 It's theCUBE, covering Fortinet Security Summit. Brought to you by Fortinet. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Fortinet's championship series, Cybersecurity Summit here in Napa Valley. Fortinet is sponsoring the PGA Tour event, kicking off the season here, and theCUBE is here as part of the coverage. And today is Cybersecurity Day, where they bring their top customers in. We got Glenn Cass, SVP General Manager, Comcast Enterprise Solutions. Glenn, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for taking time out of your day to stop it. No, this is great. This is great. Tell me if you explain what you guys do in the Comcast Business Enterprise Group. Yeah, so Comcast Business we're a part of Comcast overall. I always like to explain what Comcast really is. If you look at Comcast, it's a technology innovation company by itself. That happens to focus on communications and media type of markets, right? And if you look at the Comcast side, or the communication side, it's really everything residential with customers. Then there's us, Comcast Business. And we're the fastest growing entity over the last 15 years within Comcast. We started in small business, voice video and data to small businesses. Then we moved up to provide fiber, ethernet type of transport to mid-market. And then my group started in 2014. And what we do is focus on managed services. Doesn't matter who the transport layer is for enterprise, Fortune 1000 type companies. And then we layer in all these managed water and network services. So that's my business unit. Well, we appreciate it. We're a customer, by the way, in Palo Alto, Comcast Business, so we want to give a shout out to you guys. Let's get into the talk you're giving here about cybersecurity because, I mean, right now with the pandemic, people are working at home. Obviously, everyone knows the future of work is hybrid now. You're going to see more of decentralized, DeFi and or virtual spaces where people don't want to work anywhere. And businesses want to have that extension. This is what people are talking about. And it's not new, but it's kind of new in the sense of reality. You've got to execute. This is a big challenge. It is. What's your thoughts on that? Well, it's a big challenge. And it's one of the things that I'll try to be, I'll speak to this afternoon here, which is at least from the enterprise perspective, which includes the headquarters, the enterprise, the branch locations, the digital commerce, everywhere else, commerce is being done. It's not just out of store anymore. It's everywhere, even if you only have a store. And then you have the remote worker aspect. And when you do that to your point earlier, we're not in that Fortress sort of security mentality anymore. There's no more DMZs, it's done. And so you've got to get down to the zero trust type of network architecture. And how do you put that together? And how does that work? Not just for remote workers that have to access the enterprise applications, but also for simple consumers or the business customers of these enterprises that have to do business from a mobile phone or in the store. What are some of the challenges you hear from your customers? Obviously, businesses have to defend themselves now. The attacks are there. There's no pyramid, as you mentioned. There's more edge happening. Like I said, people are going to go home. What are the top challenges that you're hearing from customers? So the biggest challenge, and this is, I would think this is mostly focused on the enterprise side of it, is that it's two interesting phenomena is going on. This is sort of beginnings before the pandemic, and then of course the pandemic. The role of the CIO has been elevated. So now they have a real seat at the table, budgets are increasing to a point. But the expertise needed in these IT departments for these large enterprises, it's impossible to do what you were just talking about, which is create a staff of people that can do everything from enterprise applications, e-commerce, analytics, the network, how do you secure that network all the way down to the end users, right? So it's that middle portion that's the biggest challenge because that takes a lot of work and a lot of effort, and that's where folks like Comcast can come in and help them out. That's their biggest challenge. They can handle the enterprise, they can handle the remote workers, they can handle their own applications which are continually trying to be, have to be, it's competitive out there, it's that middle area, that communications layer that they're challenged with. Yeah, and John Madison's this EVP, CMO, Fortinet, it's always talking about negative unemployment in cybersecurity, never mind just the staff that do cyber. I mean, if you're a business, you can't hire people fast enough, and you might not have the budget for it, you want to manage service. So how do you get cyber as a service? Well, so it's even bigger than that. It's not just a cyber as a service because it's now a big package. That's what Sassi really is. Sassi's secure access service edge. But think of it, what I think of it is you've got remote users, remote workers, mobile apps on one side, you've got applications, enterprise, or commercial that are now moved into different cloud locations, and in the middle you've got two real fundamental layers. The network, and that includes the actual transport, the software defined, wider networking components, everything that goes with that, that's the network as a service. And then you've got the secure web gateway portion which includes everything to secure all the data going back and forth between your remote laptop, the point of sales, and let's say the cloud based applications. So that's really the center stage right there. And the cloud has brought more services to the top of the stack. I mean, people talk down stack, up stack, it's kind of like a geeky terms, you're talking about innovation. If you're down stack with network and transport, those are problems that you have to solve on behalf of your customers. And make that almost invisible to them, that's your job. That's our job, that's our job as a service provider. What's interesting is that back in the day, I mean, when I mean back in the day, it could have been 10 years ago in 20, you really, you know, you had stable networks, they were ubiquitous, they were expensive, and they were slow. That's kind of the MPLS legacy TDM. So you just put them in and you walked away and you still did all your enterprise, you still did all of your applications, but you had your own private data centers, everything was nice, it was that fortress mentality, right? Now it's different. Now everybody needs broadband. Well, guess what? Comcast is a big company, but we don't have broadband everywhere. AT&T doesn't have it, Verizon doesn't have it, Charter doesn't have it, right? So you need, so now that think about that from enterprise, I'm gonna go, I'll give you an example. All of our customers to fulfill a nationwide network just for the broadband infrastructure, that's, you know, redundant if you wanna think of it that way, we source probably 200 to 300 different providers to provide a ubiquitous network nationwide for broadband. Then we wrap a layer of the SD-WAN infrastructure for that as an example over the top of that, right? You can't do that by yourself. I mean people try and they fail and that's the role of a managed service provider like us is to pull all that together, take that away, we have that expertise. Well, I think this is a really interesting point. Let's just unpack that just for a second. In the old days, we want to do an interconnect. You had a agreement because you have your own stuff. Do an interconnect, you connect. Now there's all this mishmash. You get a traverse multiple hops, different networks. Different owners. You don't know what's on that, hygiene. You don't. So you guys have to basically stitch this together, hang it together and make it work, and you guys put software on the top and make sure it's cool, is that what works? Software and different technology components for the SD-WAN and then we would deliver it ashore and manage all that and that's what I really like what's happening in the industry, at least in terminology, which is, you have to try to simplify that because it's very, very complicated. But I'm gonna give you the network as a service. I mean I'm gonna give you all the transport and you don't have to worry about it. I'm gonna rent you the SD-WAN technology and then I'm gonna have in my gateways all these security components for firewalls of service, zero trust network access, cloud brokerage services. So I will secure all of your data as you go to the cloud and do all of that for you. That's really what we bring to the table and that's what is really, really hard for enterprises to do today. Just because they can't, the expertise needed to do that is just not there. Well, what's interesting is that first of all, you have to do it now because the reality of your business now is if you don't do it, you won't have customers but you're making it easier for them so they don't have to think about it. But now you bring in hybrid networking, hybrid cloud, they call it, or multicloud. It's essentially distributed computing. It's essentially what you're doing but with multiple topologies. I got an edge device, if I'm a business, it could be someone working at home or it could be my retail or whatever it could be. So edge is just an extension of what you guys already do and is that right? Am I getting that right? Yeah, that's exactly right. But the point is is to make it economic and to make it really work for the, and use if you're a branch, you may have a application that's still being run via VPN but you also need Wi-Fi internet for your customers because you want them to use your mobile device. They've entered into your store and you want to be able to track that, right? And push something to them. And then you've got the actual store applications, could be point of sales, could be back of house, that's going up to AWS, Azure, whatever, right? And that all has to be, it all has to come from one particular branch and someone has to be able to manage that capability. It's funny, just as you're talking, just when I'm thinking, okay, facial recognition, high bandwidth requirements. Huge high bandwidth requirements. Processing at the edge becomes huge. It does. So that becomes a new dynamic. It does. For you guys, it's got to be more dynamic. It's not a static IP endpoint. Well, I'll give you another example. Let's say it seems silly but it's so important from a business perspective. Your quick service restaurant. Yeah. The amount of digital sales from applications are just skyrocketing. And if you yourself, particularly in the pandemic, you order something, well that goes up through the cloud, comes back through, goes to the point of sales and then the back of house network in a particular restaurant. If that doesn't get there because one line of, you only have one internet connection and it's down, which sometimes happens, right? You lose business, you lose that customer. It's so important. So what's being pushed down to the edge is reliable broadband, hybrid networks where you have a primary wire line and a secondary wire line, maybe a tertiary wireless or whatever and then a box, a device that can manage between those two so that you can keep that 99.99% availability at your branch just for those simple types of applications. You know, Glenn, as you're talking, most people when we talk tech like this, it's mostly inside the robes, hey, I can get it. But most people can relate with the pandemic because they've ordered with their phone on them with the QR code. Exactly right. They see the menu. That's right. They get now what's happening. That's right. That their phone is now connected to the service. That's right. This is not going away. The new normal's here. No, it's absolutely here. I've seen, there are many, many companies that already knew this and understood this pre-pandemic and they had already changed their infrastructure to really fit what I was calling that network as a service and a SASE model in different ways. Then there were a bunch that didn't and I'm not going to name names, but you can look at those companies and you can see how they're struggling terribly. But then there was this, now there's a much bigger push in prioritization. Again, CIO is saying, hey, I asked for this before. It's not like the CIO didn't know, but management said, well, maybe it wasn't important. Now it is. And so you're seeing this actual amazing surge in business requests and requirements to go to the model that we're all talking about here, which is that SASE type of implementation, high-speed broadband, that's not going away for the same reason, and you need a resilient network, right? You can't do that. Yeah, it's interesting, best practice. Let's just take that advice to the audience. I want to get your thoughts because people who didn't do any R&D or experimentation prior to the pandemic didn't have cloud, wasn't thinking about this new architecture, got put flat-footed. Exactly. And they were getting indoor out of business. Correct. If people who were on the right side of that took advantage as a tailwind and they got lift. That's exactly right. So what is the best practice? How should a business think about putting their toe in the water a little bit or jumping in and getting immersed in the new architecture? What advice would you give? Because people don't want to be in the wrong side of history. No, they don't. What's your advice, best practice? I may sound biased, but I'm really not trying to be biased and this will be some of the things I'll speak about here later today. You have to try, you as the end user, the enterprise customer to fulfill these types of needs. You've got to really probe your managed service providers. You've got to understand which ones not just can give you a nice technology presentation and maybe a POC, but who's going to be there for the long term? Who has the economic wherewithal to be able to give the resources and needs to do what I was talking about? Which is you're going to outsource your entire network to me and a good portion of your security for the network to a service provider. That service provider has to be able to provide all of that, has to be able to have the financial capabilities to be able to provide you with an operating type of model, not you have to buying equipment all the time. That service provider has to be able to have teams that can deliver all of that, two hard to 300 different types of providers, aggregate all of that and then be there for day two. Simple thing, like if most companies, if you're not a really large location, you can't afford to double types of routers that are connected and if one fails, you have failover, right? Most of them will have one router and they'll have two backup paths. Well, what happens if that router or a single switch fails? You need to have a mean time to repair of four hours. I mean, that's kind of basic in it. Well, to do that, how do you do that? You've got to have depots around the entire country. These are the types of questions that any enterprise customer should be probing their managed service provider, right? It's not just about the technology, it's about how can you deliver this and assure this going forward. And agility too, because if things do change rapidly, being agile means shifting and being flexible with your business. That's exactly right. And that's important too. That's a really important question and the agility comes from this financial agility, right? New threat, new box, I want this old one, I'm going to upgrade to a different type of service. The service provider should be able to do that with having to force you to go get some more CapEx and buy some more stuff. Okay, that's number one. But the other agility is every enterprise is different. Every enterprise believes that its network is the only network in the world. And they have opinions and they've tested different technologies and you're going to have to adapt a little bit to that. And if you don't, you're not going to get a lot of business. It's funny, the old days, non-disruptive operations was like a benefit. We have non-disruptive, now it's a table stakes. You can't disrupt business. You can't, you can't. You can't. At the branch, at the remote worker, if you're on a Zoom call or whatever or you're on a Teams call, we've all been there, we're still doing it. If it breaks in the middle of a presentation to a customer, that's a problem. Glenn, thanks for coming on theCUBE with Great Insight. Are you excited? Golf, are you going to get out there? Hit the range. I played golf a lot when I was younger, but I haven't. And so I have a few other things I do, but I guess I'm going to have to learn. Now that we're also a sponsor of PGA, so yeah, for sure. Great, well great to have you on and have great talk. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insight. I appreciate it. This is great, I appreciate it, thank you. Okay, CUBE coverage here, Napa Valley with Fortinet's Cybersecurity Summit is part of their PGA tour event that's happening this weekend. I'm John Furrier of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.