Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering Riverbed Disrupt. Brought to you by Riverbed. Oh, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Riverbed Disrupt. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Youssef Kaledius here is the corporate vice president of Azure Networking at Microsoft. Youssef, thanks very much for coming. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Keynote this morning, talking about Microsoft and Azure and the global network that you have built and are building. It's like the universe, it's constantly expanding. So, again, welcome and give us the update on Azure and your role. Well, we have been on this cloud journey now for a number of years. Many years ago, we started this thing called Azure. The cloud was at the beginning, if you will, just a buzzword, now it's real. So, adoption is happening like crazy, to be honest. So, everybody's moving to the cloud. Now we're experiencing amazing growth in the journey to the cloud at the moment. And as part of building the cloud, we had to build a huge footprint around the globe. It's a hyperscale system. We have 34 regions across the globe. We have a global wide-aided network that connects all these regions. And we are basically giving what customers want. We are close to what the customers are and we give them all the software that they need to run on that platform. Now, as an outside observer, and don't hate me for saying this, but you can correct me if I'm wrong. It felt like when Azure first came out, it was like, okay, we're going to do the cloud too. And now it feels like cloud is a way of life at Microsoft. Is that a fair observation? Well, I'll give you a small story. Actually, one of the few people who started Azure. That was 2006. And it was before, frankly, anybody used the term cloud, including us. We started by building something called the platform for the web. And we had a code name called Red Dog and what have you. So, what I'm trying to tell you is we started this journey way, way early on and we knew what we wanted to do. We wanted to build a very large-scale system, highly secure and multi-tenant that can run anything. That was the vision, actually, from 2006. Now, I grant you took us a while. We had a beta in 2008, then a GA a few years later and so forth, but we are all in. We are all in. It's one platform that runs everything the company itself has and it's open to a large, large set of customer, everybody else. So, Yusuf, when we talk to customers, end user practitioners, they've got their on-prem stuff. They're using SaaS, lots, Office 365, almost everybody I talk to is using it and there's public cloud. Can you talk about the importance of networking, kind of your space and how that ties together and especially what brings you to Riverbed? Definitely. So, it's really straightforward. You can't have a cloud without having a network. It's by definition. The cloud is out there. So, what's a cloud anyway? It's a large distributed set of data centers, capacity all over the globe. Between you or your customer or your employee, you have to reach the cloud somehow and how do you reach it? Through the network. So, when I say through the network, you start first with your client. What's a client? I see you have a mobile phone. You have a mobile phone. You start with the phone. You start with the laptop. You start with your device. You connect through your local service provider on ISP, wireless, what have you. Ultimately, you have to hit a network somewhere to get you to the cloud. So, the network is crucial to making a virtual cloud. And it can be quite complicated, by the way. There's infrastructure that starts from fiber in the ground, subsea cables, IP networks, peering, transit, the buzzwords are plenty. Net-net, without a first-class cloud, you cannot have a first-class cloud. Without a first-class network, you cannot have a first-class cloud. So, it's a couple of stats. 34 regions, 100 data centers. You're basically building out a global WAN. 1.5 million miles of fiber. You connect to 3,500 or more ISPs. You own subsea cables. Okay, so you're essentially building this global wide area network. I want to talk about that a little bit. And what role does RiverBit play? What's the partnership about? Maybe talk about that a little bit. So, it is very important to meet customers where they are today, in their needs. And customers need technologies, such as what RiverBit provides and others, to connect their applications to the cloud. From acceleration to connectivity, there's a wide spectrum of partners that are needed to make the story complete. And as you probably know, we in Microsoft have always been partner-friendly. We need the ecosystem. Customers want the ecosystem. So, we're very happy to partner with RiverBit, like many others, to give customers what they need for the connectivity solutions. So, what's the nature of the partnership? Is it a deep integration? Is it a go-to-market? Is it all of those things? So, Azure, for example, has something called a marketplace where you can go in there and find virtual machines, pre-tested systems, a way you can transact, and so forth. And we have most of RiverBit's solution already in the marketplace, and we're working to add more to them as well. So, we do that very well. We also have go-to-market activity as well with them and our partners. So, it's enabling RiverBit as a service, essentially? Most definitely. And NetNet for us is giving what customers want. And customers want what RiverBit has. I think we can talk about security a little bit. We don't usually think about sub-C cables on theCUBE, but you own sub-C cables. You obviously, there's physical security associated with that. You own all these millions of miles of fiber, and then there's obviously cyber security. Can you just give us the high level? What can you tell us about security? What should we know as observers? In this business, security, multi-tenancy, using the same infrastructure among multiple customers is a given, it's by definition, it's a cloud. So, from day one, we designed the system to be highly virtualized, both for your virtual machines to be separated and secure from each other, and for the network to be virtualized and also separate from each other. So, I can have company A, company B, who may be competitors running over the same network, because the networks are virtualized, and each one sees their own network, if you will. Ultimately, it's a slew of technologies you need to have in the platform to enable people to run a platform like this from a security perspective. Isolation, separation, DDoS prevention, et cetera. And we have all of these things. In addition, to go back to your previous question, we have partnerships with the security vendors, all the brand names you can think of, such that we can utilize them, including riverbed technologies, so customers can put the solution together to meet their corporate needs for security and isolation. So, it's a multifaceted multiple parts to put together a solution to go to market with. You described Azure, you sort of described the stack. So, the plumbing, the storage, the compute, the networking, and the security, and then the platform services, and then the tools, the development tools on top of that. And I guess the apps fit on top of that, right? So, really that's the fourth layer of the stack, simplifying it, of course. And then, you said, okay, we now connect as well to on-prem, and then we have this hybrid approach. So, Nirvana is same, same. Where are we in terms of achieving that level of interoperability and consistency? Of course. The market is in transition, as you might expect. There will always be things on-premises that are different from the cloud. By definition, the older staff, legacy, and so forth, all the very specialized systems. There will always be some, you have to do on-prem, if you want to do it very differently, if you want, very specialized. If you want to put a mainframe on-premises, et cetera. On the other hand, many things are becoming available on-prem and in the cloud. From a manageability perspective, APIs, identity, virtual machine management, and so forth. So, you're going to see foundational pieces that are very similar between on-premises in the cloud, where the cloud gives you hyperscale, a huge scale, and distributes geographies around the globe, and then you can put stuff on-premises in your data center, in your colos, whatever the case may be, to meet other needs. Isolation, geo-political considerations, et cetera, or latency for that matter. So, it's an evolving picture, and there will always be different things in different parts, but for a long time, we believe that the hybrid model will dominate. So, you're talking about scale, and I wonder if we could ask you about the economics of scale. Microsoft taught us the power of volume economics with software, and its ascendancy in the 80s and 90s. Is there a similar analogy with cloud at volume? You're packaging all these services, you're automating to a high degree, you're eliminating all this heavy lifting and human IT labor, and super high degrees of efficiency. What are the implications on marginal economics and ultimately pricing for the customer? It has a few implications. One is that the market will eventually evolve into a few large providers, that's what we believe. It's just the economics of the situation is such that it's hard to have many, many cloud providers, to be honest. You're going to have many others adding value, being integrators and so forth, but when it comes to the basic infrastructure, I believe the number will be very small going forward. And again, the reason is you mentioned subsea cables, these are not cheap. You mentioned 34 regions and more than 100 data centers, these are not cheap, et cetera. So this is a scale beyond which it's going to be very hard that otherwise you have many players in the space. For the customers, they will actually gain many advantages that we are obtaining by our scale. Frankly, when we buy our servers, we buy them by the truckload, literally. When we buy capacity, we buy them in the terrible, bits per second, numbers. And as such, you end up with economies of scale that we are invariably pass through to our customers. So in both ways, the industry is going to become, I believe, a few big providers for the infrastructure and invariably the price reductions if you will go to the customer. And you always hear people talk about the race to zero, but it's not a race to zero, is it? I mean, it can be a highly profitable business. Definitely, and please note, what customers really want the cloud for is because of agility more than anything else. Don't get me wrong, the cost structure is good too, but the agility of standing up a new service, connecting it, and so forth, sometimes literally within days versus years or months, that's worth gold. People would pay more for that too. Yeah, Yusuf, I think Microsoft is a great story on hybrid, we talked about the various profiles from a networking standpoint. Curious what you're seeing from customers when it comes to things like cloud data migration and cloud bursting. We've watched Amazon with their snowball, cloud bursting, something we've batted back and forth for the last five years or so at least, but what do you see from a customer base? Well, the need for connectivity is increasing, both from the actual consumer and the customer to the cloud and within the cloud if you want. So you're going to see the numbers always increasing in terms of bandwidth and the like. The scenarios we are seeing for cloud usage are actually very, including for recovery, backup, disaster recovery and the like, which requires a lot of data to be transferred, both ways, by the way. Sometimes you want to go to the cloud, sometimes you want to exit to the cloud. There will always be niche corners where you need very, very high bandwidth, where the fastest way is a pile of tapes. You know the old joke. Sure, CTAM has the fastest. Exactly, again the 747, 424 tapes, that's the highest bandwidth solution, the very low latency. So there will always be these niche solutions which we also support, by the way. But net-net connectivity and ubiquitous connectivity, both for the clients and for the backend, is the way it's going to happen going forward. How about, I want to go back to the hybrid for a minute. We often say in theCUBE that cloud is not just about where you put applications and data, but it's about the operating model. Sure. So let's talk about what that means to IT executives and business people. What does it mean to have a cloud operating model and how can I as a customer achieve that? That's a deep question. I'll touch on some of it by relating our own experience in building the cloud and operating the cloud. In the early days, we used to, many of us come from enterprise software background, where we used to spend 18 months, 24 months building a new software release. And we had time.  Things were slower, very deliberate, but we could not really meet customer needs if you want. Now things are much faster. If things are agile, from the way we develop the software, the way we operate the software. I believe some of these aspects will reflect onto IT as we speak. And actually they're going to be a good thing for IT because it will elevate IT from being, if you will, a cost center or organization that's trying to run the business to become core to the business. And it will help IT spend less time doing the plumbing piece. We're the plumbers, we actually build all the lots of the low level stuff and the infrastructure. And they can move up the stack and add value and be very agile to meet their business needs. The implication of this thing on how IT would operate include the need to embrace some new technologies while still retaining the ability to connect back to on-prem, do the hybrid stuff so you can have both sides, if you want. So transformation is the name of the game here and the end game is really agility. Does that need for speed have, even if it's short term, potentially midterm effects and maybe even long term effects on quality, how do organizations, yourselves included, square that circle? You'd be surprised, I mean you can take a piece of software test it forever and then ship it and have a long time before the next version and you're going to have lots of bugs in between as opposed to shipping often and doing the right testing methodology where you can actually recover very, very quickly. The basic techniques we now use, we roll forward, we roll backward, we test and that's more before we go big and so forth. So what I'm trying to tell you is agility is actually the main tool we use to get higher quality now as opposed to time in the past, which was let's go bake the bits. We used to bake them in the lab and then still find the bugs. And you have, I presume you have proof points of that. I mean you have the data. The cloud as we know it today will not operate otherwise. So it's more, it's obviously faster, more agile, it's higher quality. Yep, it's very true actually, I strongly believe that. And more secure by the way. I was going to ask you, is it more secure? How many features scrolled throughout during your keynote there in the last 12 months? That's actually just a snapshot of what we have done. But actually it is more secure because we apply the security knowledge we have and the tooling and the data to the global cloud. We have a global view of all the potential attacks and so forth and we dedicate teams for the security of the infrastructure. Sometimes frankly when we used to give it to customers some customers were amazing, others were not as good. So if you will extract all these things and put it in one place now in the cloud itself. Security used to be the number one reason why people didn't go to the cloud, particularly in financial services and healthcare. And then they turned around and realized, wow, they're all actually used for how. You can actually argue that security is one of the main reasons why you want to move to the cloud. Yeah, so why? Within the reason of course of your political boundaries and so forth. Yeah, compliance and so forth. So why don't people move to the cloud, why? I think they are moving to the cloud. But do note, customers also have some costs on premises. And we as human organizations sometimes takes us time to switch the earlier question, the operating model and the like. But the movement is happening. But if you asked me a few years ago, it was mostly test, dev and test and proof of concept. Now the movement is really happening. It's inevitable and not just because you're biased because you're in the Azure. I am biased, but we are seeing the numbers speak for themselves. But Microsoft believes that now. That's what as an observer, I... I can give you some numbers, you know. We sign up 100,000 subscriptions a month now. 100,000 subscriptions a month. And the numbers keep growing. You know, I remind you of the footprint. The reason we have 34 regions, which is more than what Google and Amazon has combined is a testament of the demand we are seeing. The reason we have this huge network you mentioned earlier is because we need it to connect all this infrastructure for the cause of the demand. The demand is there. Massive scale, agility, you know, huge investments, obviously. Yousef, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you guys, I appreciate your time as well. You're welcome. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this, we're live from Disrupt in New York City. Right back. My name is Dave Vellante and...


Hey there friends, how's it going? My name is Kevin and today we're going to hit man, woman and child and an epic quest to kill everyone. Oh, what a good day this is gonna be. Well, not for them. We're playing Hitman Blood Money. It's probably arguably my favorite. These are Hitman 2, oddly enough. Usually I'm very nostalgic. I'm like, oh, the best of this game is when I was a kid, but no, Hitman 2 is actually a really good game. But Hitman Blood Money always is a special place in my heart. We're gonna jump back into a new life, which is incidentally going to be a short life for most of them. The incident put us back on 47's tail, which eventually led to his destruction. I'm just thinking this whole story is basically this guy telling a journalist how they killed Agent 47 and he's going through all the missions, like telling them his stories.  Here we are. And let's get off to a good start by immediately assaulting this man. Just a gentle push. This is how my rampage begins. It'll escalate. Trust me. No, wait, hold on. I can't remember what the button is to take out weapons. I'm just gonna have to gently push him back out of the map.  No one hear this screaming, please. Wait, is he still alive? Hmm. Okay, there we go. I'm not sure if he was alive or not. There was some, uh, gargling going on there. Oh, look, another innocent bystander. The cheek of some people.  You're going in the bin. Just a fully grown man in a suit playing hopscotch, but not playing it very well. Oh, hello, Karen. It's good to see you again. Just trample over these, if you don't mind. She's in a strange mix of gardening, cowering, and dancing, all at the same time. And now she's in a weird mix of dead and dead.  Jesus Christ. Must have been the jogger from earlier. Maybe he wasn't dead. He just took off so quickly. Oh my god, where did the other one go? It grinded him into a paste or something.  Bad blood. Well, at least now the blood may not draw suspicion when it says bad blood on the actual truck itself. They'll just think it's some weird gorilla machining technique. Oh yeah, that's grinding him into a paste, all right. This one, on the other hand, is a little harder to explain. I may just bring the blood trail into this nearby garden.  I don't know if I can kill everyone on this map. Even when I kill them, they still seem to be a bit jittery. It's like when you go fishing and you get that fish out of the water and he's still got a bit of a wriggle in him. Wait, what? Oh god, I've been caught trespassing. Follow me. Come back here. I'm trespassing back here, but I'm hard of hearing, so you have to confront me in this dark alley. Oh no, feck, feck, feck. How did they not see that across the garden? Maybe they did, but they're like, ah, that's out of our jurisdiction. We're paid to protect this house, not that house. I don't know, the game's pretty old. Maybe the draw distance for them is quite small. They can only see like six foot in front of them. Oh my god, Jesus Christ. Murdering the woman across the street is fine, but opening their van is too far. That's where they draw the line. Oh. Never mind, I have a hedge cutter, which apparently is a weapon of mass destruction in this game. Oh, for feck's sake, here comes the backup. You see what I mean? Look at this. Alright, we're gonna load that. I saved it just after I killed Karen, so it's not too bad. That kill just meant a lot to me. Alright, I'm stealing these donuts. Gotta be careful though. These people are pretty jumpy. Stealing donuts is probably punishable by death as well. You don't know what these people... Oh god, Karen is watching me. Look at her, she's so feckin' nosy. I mean, to be fair, I look pretty suspicious. I like how I'm trying to hide from the Karen as well, and I'm holding the syringe out towards her. Alright, now's my chance. Poison it. Wait, did she see me? What is she doing? Is she going for an afternoon jog? What is this? Oh, no, she told on me, and now they've opened fire. I was just adding the secret ingredient, glove.  Oh, I guess this is my van now. Come on. How are they gonna justify this? Like, there's so many cameras and everything. And I'm just there holding some donuts as they unload bullets into me, and I'm not even reacting. Feckin' Karen's man. They're just so nosy. Like, who cares if your neighbor is poisoning some donuts and feeding it to strangers? It's none of your damn business. Oh yeah, I forgot, I just left this body here. Oh, for Feck's sake, you just threw the donuts on the ground. Like, I get it. I have to poison them and whatnot to succeed in my mission, but throwing them on the ground and then feeding to people, that's too far. It's inconsiderate is what it is. Put down donuts. There we go. Knock, knock, knock. Run. Quick, quick before they open fire for no reason whatsoever. There they go. And there goes the clown as well. I was hoping I could get him. I want to be a clown. I already am one in real life, so it would just make it more immersive for me. Just running around, waiting for the clown to come back. He must be looking at him like, that man is really excited by clowns. Ah, here's the man himself. Look at that for a grand entrance.  He looks absolutely terrifying. Luckily for me, he looks also exactly like me.  Dispose of, yeah, there we go. There's no way he's fitting in that. There's not a feck in hope. Okay, he just went right on through it. God, he's even more terrifying now. He looks like he's been transformed into a snake or something. I'm here for the children. We have to frisk everyone coming into the house. Uh-oh, I'm going to go this way now. No, I don't want to be frisked. Social distancing and all that. I just don't want to be frisked. All right, you want to frisk me? Oh, God. Bad timing, bad timing, bad timing. Oh, for feck's sake. Uh-oh, wait, what has happened? Okay, it's fine. It's been caught on camera, but it's fine. I thought Karen had spotted me again. All seeing, all knowing Karen. Oh, my God, I thought that was a ghost. There we go. Just going to make a little body pile out here so it's nice and neat. With the trash. The trash man can pick this all up whenever he's re- Oh, wait, no, I killed the trash man. Oh, God. Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no. Someone found it. He's dead. Oh, yeah, yeah, come this way. We got to tell someone about this. Wait, there's a basement in this level? I don't remember a basement. Perfect place for a clown, though, if you ask me. Jesus, it's like something out of Until Dawn or something. Oh, I shouldn't be here. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I thought I was supposed to entertain the grown-up. It's my first day as a clown.  Look at him. Even though I was right there with a gun, he still made the call to his friends. Okay, went on a bit of a rampage here. Maybe I can get away with this. Who knows? Okay, close the door. Let's just get in a new disguise. That's fine. There we go. Now I'm just in the bathroom. Surely no one would interrupt me when I'm in the bathroom. Plus I have a headache. Owie, owie. I took some painkillers for all those gunshots, and now I feel fine. The pool boy does not care that there was just a massacre in the kitchen. He's like, either way, I got a job to do. Someone's got to clean that pool. Hmm. Kids room. Come out, come out wherever you are. I did say I'd kill every man, woman, and child. And when I make a promise, God damn it, I intend to keep it. God, you have seen better days, haven't you? She moves like one of the first androids that Boston Scientific made. The ones that just tip over all the time. Oh, she's found the bodies. Okay, that's not good. Oh, God, that was awkward.  Uh-oh, hold on. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, reload. How long does this take you? Christ almighty. For fuck's sake. Honestly, this was not my fault.  He was too dedicated to his job, and now he's dead. But someone's got to clean the pool, and I guess that's me now. Diana, this is agent. I've got a pool to clean. I just got to lay low until this all blows over. What?  All right, we'll just not include that clip, so no one will know I killed the dog, and then the comments won't be angry at me. Future Kevin is a genius. He won't forget about that. All right, I'm laying low. He looks like a thumb. But if anyone goes near this thumb's pool, I'm ready. All right, Karen, I'll be out of your hair. I think they've forgotten about me. They take multiple homicides a lot less serious than stealing some doughnuts, for example. Like, look, the other Karen is still just cutting her a hedge. Like, she's been cutting the same hedge since I got here. There's no way she's actually cutting anything. She's just here nosing on the neighbors and pretending to chop, chop away. I don't know where the actual target has gone. A lot of his bodyguards are dead, but I think I killed him so fast the backup didn't arrive, thankfully. It's hard as well because I'm playing it on expert because I'm quite an expert of video games. I play them for a living, and you only get three saves, which is kind of brutal when you're playing like this. The pool isn't the only thing I need serviced. Come on. Okay, rejected animatronic from Five Nights at Freddy's. Let's go. I would love to go to your bedroom. Wait, you saw these bodies earlier. Did you just forget about them? God, that guy's skipping bicep day. What is that about?  I think that might be herb. Help! I don't know what you want me to do. I clean your pool. I don't clean up the dead bodies. What? Oh, Jesus Christ, almighty. Never cleaning your pool again, lady. In fact, I'm going to intentionally make it dirty. There you go. How about that? It's like I'm just teaching you how to swim. This is how I'll teach my child when I have one. He's just grabbing them by the arm and dragging them through the water. I don't think there's many people left on the map, you know, except for my target, maybe. I still haven't found him. He's hiding upstairs somewhere, I think. I think everyone else is dead.  Is he in the living room? I passed through there a second ago and there was no one there. Ah, let me take a look. Let me take a look. Aha, I wonder where he is. He's circling. Oh, he's so good at hiding. I might have to give up. Where could the little rascal be?  Let's see if pool boy can make him come out of the closet. He's just freaking out in there. Well, to be fair, it looks like a ghost just opened his door, so maybe that's why he's freaking out. What? Good Lord. Reaction. That is everyone except for Karen dead on the map, I believe. All right, I think after all the grief you put me through, you're going to get the crappiest death of all. There you go, Karen, down into the sewer.  Oh, look at her. Kicking up a fuss even. Oh, go down, Karen. The world doesn't revolve around you, okay? You have to obey gravity, all right? And no time for my escape? Deranged, deranged slayer, but only a three out of 10 noise level. That's not too bad. That's something to boast about, I think. But we are going to leave it there. I hope you enjoyed the murder spree. This was quite fun. If you want to see any more Hitman videos, please do let me know.  It's a lot of fun. I don't know if I should be worried about that, but I hope you enjoyed. I appreciate you a lot for watching my videos. You know, if you want to help me, you can gently press the like button. I don't really like when people say to slap the like button. I don't really like violence, but I hope you did enjoy. And if you want to see more of me, I post every day and I also stream over on Twitch. There's a link for that in the description. But that's about all the rambling I can do for the end of the video, so I'm going to leave you go. Thank you very much for watching again. Hope to see you next time. Bye for now.


is this little thing here. Let me take the camera off because you can see the camera. You can see how the camera is on the dolly, right? It's with the quarter inch screw on there, right? So this is a little, you got to undo the clamp here, you know, loosen it up and then it comes loose, right? But it's basically, you can put this anywhere you want, right? Take this off the screw here. So it's got on this side, it's got your screw, but actually it's got, you've got your quarter inch on this side, right? And hold on, let me, let me do the overhead. Why don't I do the overhead with this so you can see, right? Bear with me, people. All right, so we're going to do the overhead. So we're going to show in this dream, we're going to show this, we're going to hide that. And now you can see I'm going to put the light back on. Right? So it comes with this side, but this side actually came with this, with the shoe for the, for the camera or the light, right? So you put that into the camera, right? And then you can hook the light up onto this one, right? But I'm not using it for my purposes, I'm taking that off and I'm using this screwed into my dolly, right? The other side has your your quarter inch screw, right? You can see that there, the quarter inch screw.  And I was kind of disappointed because they're very loose, right? But when you tighten this up, wherever you tighten it, right? Let's say I tighten that now. Now it's tight here and this end is tight and this end is tight. So, you know, so whenever you tighten it, it stays where it is. So you can put it in any position you want, you know, it's pretty cool.  I love it. I love it. I love it. So, I'm not sure what that's called. What is that called? If I go over to my Amazon, it is the heavy-duty magic arm with shoe mount adaptive. It's a magic arm. I should have known it's a magic arm. It's a magic arm.


Members of a coalition of civil society organizations, known as the Cohort of Civil Society Organization, on productive partnership have urged Nigerians to demand accountability from the members of the 9th National Assembly. The coalition charged the let's-latest to all the sponsors and pass bills that are relevant to their constituents. We should always remember it's about the citizens. We've forgotten about that in this country. Everything comes down to citizens, the ordinary people who are neglected out there. That is why these people were elected, to represent them. Okay, mentioned about bills dumping, the focus really is to be able to identify that you're not just making laws, but you're making what we call technically high-impact legislation. This is our project. We agree no less with the speaker when he said that, of course, bills making is not the only function. It's right. You know, but the full story is that there are other core functions, and let me also make us realize or remind us that this sponsorship is not actually the true story, and that is what we have done. We want to work from inside, we want to be part of this platform, that what we need to do is to engage them in such a way to get the information, and we need you to put it out there for Nigerians. The 11 or 12 of us here, no matter how much information, factual information we have, without you putting it out there correctly to Nigerians, there is still an extent that we can go. And amongst others such as gender, gender mainstreaming. I mean, that's also another key conversation to be having right now. They were looking at a constitutional review amendment amongst other engagements with the legislators. And again, we said we also could be co-opting the media as partners. So it's a win-win situation. You are part of this conversation.  So it's our duty. It's a collective drive with both the media and the civil society. You can find about fresh news updates.


Hi, my name is Bobby Samuel and I've got Frederick Coutts here with me, and we're going to talk to you today about health OS and enabling standards-based healthcare interoperability using cloud native and zero trust. So first of all, I'm Bobby. I work at Anthem. I lead up the health OS development as well as precision insights. Frederick, would you like to introduce yourself? Hello, I'm Frederick Coutts. I am a director of software engineering at Sharecare, and I collaborate with Bobby and Anthem on zero trust and variety of architectures and systems. So the way we're going to walk through this today is we'll start with the business case or the business challenge and then we'll move into the technology and then be here to answer any questions.  What's the what's the point of all this? So health OS is something that we've created internally here within Anthem and payers are seen as the middleman pain point across the ecosystem and causing abrasion across various user segments, whether as provider, member or even to other payers. But we also sit in position where we have the richest longitudinal view of data and that's whole health data about the person. So health OS helps us operationalize our health health data to drive improved outcomes and reduce costs and overall, you know, increases efficiency. So we'll talk to you about how we do that, but at the foundation of it all, health OS is a platform. It's a hub whose primary emphasis is interoperability and then driving world-class experiences and uses machine learning and AI to drive insights and also actions. So just to talk about the business architecture and how the pieces fit together, at the bottom we've got the data layer and that data layer it focuses on integrations with the EHRs. It's got payer and clinical data and then our data about members or our constituents is based on fire or the fire standard. On top of that layer, and this is where we'll get into cloud-native and zero trust, but in that space in the security layer and our platform layer, we've got a number of things that are running and happening. So insights and action apps live here and are created here. We've got tool sets or IDEs and tool sets to rapidly build, validate and or deploy health apps. And then this is where we'll talk about where we're implementing zero trust to do workload identity management. And then on top of that, we've got interaction layer. So the cool thing about health OS is that, or one of the many things about health OS is that whether it's a UI UX that health OS manages or a UI UX that someone else manages, whether it's another EHR or a homegrown app that we have, those all plug into and have the benefit of connecting back into all of these health apps and back into the place where we've got the rich data stores. So this is the ecosystem that we've been putting together with our client application endpoints to connect as well as SDKs to build and rapidly deploy apps. So in our ecosystem, what are we trying to do this for? And at Anthem, we have a number of partners we work with. We have a number of partners that we connect with and various lines of business. But the big problem is they're not connected. Anthem's connected to them, but they're not connected to each other. And what this allows us to do is to connect all the apps to each other. So health OS allows us to connect to Anthem's data ocean. It allows health apps, insights and actions to run and connect all these different apps. So we bring our digital ecosystem together and we bring our EMR systems together that we connect with, as well as internal systems that exist within Anthem. All of these things working together focused on better outcome for the member. And so let me zoom back out into what's our ecosystem and where Zero Trust kind of fits in. So we've put health OS in the center. Once again, action apps and inside apps. So an example of an inside app would be what benefits are covered for Bobby or does Bobby have this in his formulary, this particular drug in his formulary or treatment in his formulary. And action could be scheduling an appointment. It could be one click prescriptions or painless prior off, one click prior authorizations. And so those things run together and then using Zero Trust connections, we connect to various clients like the desktop or it could be, and I'm going counterclockwise right now, but like the desktop, it could be on AIML tooling that we've got running that we can make insights available. Third party health solutions. And then even to clients like third party clients like Telehealth OS, which Telehealth has seen a huge rise in popularity and usage due to the pandemic. And then EMR apps or apps that do payment acceleration, as well as just traditional EMR platforms like in large hospital systems, Epic, CERN or Athena Health. And all of these connected together, working together, once again focused on our member's health and improving the health of humanity. And so what we'll do is we'll dive a bit more into how we're putting all of these things together on a cloud native Zero Trust foundation to deploy this ecosystem. So Frederick, let me turn it to you. Thank you, Bobby. So before we jump into Zero Trust, let's talk a little bit about some security basics. Very often, when you speak with a security or information security person, you'll often hear about the CIA triad. We actually look at four things now, but the first three in the CIA is what traditionally people would look at. Those three are confidentiality. Is the information protected against unauthorized viewing or access? We look at integrity. Has the information been modified in a way that was unauthorized? How do we protect it from being modified? We also look at availability. Is the information available when you need it to be? And there's a fourth thing that has been added in in more recent times called non-repudiation, which is how can you ensure that an entity that has performed a transaction cannot back out of that transaction? And there's multiple reasons for this, which could include at the business layer, how do you prevent fraud? How do you ensure that you can observe the system? And know that that's what the state was likely to be. It could also be based upon trying to make sure that when you're looking at security systems, that you know exactly who you're connecting with and that it hasn't been swapped out with someone else. So in general, there's now four main categories that people tend to look at. There's a couple others that people will bring in as well, but these are the main four that you tend to see. So using this particular framework, we then take a look at what are the business requirements? What is it that we're trying to protect? What has changed? So when we look at the zero trust space and why it's important, one of the things that we want to look at is what are the previous assumptions that we've made? And what is the reality that we're seeing today? What has changed? And the differences between that assumption and reality can be seen in the form of cyber attacks where people will perform data breaches, will run ransomware, denial service attacks, forging identities, or so on. And the policies that we tend to apply in from a regulatory or policy perspective may also end up ossifying some of those assumptions, end up entrenching those assumptions in such a way that they can be difficult to respond to. So zero trust is about realizing that we have these gaps and then building up a new framework that is more flexible in order to allow for response to these type of conditions and to allow for additional controls to be put in in such a way that it enables other parts of your organization, your digital organization or your developers to be able to make the changes necessary to meet your mission, but at the same time still maintain that control to hit your confidentiality, your integrity, your availability, and your non-repeation goals. So what is zero trust? I try to distill it down into a small image. And this is the simplest I was able to find. In the top half of this, you have perimeter defense, which is the common gold standard that you see within many environments. That is where you have a trusted network. In that network, you have your services. If you need to connect to another network, you may have a firewall that you put in between them in order to protect entities in one network from entities in another network. But the problem is that if you end up with an attacker in one of these networks, then there's a lot that they can do there, a lot of damage that can be done. In the zero trust model, instead what we say is, well, what if that network was not trusted? No, it's not implicitly trusted. That doesn't mean the firewalls go away. It doesn't mean that you're not trying to protect the network, but it means you're no longer saying, this network is the implicit thing in which we base our trust. So once you no longer trust your network, then you have to look at where you push the controls. And the controls end up being at the services themselves. So if you look at the bottom half of this, you can see every service when it connects to something else has some form of a, of something resembling a firewall, something that is a control that allows you to determine what you want to send over those links to those other devices. If an attacker enters into your network, again, that doesn't mean you're no longer at risk, but it's yet another layer of security that you have that doesn't allow for implicit access to things simply because they're on the network. So to build our zero trust framework, we started with three main foundations. This is identity, policy, and automation. Identity is what is it that identifies your service? What does it identify as your user or identifies your data? How do you know that what you're looking at is the thing that you're, that you're looking for? How do you attest that identity? Policy is how do you develop the rules and apply those rules and enforce those rules across the, across identity? From the automation perspective is how do we take this from, let's say you have a single system and you can put a person on that system to defend it. When you say, when you start to try to scale this out to a large number of systems, hundreds of systems, thousands of systems, tens of thousands of systems, you need to have automation in place that is able to help you assign the identity and enforce the policy, but also bring in things like observability so you can audit what's going on and to have controls over what the automation is capable of doing or what it's not able to do. So it ends up being three intertwined primary pillars that have to be put together in order to build a zero trust framework. So we've been working on a reference implementation for this in the cloud native environment and we focus around three primary things. So if you notice, in the triangle, I actually made them link up so you can see identity. We're using Spiffy Inspire. For policy, we're using open policy agent. For automation, we're relying heavily on things like network service mesh. Now these aren't the only things in the infrastructure, but they're the representative of the type of things that we're trying to accomplish. So we'll go over each of these in more detail soon. We also build this on top of Kubernetes. We build it on top of systems like OpenShift. We build in automation on the infrastructure side. We have GitOps style processes that we're bringing in. Underpinning all of this, you still need observability across the whole stack. You still need control over the whole stack. So it ends up becoming this model that this particular thing represents, that all works in coordination to deliver the infrastructure that is part of HealthOS. So what Spiffy Inspire are is they provide identities to your workloads. So most people are familiar with user identity. You put in your password, you log into an online service, you have that user identity. In this scenario, we're looking at workload identities. So every workload receives an X509 certificate. This is the same type of certificate that when you log into your bank, your bank will use an X509 certificate to identify who it is. So we're relying on the same type of primitives and principles in order to secure the workloads. When a workload connects to another, they use a new feature within TLS that is available in TLS 1.3 and presumably above as those are released. And that is mutual TLS. Mutual TLS is where your client is able to validate your server, like you typically can from a web browser validating your bank. But simultaneously, the server is capable of validating the identity of the client. So you have this two-way validation that occurs within a trust domain. So we're able to create these identities that live within a trust domain that allow them to establish their identities. And these identities are constantly rotated out. Every hour they get rotated out by default if you're using Spiffing Inspire.  What we mean by that is that the system will ask for an identity. We will look at the properties of that system. You might have a TPM module that you're working with. You might have a identity document that is within AWS or within GCP or other similar systems that have some cryptographic material inside of them that help prove something about that system. We are able to build our Spiffy identities with attestation that is rooted in these cryptographic materials from these types of systems. This also has a very nice effect because since we're performing this mutual attestation and validation between systems, in many scenarios it reduces or also eliminates the need for long-living bear tokens. So in other words, you don't need to pass in a secret. The fact you're connecting in with a specific identity is enough for the system to recognize what type of a system it is and what type of policies need to be applied. In terms of policy, we're looking at things like Open Policy Agent.  What are its capabilities that it is able to fulfill? And when you create these particular systems, the properties we're looking for that led us to Open Policy Agent has to be something that's human readable, has to be something that meets the look and shape of common policies. So in other words, how do you classify data? How do you classify workloads? How can you say this system has PHI and create defaults that say, don't allow them to connect the systems that don't have PHI or vice versa? And then from there we can carve out patterns that the system is allowed to perform. In this example, we took this from OpenPolicyAgent.org. It's one of their examples they have on their front web page. And you can see a request that says, pet owners are allowed with a specific ID that is verified by the JWT, which is something that identifies the user cryptographically, is allowed to receive information or is allowed to make a request against this API in a specific way. If and only if the request comes from, like I say this is in front of a database, if and only if the request comes from a client or a workload that we have identified. So it gives us a lot of flexibility to define the exact type of shape and policies that we want in a human readable way that also allows us to get this policy into Git. It allows us to have code reviews on these policies. To share them with with other stakeholders so we can get their opinions on whether this policy meets their requirements or not. And it gives us that change over time so we can see how policy has changed, when did it change, because it's all checked into Git. We also rely on a new technology called Network Service Mesh. Network Service Mesh is another CNCF project that is looking to automate low-level networking systems. So we're looking at, if you're familiar with the OSI model, we're looking at Layer 2, Layer 3, we're looking at frames in Ethernet and IP and other similar level areas. And what it does is it facilitates the underlay to services. So typically when you're running in Kubernetes, you'll often have multiple clusters you want to connect together in some way. And when you connect them, the assumption is there's already connectivity established between both systems. What Network Service Mesh allows you to do is to acknowledge that there may not be a connection that's there and you may need certain things in place in order to make that connection work. So this allows the operator to say, in order for this connection to occur, I needed to have a firewall and intrusion detection system. These will go through a certain VPN gateway, a certain VPN concentrator. So Network Service Mesh allows you to automate these processes through a cloud-native API with native support from Spiffy Inspire and Open Policy Agent. And it provides you a cryptographic reputation of that connection chain. So in other words, in this example we have on the left, HealthOS app, going through a specific VPN gateway to a specific VPN concentrator to a specific health app. We can get the cryptographic identity of everything in between and see what is a system connecting through. Is it connecting through systems that we trust? Is it connecting through systems that are required to? Do we have everything in here that we need in order to establish this connection by policy and enforce it on an ongoing basis? Finally, we look at GitOps. And from a GitOps perspective, the workflow, this is more of a process side that is then committed as a service. So from the process, you have a developer. Developer will make some form of a commit into the source code system like such as Git. Then the CI CD system, your continuous integration system will see those changes that have been put into Git and will then render them into your test environment, into your staging environment, your production environment. The every change goes through source control. Every change goes through Git, which gives us that auditability. It gives us that chain as to who made the change. We also have control from the QA side. So in fact, when you're looking at regulatory concerns in this space, it's important that your developers are not allowed to push into production. You have to have a separate group of people, a separate team that is able to look at what changes are there and decide whether or not those changes should hit production. So when you start looking at things that are PCI compliance or HIPAA compliance systems, you tend to see this pattern quite common so that you don't have a single place or a single person who is able to push these type of things in. So the QA team is then able to determine at what rate and when something is promoted from testing to staging or staging to production. A really great example of a system that you can use to achieve this in your own infrastructure is Flux. So highly recommend that you go look at Flux and give it a try. It hooks up to GitHub and gives you that initial path towards automating in this style. So with that, I want to thank you all for joining us and learning a little bit about HealthOS and Zero Trust. Please consider that these are the type of technologies that we're using. We're using OpenShift with Kubernetes. We're using Spiffian Spire of the Policy Agent, Network Service Mission Envoy. Please join these particular communities. There's a lot of things that you can work on in those particular spaces. And if you're interested in the type of things that we're working out, please reach out to either Bobby or I and we'll help you navigate the path, whether it's coming to work with us directly or whether it's trying to work in the same area in your own industry. So please come and join us. With that, we have time for questions and thank you very much.