 Good evening guys, welcome back to Las Vegas. TheCube is here live at AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We have two live sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests on theCUBE, talking with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners, bringing you this hybrid tech event, probably the biggest of the year. And I'm pleased to welcome Stephen Kovac, next the Chief Compliance Officer at Zscaler. Stephen, how's it going? Well, it's going well, Lisa. Thank you for asking, enjoying Vegas. Loving the conference, unbelievable. Isn't it great to be back in person? It's so great. I've seen people- Conversations, you can't replicate on video conferencing, you just can't. Can't, and you see people you haven't seen in, you know, two years, and it's like, it's just, all of a sudden, it's like your best buddies again. It's just wonderful, it's so great to be back. It is, and AWS in typical fashion has done a great job of getting everybody in here safely. I'm not at all surprised, it's what I expected, but it's been great, and I hope that this can demonstrate to other companies, you can do this safely. You can, I think so. I mean, there's a lot of effort going on in this, but as usual, AWS does it right, so you expect that. Talk to me about the Zscaler AWS partnership. What's going on? Wow, it's a great partnership. So AWS and Zscaler have been partners since the beginning of Zscaler. We are the largest security cloud in the world. We're born and bred in the cloud security company, so literally, we wrote one application that does global security, everything from firewall, to proxy, to secure web gateway, to DLP, to all this in one piece of software. So in the past, where people would buy appliances for all these devices and put them in their own data center, we wrote a software that allows us to put that in the cloud, run it on the cloud globally around the world, and our partnership with AWS is, we originally built that on AWS, and today still, AWS is our prime partner in our, and especially in the zero trust side of our business. So great relationship. Long term, and great, I think for both of us, it's been a very, very fruitful partnership. Great to get love, thank you, synergistic, love that. So yeah, yes. You mentioned zero trust and that, we have seen such massive changes to the security and the threat landscape. The last 20, 22 months, talk to me about the recent executive order calling for zero trust. How does Zscaler's partnership with AWS help you enable organizations, Fed, Sled, DoD to be able to actually bring in and apply zero trust? Yeah, great question. I mean, we, so I was, five years ago, I was tasked to bring Zscaler into the government side of the business. So I was employee wanting to do that, it was a great honor to do it. And the first thing we did is, we partnered with AWS because we needed to get FedRAMP compliant. We knew we were going to go into DoD, so we needed to go to the impact level five, and eventually we'll be at a level six with AWS. And so it was our partnership started there. And as you've seen in five years, with all the changes that happened, obviously the break, the breaches like solar winds, and we have, I mean, the people about here talking about them all week with you, I'm sure. You know, the executive order came down from the Biden administration, who I completely salute for being just tremendous leaders in the cybersecurity space. And the executive order, one of the big pieces of the executive order was, every agency must produce a plan for Zero Trust. So our cloud platform that is on AWS is a Zero Trust platform. It is the first and only Zero Trust platform to get authorized by the federal government at the FedRAMP level, and now at the aisle five level. So together, we are literally capturing and taking over, being the leader in the Zero Trust space for the federal government. And I'm going to get a sip of water, so forgive me, I've been here all week talking to a lot of people, so forgive me for that. That's one thing that we don't have to deal with when we're on Zoom, right, is you don't really have the risk of losing your voice. But in terms of the executive order, that's something that you mentioned, solar winds, colonial pipeline, we only hear about some of the big ones. The fact that ransomware happens, one attack every 10, 11 seconds, it's a matter of when we get hit, not if. As you know, the story coming up for me, coming up on stage today, I just got myself reached just this morning. Individually, so yes, it's going to get all of us. And especially, I think when you look at Zero Trust and ransomware and how Zero Trust can prevent it, you look at the sled markets, state and local governments, they don't have the dollars to go spend like DHS does or some of the DOD does. So, our partnership with AWS allows us to produce a product that is very cost effective on a per user basis consumption model, which is what AWS has been famous for since day one, right, the consumption model. Use it when you need it, don't use it when you don't. We built our software the same way. So, at some points of the year, in the school year, we'll ramp up with some schools up to 100,000 users in the district and over the summer we'll ramp down to 1,000 and we build them for that. So, it's a beautiful relationship that we partner in, not just the executive order, but being a partner in sled, fed, in the sense that it matches making our business and together match the government's business. And that makes us a true leader and makes us a cost effective solution. And if you think about it, and just for a moment, I was just, yesterday I was told you I was testifying in front of the Senate. And one of the questions that I got asked was how many security updates do you guys see a year? I said, a year, well we do over 200,000 a day. 200,000 security updates for potential hackers every single day. And we're doing that over 200 billion transactions a day run on AWS. So, it's a tremendous partnership and be able to work like that and that kind of volume and be able to go up and down with the, and you got AWS able to scope up and down and us to be able to ride that wave with them, it's been great. One of the things that we always talk about when we talk AWS is their customer focus, their customer obsession, that hey, we start backwards, we work backwards from the customer. The same thing, synergistic from a cultural perspective? Absolutely, I mean, I always love about AWS and I've been a customer of AWS for many years, even prior to my Z-series days. I love the way they approach things, right? They're not trying to out and sell it, they're trying to meet with the customer and find out what the customer needs and then build a solution. We're the same way. I always tell you, when you think of our solution, Zscaler, I always tell my sales teams that I said it takes four sales calls for people to really understand what we do. In AWS, in the beginning of AWS, it was kind of the same thing. In the old days, we all just built data centers and we had all these racks and all this expense and mesh is what you did. It was unusual back in the day, 10 years ago, I mean, I've been to every single reinvent. I mean, the first one, you're actually going to put all your stuff in this unknown cloud thing and it'll be available when you need it. So yes, the way that they did it is the same way we do it together today and we do it together today. We partner on many deals today where both our teams are in there together, selling together, whether it's DOD, federal agencies, sled agencies, commercial, selling hand in hand because it's that same philosophy is we're going to build what a customer needs. Not, we're not going to tell the customer what they need. We're going to hear what they need. So that's the same relationship. So I'm going to get in there real quick. It's okay. Go for it. One of the things that has been a theme that we've heard the last couple of days is every company needs to be a data company or private sector, public sector. And if they're not, they're probably not going to be around much longer. How do you help customers get their handle around that? Because the security threats are only increasing. I mean, it's ransomware as a service, the fact that these criminals are getting much more brazen. You just had this happen to yourself but enabling them to become data driven organizations and use the data, extract the value from it securely as hard. It is. I mean, if you think back in the day, companies didn't have chief compliance officers that worked in the space that we do. The chief compliance officer back in the day was the guy that was writing your HR issues and what OSHA issues. And of course, I still deal with some of that stuff. But my true job is really around the data. How do we build our platforms? What decisions we make on our platforms? How are we going to certify them to support that? And I mean, chief data officers, chief security officers, I mean, these are, you're going to companies today, even car dealerships today. I mean, I'm pick one eight. You never thought of them having a security officer but they do. They have to. Have to. They have to. And I mean, you space basic school districts. I mean, I was a kid, went to school, I didn't have computers. But, you know, when my kid went to school, they did but they didn't have a security officer. Now today, every single school district has security officers. I mean, it's just, I love how you said it that data driven that data thought is there. And it has to be. It's a real threat. I mean, and the sad thing is, it's of these ransomware attacks. How many don't get reported? Oh, right. They're all the hearing about it. The numbers are something like 88% don't get reported. It's that big. So that just tells you how, you know, we hear the big ones, right? You know, colonial pipeline, things like that. We don't hear about, you know, West Texas or, you know, middle Illinois school district, they paid, you know, five grand because somebody had something on the school period. So that's what we really, that's how you said this ransomware as a service security. We call it a security as a service. There's, you know, the SAS, which is software as a service. We're security software as a service. And AWS is the infrastructure as a service that we run on. And that's how it works well together. You guys go and do accounts together from a go to market perspective? Is it? We do. We can always do a better job. And I'll just pivot my good friend here at AWS and try listening. We can always do better. But yes, it has become something especially in the state and in the government space, we do. And in federal DOD, because the certifications are really important. Certification is important everywhere. And we have many, we talked about all the certifications. We have federal, federal ramp and, you know, IL-5. And we have plethora of those certifications in the commercial space. What they mean in a federal space, they're really the ticket. They call them the energy star of approval, good housekeeping, please. So, you know, having that, teaming up with AWS, you know, we partner together. And because AWS has the same certs, we can sell at the same levels. And we do a really great job of co-selling in that space together. And I think when they look at us and they say, well, you're AWS, you've got, they've got their federal ramp high IL-5 and yours each, you know, you got your federal ramp high IL-5. Yes, we can do business with these guys. And that's important. So you guys both open doors for each other? We do. We do in many cases. Yeah. As a matter of fact, like what reinvented five years ago, what buddy of mine here opened a big, big account for us, which is that today our largest count in federal came from a reinvent where he came up to me and said, hey, my customer wants to, he's looking to do something. They're an agency, his global footprint. And they're like, we want to do something as a security as a service. They don't want to ship boxes all over the place. And, you know, we became, we just met the customer, you know, for a coffee. And next thing you know, became our, still today, our prior largest customer in federal. Wow. Well, this is the 10th reinvent. You said you've been to all of them. I have been to all of them. One of the things that I can't lie, but I can't say I did all the virtual ones. So, I mean, I was logged in. That's okay. We'll wake on that one. But one of the things that we've just got about a minute left here is in, you know, new leadership, Andrew Jesse going, being promoted to the CEO of Amazon. We've got Adam Soliski heard a lot of announcements and news from Adam yesterday. But some of the things that we've been talking about on theCUBE is the first 15 years of innovation at AWS, that's going to accelerate. Do you see that also? Like, if you look forward to the next decade, do you see things moving even much faster than they did the past decade? I don't think they can't. I mean, I should say they have to. And the change of the guard, as you might call it here, is it's always good to have a change of the guard. I think, you know, the question is, you know, when's Andy going to go to space? I mean, that's the world that, you know what I'm saying? But I think you have the guys that took, got AWS to the dance. And now that, you know, the dance has got to become, but who's going to become the bell of the ball? And this next generation of leadership coming in is fabulous. I think they've made great decisions. And I think they're going to do really well. And we're behind them, we support it. I've got a chance to meet with most of them. Look, chance to meet with Andy. I've met with him yet. So Andy, love to meet you sometime soon. But I'm very impressed with what they've done. And yes, I think it's going to be the last 10 years, the last 10 years of growth, is going to be a year next year. I think literally you take 10 years, we compress to a year. And then next year it'll be compressed to a day. So it's just going to, it's moved that fast. Yep. Get your neck brace on, prepare for that. That's why I said, Jeff, Jeff went to space. It's faster about to travel, right? It's really relative. It is. There is no limit. Well, Steven, thank you for joining me, talking about Zscaler, AWS, what you guys are doing, how you're helping to revolutionize public sector, Fed, Sled, a lot of great stuff there. Security is an ever evolving topic. And we appreciate all of your insights. Well, it was wonderful to be here. Great to see you again. And glad to be back when back to all of our friends at re-invent. All of our friends, exactly. Thank you for so much for the time today. My pleasure. For Steven Kovac, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage.