 Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner ecosystem. Welcome back here to the show floor at AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, along with John Furrier. I'm John Wallace, glad to have you. Here on theCUBE is a continue our coverage here live for the nation's capital. Joining us now from Enlighten IT Consulting is John Newbank before, Director of Program Management Office. And John, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE, a CUBE rookie, I believe, is that right? Yes, sir, yeah, thanks for the invite. Nice to break the maid, good to have you aboard here. First off, tell us a little bit about your consulting firm for our viewers at home to give an idea about your frame and why you're here at AWS. Absolutely, so we're a big data consulting company focused on cybersecurity solutions for the DoD, IC community, what we jumped into about three years ago was a partnership with AWS and seeing just the volume, the velocity of data coming out of the DoD, that those on-premise server farms could not keep up, could not support it with the power space and cooling needs. So we partnered with AWS and over the last three years we've been migrating our customers up to GovCloud specifically. So what are you doing for DoD specifically there? You said you solve problems, right? They got the reins and reins of data and trying to help them manage that process a little bit better, but you know, control it down a little bit more specifically what you're doing for DoD. Absolutely, so we developed a proprietary technology called the Rapid Analytic Deployment and Management Framework, RADMIF. It's available on radmif.com, radmf.com. True marketer. True marketer at heart. So that's our sort of governance framework for DoD applications that want to move to the cloud. It automates the deployment process to get them out of their existing systems up to the cloud. One of the real problems inside the DoD that we've encountered is the disparate data sets to enable effective analytics when it comes to cybersecurity solutions. So I'd like to think back to the day one conversation about sort of the data swamp, not the data lake. That's exactly what we have inside the DoD. There's so many home-built sensors paired with cot sensors that it's created this absolute mess, or nightmare of data. That swamp needs to be drained, it needs to be sort of refined in a way that we can call it a data lake, something understandable that people can't. I hate the term data lake. You've been listening. John knows I hate the term data lake. Love the term data swamp because it illustrates exactly that. There is, if you don't watch the data and you don't share it, it's just stagnant and it turns into a swamp. And I think this is a huge issue. Absolutely correct. So I want you to just double down on that and just give some color. Is it the volume of the data? Is it the lack of sharing, both? It's really everything under the sun. There's sharing issues all across the federal government right now and who can see what data Navy doesn't want to share with Army inside the IC? Well, that'll never happen. Agencies don't want to share with each other. I think we're breaking down those walls. We're seeing that when it comes to cybersecurity, no one person can defend an entire nation. No one agency can defend an entire nation on their own. It has to be a collaborative solution. It has to be a team effort. Navy, Army, Air Force, IC, et cetera, have to work together in tandem, in partnership, if we're ever going to just defend our nation from cyber attackers. John asked you a philosophical question because as someone's been online all my life, you know, computer science, you've seen there's only the notion of trolling, the notion of online message boards, back in the day when I was growing up, it's now mainstream now. People trolling each other on Twitter for crying out loud, mainstream. So the culture of digital has an ethos and open source is a big driver on that. Cyber security, there's a huge ethos of sharing and it's kind of an honor among practitioners because they know how big the threat is. How is that evolving? Because this seems to highlight your point about sharing that is the digital world is different than the analog world and that some of the practices that are getting traction can be doubled down on. So everyone's trying to figure out what should we double down on and what are the good practices from the bad? Can you just share some cultural? I think he hit the nail on the head with the open source model there. That is the key right here. It's not even within the government we need to share. It's industry and government in partnership and we need to approach these problem sets together and work on them as one cohesive body. So for example, our company, our platform, it's entirely an open source platform. It's a government-owned solution. We don't sell, it's a big data platform, it's provided by DISA right now. We don't sell that product. It's available to any government agency that wants it for free. We have 1500 different software developers and engineers from across the government community that collaborate together to evolve that platform and that's really the only way we're going to make significant difference right now. And the creativity that could come out of this new process that you're referring to, I'm just kind of thinking out loud here on theCUBE is interesting because the thing about all those people on Twitch, 34 million things a day or whatever the big number, it's a huge number. Those idle gamers could be actually collaborating on a core problem that could be fun. So if you look at a crowdsourcing model of attacking data, this is kind of a whole new mindset of culture. To me, this is the kind of doors that open up when you start thinking like this model because the bad guys are already ahead of the game. I mean, so how do you guys talk about that? Because you guys have to kind of keep some data masked and you have to kind of maybe not expose everything. How do you balance that secretive nature of it and yet open it up? That's a question that DHS is struggling with sort of day in and day out right now. They're going through a couple different iterations of different efforts. There was the ESSA program, there's the automated indicator sharing program that's going on right now with DHS and some of the IC partners. What do we share with industry? Because we're recognizing as a government we can't defend this nation on our, we need an industry partnership. How do we open that up to the general public of the United States to do that crowdsourced mentality? Threat hunting is a lot of fun if you know what you're doing and if somebody will guide you down the path, it's an endless world and a need for threat analysts to study the data sets that are out there. Indicators of compromise point you in the general direction, but they're a wide open direction. They're already playing, it's like lagging in a video game. The gamers are already ahead of you, the hackers are already ahead of you. Interesting point, Berkeley, University of California and Berkeley has a new program they call it the quote, Navy Seals of Cyber. It's the integrated computer science and engineering and host business school program. And it's a four year degree specifically for a special forces kind of thinking. Interdisciplinary, highly data driven, computer science, engineering and business so they can understand, again hackers run a business model. These are organized units, this is kind of what we're up against. Absolutely agree. You've talked on that, you think that's the right direction, we need more of it? We need more of it, absolutely. DoD is moving in the same direction with the cyber protection teams or CPTs. They're beginning to do sort of the same formal training models for the soldiers. Unfortunately right now a lot of the cyber protection teams are just scavenged resources from other branches of the military. So you have guys in EOD that are now transitioning into cyber and they're going from diffusing bombs to diffusing cyber threats. It's a totally different scenario in use case and it's a tough struggle to transition into that when your background was diffusing a bomb. Well, you brought up the industry collaboration talking about private sector and public sector. I know from personal experience in the wireless space there was a lot of desire to share information but yet there was a congressional reluctance. To allow that for different concerns. Some we thought were very unwarranted at the time. So how do you deal with that? Because that's another influence in this is that you might have willing parties but you've got another body over here that might not be on board. I think we're going to start seeing more of a shift as private industry acknowledges their need for government support and that government collaboration. So data breaches like the target breach and massive credit card breaches that these private industries cannot keep up with defending their own network. They need government support for defending very large corporations. Walmart, Target, Home Depot. The list goes on of breaches. Final question, we're going to wrap up here but what's the coolest tech that you're seeing that's enabling you to be successful whether it's cool tech that you're looking at and you're kicking the tires on from software to Amazon, hardware. What are you seeing that's out there that's really moving the needle and getting people motivated? So a surprising thing there I'm going to say the snowball edge and people go it's just a data hard drive. Well not really, it's way more than a data hard drive. So when you come to Amazon you think enterprise solutions, enterprise capabilities. What the snowball edge provides is a deployable unit that has processing, compute, storage, et cetera on board that you can take into your local networks. They're putting it so you can run any VM you want on the snowball edge. What we're doing is we're taking that inside DOD tactical spaces that don't have connections to the internet. We're able to do computation analytics on threats facing that local regional enclave using a hard drive. It's really cool technology that hasn't been fully explored but that's what we're all about. It's kind of like, hey, drove the new Ferrari, came out. It is. When I saw it, I just jumped all in. You loved it, right? Three months ago. It's no-mobius to think the big wheel. John, thank you for being with us. I think they're going to kick us out of the box, John. We're going to go and fully unplug us. All right, John, again, thanks for being with us. Thanks for having me here on theCUBE. Thank you guys for your time. Much appreciate it. Thank you for joining us here from Washington for all of us here at theCUBE. We appreciate you being along for the ride at AWS Public Sector Summit 2017.