 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California and doing a remote interview in our quarantine studio where we're getting the stories out there and sharing this content during the time of crisis where we're sheltering in place as we get through this and get through the other side of the new normal. It's not necessarily normal, but it'll certainly create some normalcy around some of the new work at home, but also cybersecurity. I want to bring in a special guest who's going to talk with me about the impact of COVID-19 on cybersecurity, work at home, work in general, and also business practices. So, Bill Welch, who's the CEO of IronNet, who is taking over the helm run of the operations with General Keith Alexander, CUBE alumni as well, former NSA and former Cyber Command, who's now leading a new innovative company called IronNet, which is deploying something really clever, but also something really realistic around cybersecurity. So, Bill, thanks for joining me. Hey, John, thanks for being with you. So, obviously the COVID-19 crisis has created essentially a lot of exposure to the real world and general around what it's like to work at home. Obviously, the economies are crippled. This is an invisible threat. I've been, you know, chirping on Twitter and saying, you know, we've been fighting a digital war for a long time. Okay, there's been, you know, the internet has provided nation states the opportunity to attack folks using other mechanisms, open source and others. But if you look at this COVID-19, whether it's a bio weapon or not, it has crippled the country in the United States and caused crippling around the world. But it's just a threat causing disruption. This is almost like a nuke, if you will, digital nuke. This is changing the game. You guys are in the cyber intelligence, cyber security area. What's your take on all this and what are you hearing? Well, I agree with you, John. I think that this is the invisible enemy. And as you know, right now with that going on, there's going to be adversaries that are going to take advantage of. You see right now in some of the nation states where they are looking at opportunities to use this to go after other countries, maybe just to test and see what their vulnerabilities are. You're seeing some activity overseas with nation states where they're looking at some of the military incursions. They're thinking about possible weaknesses with this invisible enemy. And it's affecting us in so many ways, whether it's economic, financial, our healthcare system, our supply chains, whether it's the supplies and groceries that we get to our people. So these are all challenging times that the adversary is not going to just sit back and say, oh, well, you're in a crisis right now and we'll wait for the crisis to be a leave. We're now going to take advantage of. And certainly the death toll is also the human impact as well. This is real world. This is something that we can have a longer conversation on another time when we get more data in and we will certainly want to track this new kind of digital warfare kind of paradigm, whether it's bio and or packets and cybersecurity. But the real impact has been this at scale exposure of problems and opportunities. For instance, IT folks were telling me that they under provisioned their VPN access. Now it's 100% everyone's at home. That's a disruption. That's not a hurricane. That's not a flood. This is now a new disruption to their operations. Other folks are seeing more hacks and more surface area, more threats from the old side getting hit. This has certainly impacted the cyber but also people's anxiety at home. How are you guys looking at this? What are you guys doing? What's going on at IronNet right now around cyber and COVID-19? Yeah, what we're seeing right now is that our customers are seeing increasing awareness of their employees to understand what is going on around them. And one of the things that we formed the company was, was the ability to assist enterprises of all sizes to collectively defend against threats that target their industries. We believe that collective defense is our collective responsibility. And it can't be just about technology. It's about some of the IT systems you talked about, being able to leverage them together. When I look at our top energy companies that we partner with, these individuals have great operators. But when you think about it, they have operators just for their company. What we're able to do within our environment and in our Iron Dome is bring all them together. We bring the human element and the IT element in order to help them solve positive outcomes for their, their industries. I want to dig into that because I think one of the things that I'm seeing coming out of this trend post pandemic is going to be in real emphasis on community. You're seeing people realizing through, whether it's doing zoomification or cubification, doing cube interviews and zooming and talking, I think you're going to see this element of, I could do better. I can contribute either to society or to the collective at all. And I think this collective idea you guys have with Iron Dome is very relevant because I think people are going to say, wow, if I contribute, we might not have this kind of crisis again. This is something that's new. You guys have been on this collective thing with Iron Dome for a long time. I think this is pretty clever and I think it's going to be very relevant. Can you explain the Iron Dome collective intelligence paradigm and, and the vision? Yeah, absolutely. You know, and just to back up a little bit, you know, what I will tell you is that we observed as far as the problem statement was that, you know, cyber is an element of national power and people are using it to achieve their political, economic and military objectives. And now what you're seeing is other other ways, because I, you know, while this COVID-19 may or may not have been, you know, anything as far as a bio weapon, now others will see, well, here's a way to bring down, you know, a country or an economy or something like that. We're also seeing that the cyber attacks are getting more and more destructive, whether it's, you know, WannaCry or NotPetya. We're also seeing the toolkits being more advanced. We're seeing how slow the response is by their cyber tools. So what we've looked at is we said, wait, stop defending in isolation. That's what enterprises have been doing. They've been defending in isolation, no sharing, no, you know, collective intelligence as I would call it. And what we've been able to do is bring the power of those people to come together to collectively defend when something happens. So instead of having one security operation center defending a company, you can bring five or six or seven to defend the entire energy grid. This is one example. And over in Asia, we have the same thing. We have one of our largest customers over there. They have 450 companies. So if you think about it, 450 companies times the number of SOC operators that they have, the security operation centers, you can think about the magnitude that we can bring to bear the arms, the warriors to attack this crisis. So you're getting more efficiency, more acute response than before. So you got speed. So what you're saying is the collective intelligence provides what value? Speed, quality? Yeah, it's cloud. It's at cloud scale, network speed. You get the benefit of all these operators. Individuals have incredible backgrounds in offensive and defensive operator experience, including the people that we have. And then our partnership with either national governments or international governments that are allies to make sure that we're sharing that collective intelligence so they can take action. Because what we're doing is we're making sure that we analyze the traffic. We're bringing the advanced analytics. We're bringing the expert systems and we're bringing the experts to bear, both at a technology level and also a personnel level. You know, General Alexander, one of the architects behind the vision here, who's obviously got a background in the military, NSA, cyber command, et cetera, uses the analogy of an airport radar, you know? And I think that's a great metaphor because you need to have real-time communications on anything going on as telemetry to what's landing or approaching or almost like landing that airplane. So he uses that metaphor and says, if there's no communication, if it lags, you don't have it. He was using that example. You guys still use that example or can you explain further this metaphor? Yeah, absolutely. And I think another example that we have seen some of our customers really and our prospects and partners really embrace is this concept of an immersive visualization, almost gaming environment, right? You look at, you know, what is happening now where people have the opportunity, even at home because of COVID-19. I mean, my teenage boys are spending way too much time, probably on call of duty and fortnight and that, but apply that same logic to cyber. Apply that logic to where you can have multiple players, multiple individuals, you can invite people in. You can invite others that might have subject matter expertise. You might be able to go invite some of the IT partners that you have, whether it's, you know, other companies to come in that are partners of yours to help solve a problem and make it visualize, immersive and in a gaming environment. And that is what we're doing in our iron dome. I think that's compelling. And I've always loved the vision of abstracting away gaming to real world problems because it's very efficient. Those kids are great. And then the new call of duty came out, so everyone's. And they're also the next generation, they're the next generation of individuals that are going to be taking over security for us. So this is a great environment because this is something they already know, something they're already practicing and something they're extorting. And if you look at how the military is advancing, you know, they've gone from having these great fighter pilots to putting people in charge of drones. It's the same thing with us is that possibility of having a cyber avatar go and fight that initiative is going to be something that we're doing. I think you guys are really rethinking security. And it brings up my next topic I want to get your thoughts on is this crisis of COVID-19 is really highlighted old and new. And it's really kind of exposed again at scale because it's an at scale problem. Everyone's been forced to shelter in place and expose everything from deliveries to food to all the services. And you can see what's important, what's not in life and exposes kind of the old and new. So you have a lot of old antiquated outdated systems and then you have new emerging ones. How do you see that those two sides of the street old and new, what's emerging? What's your vision on what you think will be important post pandemic? Well, I think the first thing is the individuals that are really the human element. So one, we have to make sure that individuals at home are have all the things that they require in order to be successful and drive great outcomes, right? Because I believe that the days of going into an office and sitting into a cube is yes, that is the old norm but the new norm is individuals will be either at home or on a plane, on a train, on a bus or wherever they might be practicing and being a part of it. So I think that the one thing we have to get our arms around is the ability to invite people into this experience no matter where they are and meet them where they are. So that's number one. Number two is making sure that those networks are available and at their high speed, right? That we are making sure that they're not being used necessarily for streaming of Netflix but being able to solve the cyber attack. So there might be segmentation. There might be, as you said, this collective intelligence sharing that'll go across these entities. You know, it's interesting, Bill, you're bringing up something that we've been riffing on and I want to just expose that to you and kind of think out loud here. You know, you're mentioning the convergence of physical, hybrid, 100% virtual as it kind of comes together. And then community and collective intelligence, we just talked about that. Certainly relevant, you can see more movement on that side and more innovation. But the other thing that comes out of the woodwork and I want to get your thoughts on this is the old IoT edge, Internet of Things. Because you think about that convergence of operational technologies and internet technology, IT, you now have that world's been going on for a while. So obviously you've got to have telemetry on physical devices, you've got to bring it to IT. So as you guys have this iron dome, collective view, Alexa view of things, it's really physical and virtual coming together. The virtual is- It's all the above, it's all the above. The whole concept of IoT and OT and whether it's a device that's sitting in a solar wind panel, or whether it's a device that's sitting in your network, it could be the human element or it could actually be a device. That is where you require that cyber posture, that ability to do analytics on it, the ability to respond and the ability to collectively see all of it. And that goes to that whole visualization I talked to you about is being able to see your entire network. You can't protect something if you can't see it. And that's something that we've done across iron dome with our customers and prospects and with iron defense. So something that absolutely is part of the things we're seeing in the cyber world. I want to get your reaction to some commentary that we've been having, Dave Vellante and myself and the team, and we're talking about how events have been shut down, the physical space, the venues where they have events. Obviously we go to a lot of events with theCUBE, you know that. So obviously that's kind of our view. But when you think about internet of things, you think about collective intelligence with communities, whether it's some sort of gamification or iron dome that you're innovating on, as we go through the pandemic, there's going to be a boomerang back, we think, to the importance of the physical space. Because at some point, we're going to get back to the real world. And so the question is, what operational technology, what version of learnings do we get from this shelter in place that gets applied to the physical world? This is the convergence of physical and virtual. This we see as a big wave. Want to get your reaction to that? Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. I think that the, you know, we are going to learn some incredible lessons in so many different ways, whether it's healthcare or financial, but I also believe it's what you said, is that convergence of physical and virtual will become almost one in the same. You know, we will see, you know, individuals that will leverage the physical when they need to and leverage the virtual when they need to. And I think that that's something that we will see more and more of of companies looking at how they actually respond and support their customer base. You know, some might decide to have more individuals at home basis to support a continuity of operations. Some might decide that, you know, we're going to have some physical spaces and not others, and then we're going to leverage physical IT and some virtual IT, and especially the cloud infrastructures are going to become more and more valuable as we've seen within our Iron Dome infrastructure. You know, we were riffing the other day I was even on the remote interviews, the cube is going virtual. And we were joking that Amazon web services was really created through the trend of virtualization. I mean, VMware and the whole virtual server virtualization created the opportunity for Amazon to abstract and create value. And we think that this next wave is going to be this pandemic has woken us up to this remote virtual contribution. And it might create a lot of opportunities for us, for instance, virtual cube for virtual business. I'm sure you as the CEO of Iron Net are thinking about how you guys recover post pandemic. Is it going to be a different world? Are you going to have a mix of virtual digital integrated into your physical, whether it's how you market your products and engage customers to solving technical problems. This is a new management challenge and it's an opportunity if you get it right. It could be a headwind or a tailwind, depending how you look at it. So I want to get your thoughts on this virtualization post pandemic management structure, management philosophy, obviously dislocation with your spatial economics. I get that no one's going to work in the office much but beyond that management style, posture, incentives. Yes, I think that there's a lot of things unpacked there. I mean, you know, one is it is going to be about a lot of more communication. You know, I will tell you that since we have gone into this quarantine, you know, we're holding, you know, weekly, all hands every Friday, all in a virtual environment. I think that the transparency will be even more. You know, one of the things that I'm most encouraged by and inspired by is the productivity. You know, I will tell you getting access to individuals has gotten easier and easier for us, you know, the ability to get people into this, you know, virtual environment, you know, they're not spending hours upon hours on, you know, commuting or flying on planes or going different places. And it doesn't mean that that won't be an important element of business, but I think it's going to give time back to individuals to focus on what is the most important priorities for the companies that they're driving. So this is an opportunity, I will tell you, our productivity has increased exponentially. You know, we've seen more and more meetings where more and more access to very high level individuals who have said, you know, we want to hear what you guys are doing. And they have the time to do it now instead of jumping, you know, on a plane and wasting, you know, six hours and not being productive. It's interesting, it's also a human element too. You can hear babies crying, kids playing, dogs barking. You kind of laugh and chuckle in the old days, but now this is a humanization piece of it. And that should foster real communities. So I think, you know, obviously we're going to be watching this virtualization of communities and collective intelligence and congratulations. I think Iron Dome and you have Iron and Defense, obviously, which is a core product. I think your Iron Dome is a paradigm that is super relevant. You guys are visionaries on this. And I think it's going to be turning out to be quite the product. So I want to congratulate you on that. Thanks for sharing. Thank you, John. Thanks for your time today and stay safe. Bill, thanks for joining us. And thanks for your great insights on cyber COVID-19. And we'll follow up more on this trend of bio weaponry and kind of the trajectory of how cyber and scale of cloud is going to shape how we defend and take offense in the future on how to defend our country and make the world a safer place. I'm John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE here at our remote interviews in our quarantine studio in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.