. We have bank assurance arrangements. We have all kinds of distribution arrangements around the globe with our company to distribute our products, but that the heart of what we do is an advice based channel with many variants. And so what do those advisors want? They want tools, online tools. They want safe connectivity. They want fast access to the internet. They want to be able to pull in advice. They want video conferencing. They want to be able to be reachable by their customers and really leverage technology to allow them to provide that timely advice and be responsive to market changes, almost delivering a bespoke service to each individual in yet a mass way that's simple and timely. When you look at our employees, our employees pretty much want the same thing. They want safe access to the internet. They want safe access to the cloud and our applications. We've had to go through massive amounts of cultural change and training and education to bring our employees into the new world with new skills and equip them. Just ways of working, video, introducing video into our company, upgrading our networks. The change behind all of this different way of working has been phenomenal. I wish you could see the building we're sitting in today that I'm coming to you from today. It's a stone building that was built in the early 1930s as a prominent landmark here in Toronto. And from the outside, it looks like a cake. When you walk into the lobby, it's all art deco and beautiful. They can't make buildings like this today. But in many ways, it epitomizes our company because then you go up the elevators and walk onto the floors and it's all open plan. It's all digitally enabled. We have Microsoft teams in every meeting room. The floors are all modern and newly decorated and designed to allow us to collaborate and create new solutions for our customers. It's a real juxtaposition and that, I feel, is a good analogy for our company right now and what we're going through. So let's talk about how it's changed in terms of the infrastructure. Your job is to both provide tools to all these different constituents that you talked about as well as protect it. So it's this kind of interesting dynamic where before you could build a moat and kind of keep everybody inside the brick building, but you can't do that anymore and security has changed dramatically, both with the cloud as well as all these hybrid business relationships that you described. So how did you kind of address that? How have you seen that evolve over the last several years and what are some of the top of mind issues that you have when you're thinking about, I got to give access to all these people. They want fast, efficient tools. They want really a great way for them to execute their job. At the same time, I got to keep that $1.4 trillion and all that that represents secure. Not an easy challenge. Not easy at all. A few years ago, it was pretty trendy to say we're going to move everything to the cloud. And I think now, especially for large, complex companies like ours, hybrid cloud is the way to go. I think we're starting to see a lot more CIOs like myself say, yes, I'd love to take advantage of the cloud and I'm certainly moving a lot of my footprint to the cloud. To start with, it was because of cost. But now I think it's because of agility and access to new technologies as well. But when you move things to the cloud, you have to be very cautious around how you do that. We have in-house data centers that we have systems, administration systems that are obfuscated from our clients by fancy front ends and easy to use experiences. And they're running on pennies on the dollar and so you can't make a business case to move that to the cloud. So hybrid cloud is the way to go for us. But what we realized very quickly is that we need to push our cybersecurity and defenses out to the intelligent edge, out to the edge of the internet. Stop bad things happening, stop malware, stop infections coming into our organization before they even come into our organization. The cloud has complicated that. We're reducing our surface areas. I heard just the other day a colleague of mine said, yeah, the cloud is fabulous. It's a faster way to deliver your mistakes to your customers. And in many ways it is if you're not careful with what you're doing. We've deployed technology like Zscaler and other types of sandboxing technology. But it's always a cat and mouse game. The bad guys are putting artificial intelligence into their malware. We saw the other day a piece of malware coming into our organization through email. And when it was exploded, the first thing it did was try to check signatures to see if it was in a virtualized environment. And if it was, it just went back to sleep again and didn't activate. The nice thing about Zscaler and some of the technologies that I'm deploying is that proprietary, they don't have these signatures. And so we can screen out, we literally get hundreds of thousands, close to millions of malware attempts coming into our organization on a daily basis. It is a constant fight. What we've also found is that organizations like ours are big targets. And so what companies are trying to do is not steal our data because they know that we won't pay ransoms. What we'd like to do is spend that money protecting our customers with credit monitoring or changing their passwords and helping them deal with if there is a breach. And so the bad guys have changed their tactics. Instead of stealing our data, they'd like to try and penetrate our networks and our systems and cripplers. They would really like to bring us down. And that determines a different strategy and protection. You touched on so many things there, Philip. We could go for like three hours, I think, just on follow-ups to that answer. But let me drill in on a couple. One of them just curious to get your perspective on how you finance insurance. You know, you made an interesting comment. You don't pay ransom and you have to, you have a budget that you spend on security within all the other priorities that you have on your plate. But you can't spend everything on insurance. You can't get ultimate 100% protection. So when you think about your trade-offs, when you think about security almost from like an insurance or kind of a business mindset, what's the right amount of spend? How do you think about the right amount of spend for security versus everything else that you have to spend on? Yeah, that's a great question. And I've been talking to my peers around, you know, what is the right amount of money? And you could spend tons and tons of money on cyber to still be breached. And you can do everything right and again, still be breached. You just have to be very pragmatic about where direct your resources. For us, it was hardening the perimeter was the start. We wanted to stop things getting in as best we could. And so we went out to the cloud and put defenses right at the edge, right at the intelligent edge and extended our network out. Then we went and said, you know, what is our weakest link and through social engineering and through dropping things onto people's desktops and then trying to breach into our network, we put some pretty sophisticated technology in endpoint detection. We monitor our devices using our SIM. We have a dedicated monitoring center that is global, that is in-house and staff. We've built up a lot of capabilities around that. And so then it becomes prioritizing your crown jewels, your most sensitive data, trying to put that most sensitive data into protected zones on your network and clustering even more defenses around that more sensitive data. I'm a big believer in a defense in depth strategy. So I would have multiple layers of cybersecurity that overlap. And so if you can manage to circumvent some, you might get caught by others. And really that's about it. It's been a struggle. We have a lot of people who specialize in risk management in our company. So everyone's got an opinion, but I think this is a common challenge for global CIOs. All right, I'll share the approach tip and a couple of the security shows. It seems HVAC systems are ripe for attack and the funniest one I ever heard was the automated thermometer in a lobby fish tank at a casino. That was the access point. IOT adds a different challenge, but shifting gears a little bit. Oh, bending machines. Yeah, yeah. But HVAC came up like five times out of 10. So watch out for those HVAC systems. But we're here as part of the Zscaler program and you've already mentioned them before their name is on the screen. You've talked before about leveraging partners. Zscaler specifically, but you mentioned a whole host of really the top names in tech. Wonder if you could give us a little bit more color on, how do you partner? It's a very different way to look at people and a relationship with a company and the reps that you deal with versus just buying a product and putting in their product when you really talk about partnering with these companies to help you take on this ever-evolving challenge at a security. Yeah, that's a fabulous question. I know that I cannot match the research and development budgets of some of these very large tech companies. And I don't have the expertise. They're specialists. This is what they do. We were the first company, I think, to install Zscaler in Canada. We have a great relationship with that company and Jay's onto something here. He's a thought leader in this space. And we've been very pleased with our cooperation and the support we got from Zscaler in helping us with our perimeter. When we looked inside our company, the network played a big part of delivering cybersecurity and protection for our customers. And so we placed a phone call over to Cisco and said, come on in and help us with this. We need to completely revamp our network, build a leaf and spine architecture, software-defined networks, state-of-the-art. We really want the best and the brightest to come in and help us design this network globally for us. And so Cisco's been a superb partner. Cisco has one North American lab where they try out their new technologies and they advance their technologies. It's just down the street here in Toronto. So we've been able to avail ourselves of some pretty decent thought leadership in that space. And then also FireEye has been absolutely superb working with them. We developed pretty close relationships with them. We support their activities. They come in and help us with ours. We've used their consulting agency, Mandiant quite a bit to give us advice and help us protect our organization. And I think sort of aligning yourselves with these quality companies. Microsoft, I have to call out Microsoft, have been superb starting from the desktop and moving us through, vertically aligned into the cloud and providing cybersecurity every step of the way. You can't rely on one vendor. You have to make sure that these suppliers or partners, you turn vendors into partners and you make sure that they play well together and that they understand what your priorities are and where you want to go. We've been very transparent with them around what we like and what we don't like and what we think is working well and what isn't working well. And we just build this ecosystem that has to work well in this day and age. Well, Phillip, I think that's a great summary that it's really important to have partners and really have a deeper business relationship than just simply exchanging money for service. It's the only way in this really rapidly evolving world to get by because nobody can do it by themselves. And I think you summarize that very, very well. So final question before I let you go back to, back to the open floor plan and all the hardworking people over there at Great West Life Company. What are your priorities for the balance of the year? I can't believe it's July already. This year is just zooming by. What are some of the things that you look kind of down the road that you've got your eye on? Well, we're certainly watching some of the geopolitical activities. We have large operations in Europe and from my accent, you can probably tell I'm a Brit. So we're watching Brexit and how that plays out. We're certainly trying to develop new and innovative products for our customers. And certain segments are interesting as the millennial segment, the transference of wealth from people in the later generations into earlier generations passing wealth down to their kids. Retirement is a really big category for us and making sure that people have good retirement options and retirement products. And of course, we're always kicking tires and we're looking out for any opportunities in the M&A market as well as our industry consolidates and costs rise. So that's kind of what's keeping us busy. And of course, rolling out really cool technology. All right, well, thanks for taking a few minutes in your very busy day to spend it with us and give us your story on the global transformation, the digital transformation in Great West Life Company. Very welcome, Jeff. Nice chatting with you. You too, all right, thanks again. So he's Phil, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We've had a CUBE conversation here out of Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.