 Welcome back everyone to Cube's live coverage of AWS Reinforce 22, I'm John Furrier. My host Dave Alonzo, we've got a great guest with Cisco, Eric Costelin, technical marketing engineer. Cisco Systems, great to have you on. Thanks for coming. Hi, thanks for having me. Of course we've done a lot of Cisco lives, Cisco events, Barcelona, US. Know a lot of folks over there. A lot of great momentum, supply chain challenges, but you got the cloud with a lot of networking there too. A lot of security conversations, dev sec ops. The trend we're hearing here is operations. Security and operations. What are some of the business realities that you guys are looking at right now are focused on from a Cisco perspective and a landscape perspective? Well the transition to the cloud is accelerating and it's really changed the way we're doing business and what we do. Now this combined with the more and more remote work by remote users and also the consumption of cloud based tools to perform your business functions has dramatically changed the contour of the business environment. The traditional trust boundary has evaporated or at least transformed dramatically. But you still have those requirements for trust, for micro segmentation. So what we've seen is a dramatic change in how we do business and what we do. And this is essential because the value proposition is enormous and companies are able to pursue more and more ambitious objectives. But from a security point of view it's quite challenging because on one hand what we call the attack surface has increased and the stakes are much higher. So you have more sophisticated malicious actors taking advantage of a broader security target. In order to conduct your business, in order to maintain business continuity and achieve your objectives, you need to protect this environment. And one of the... Sorry, just to clarify. So the value proposition is enormous. You mean the value proposition of the cloud is enormous. Exactly. So the business is leaning in big time and there are security consequences to that. Precisely. And one thing that we've seen happen in the industry is as these components of the business environment change, the industry has sort of bolted on more and more security solutions. But the problem with that is that's led to enormous complexity in administering security for the company, which is very expensive to find people with those expertise and also the complexity itself is a vulnerability. And that traditional trust boundary that you talked about, it hasn't been vaporized, has it, it's still there. So are you connecting into that? Is there an interoperability challenge? Does that create more security issues or are people kind of redoing? We talk about security as a do-over. How are customers approaching it? It is a challenge because although the concept of a trust boundary still exists, the nature of the hybrid multi-cloud environment makes it very difficult to define. Furthermore, the traditional solutions such as simply having a firewall and an on-premise network is now much more complex because the on-premise network has to connect to the cloud infrastructure and parts of the cloud infrastructure have to be exposed to the public, other parts have to be protected. So it's not that the concept of trusted versus untrusted has gone away, it's just become fundamentally more complex. Eric, I want to get your thoughts on this higher level abstraction trend because you're seeing the complexity being pushed to the customers and they want to buy cloud or cloud operations from partners, platforms that take the heavy lifting from there and best of breed products that handle the complexity. What's your reaction to that statement? Do you think that's happening or that will happen because either the complexity is going to be solved by the customer or they're going to buy a platform or SaaS product? No, it's unreasonable to expect the customers to constantly adapt to this changing environment from the point of view of security. They have to be able to focus on their business objectives which is to actually sell their products and pursue their ambitions. And it's a distraction that they really can't afford if they have to be focused on security. So the solutions have to take that challenge that distraction away from them. And that has to be integral to the solution. So you're saying that the vendors, the supplier has to deal the underlying complexities on behalf of the customer. Exactly, the vendor can't do this without a robust partnership with AWS, with the cloud provider. Working together, both at the engineering level to develop the products together and in the implementation as well as standing side by side with the customer as they expand their business into the cloud. This is super cloud. It's super cloud, right, exactly. So give us the specifics. What are you doing? What's Cisco doing? How are you working with AWS? What solutions are you talking about? Well, Cisco has a wide variety, quite an expansive portfolio because there's a large number of components to the solution. This spans both the workload protection as well as the infrastructure protection. And these are integrated. And in partnership with AWS, not only integrated together, but integrated into the cloud infrastructure components. And this is what allows comprehensive protection across the hybrid cloud environment. So we're talking about solutions that are embedded into switches. We're talking about software layers. Maybe give it, describe, add a little color, paint a picture of the portfolio. And it's really all of those things. So most of the solutions, historically you could say, evolved from solutions that were utilized in the physical infrastructure, in the firewalls, in the switches, in the routers. And some of these technologies are still basically confined to those form factors. But some of the most important technologies we use, such as Snort3, which is a best-of-breed intrusion protection system that we adopted is applicable as well to the virtual environment. So that we push into the cloud in a way that's seamless so that if you've developed those policies for your on-prem solutions, you can extend them into the cloud effortlessly. Another example of something that adapts quite well to the cloud is security intelligence. Francisco has TALOS. TALOS is the world's leading security intelligence operation. This is fundamental for addressing emerging threats, day zero attacks. And TALOS updates our products approximately once every hour with information about these emerging attacks, as well as informing the community as a whole of this. And now that architecture is very easily extensible into the cloud because you can inform a virtual device just as easily as you can inform a physical device of an emerging threat. But technically, how do you do that integration? That's just through AWS primitives. How does Cisco work with AWS at an engineering level to make that happen? So part of it is that we have taken certain of our products and we virtualize them. So you could say the simplest or most straightforward approach is to take our firewalls and our other products and simply make virtual machines out of them. But that's really not sort of the most exciting thing. The most exciting thing is working with them with integration with their infrastructure components and doing such things as having our management platforms, like our Cisco Defense Orchestrator, be able to discover the virtual environment and utilize that discovery to manipulate the security components of that environment. This is where I think you're onto something big here. Management is kind of like, oh yeah, we have management software, kind of always a thing. When you talk about large scale, multiple data point, billions and billions of things happening a month. Quantum, we've heard that in the keynote. We heard Kurt whose VP of platform was talking about reasoning. This is kind of a whole nother level of technology, next level, reasoning, knowing things. And we mentioned micro segmentation. So we're seeing a new era of not just policies, reasoning around the networks, around the software, stuff that needs to be better than just machine learning and doing predictive analysis. Can you share your reaction to that? Because I see this dots connecting at a whole nother level. Yes, now as we understand artificial intelligence, machine learning, I think we appreciate that one of the key components there, we think about it as data science, as data management. But when you think about data, you suddenly recognize where's it coming from. Data requires visibility. And when we talk about the transition to the cloud and the dispersion of the workforce, visibility is one of the great challenges. And visibility, even prior to these transitions, has been one of the primary focuses of Cisco systems. So as we transition to the cloud and we recognize the need to be able to interpret what we're seeing, we have expanded our capacity to visualize what's happening. And I think there's a significant contribution to the... Dave and I were talking about this in context to our thesis about SuperCloud, how that's going, evolving, building on top of the hyperscalers, CapEx, investment, doing things. Customer data control flows are a huge thing going across multiple geographies. It's global, you got regions, you got network, some trusted, some not, and you have now applications that are global. So you got data flows. Yes. I mean, data's got to move across multiple environments. So that's the challenge. And it has to move securely. And furthermore, there's a real challenge here with confidence, with confidence of the company that its data flow is secure in this new environment that is frankly can be a little bit uncomfortable and also the customer and the partners of that business have to be confident that their intellectual property, that their security and identity is protected. Yeah. Dave and I were talking also, we've all seen the movie before, remember the old days of multi-vendor and OSI models and interoperability. We're kind of at a new inflection point where teamwork, not just ecosystem partners, companies working together to make sure things are secure. This is a whole nother data problem opportunity. Amazon sees things that other people don't see and contribute that back. How does this whole next level multi-vendor partnerships, the open source is a big part of the software piece of it. You got custom silicon, you mentioned. How do you view that whole team oriented approach and security? Now, this is absolutely essential. The community, the industry has to work together. Fortunately, it's in the DNA of Cisco to interoperate. I've sat next to competitors at customer sites working to solve the customer's problem. It's just how we function. So it's not just our partnerships, but it's our relationship with industry. Because industry has common purpose in solving these problems. We have to be confident in order to pursue our objective. Our dreams. You see this industry at a flash point right now. Everyone has to partner. Exactly. How would you summarize it? We are out of time, but so give us your, thank you for the point of view of business leadership. A business needs business continuity. Its contributors have to be able to access resources to perform their job. And the customers and partners need confidence to deal with that business. You need this continuity. You demand flexibility to adapt to the changing environment and to take advantage of emerging opportunities. And you expect security. The security has to be resilient. It has to be robust. The security has to be simple to implement. Cisco in partnership with AWS provides the security you need to succeed. All right, thanks for so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your insights and your experience and candid commentary. And appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Okay, we're here live on the floor at Expo Hall at Avis Reinforce 22 in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.