High-profile cyber attacks like the Solar Winds hack, the JBS Meet and the Florida Municipality Breach have heightened awareness of how exposed critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4J vulnerability. That's yet another example of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now, data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault, if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt in an effort to hold companies hostage in a ransomware attack. Now, in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, theCUBE is hosting the special presentation Infinigard Cyber Resilience, new cyber crime solutions. We're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the chief marketing officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wasaki, who is the president of Mark III Systems, who's either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to theCUBE. Hello, Eric. Great, Dave, thank you very much. Always loved talking to you and theCUBE about leading edge technology solutions for end users. Let's do it. So first, we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat, new CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing, obviously. Phil Bollinger has really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat. You just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us and give us the business update? Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. We had a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68% and over 25% of the Fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our Infinibox, our Infinibox SSA, all flash array or our Infinigard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today on February 9th. Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th and why it's important. Well, what we've done is we've got a high-end enterprise purpose-built back-of-appliance, the Infinigard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our Infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup data set could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know, backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster for a traditional backup workload. So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe and specifically, Eric, I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions.  Like I said, you guys always try to take non-conventional approaches. So tell us a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? Sure, well, Infinisafe incorporates, as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots cannot be deleted. They cannot be altered. You cannot accelerate the rate. You can set the rate of immutable staff. Do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously, if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data deduple appliance and that data deduple engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology to that backup data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE's can access it, giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE and of course, the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology. So you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A to a different Infiniguard in data center B.  And then of course, you'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So if the cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fenced network in which to perform that forensic analysis to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single Infinibox. Some of our competitors right on their website say you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances to do cyber resilience, meaning twice the CAPEX and twice the OPEX, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then last thing is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their convolve, their VM, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, whatever their backup software is to do recovery from the Infiniguard box back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original data set with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at whether it be purpose-built backup competitors or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery. And the one or two that do talk about recovering the data set, we recover the entire environment. We are ready to go. And the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, VMware, Veritas, they could immediately start the backup as soon as we did our recovery, which again takes between 15 and 30 minutes independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes. It could be a petabyte. It could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course the backup admin can restore from that backup data set. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. Well, the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like at the bank vault because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus. That's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good, but there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improve the performance of the purpose built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour. Now we're at 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than double the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the data set took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half, or even faster. So that of course minimized the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers and primary storage. So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion, the impact that Infinigar, this announcement that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEx compared to the previous vendor that they had. And they used to be able to do 30,000 backup a day. Now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of Infinigar, not the version we just announced on the ninth. One of our other customers, which is in Amia and they happen to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from another vendor and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one and seven in data center two. Within Infinigar, they've got one in data center, one and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now. They've had zero recovery failures whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%.  They again, were able to take those two systems out and use one Infinigar solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure to going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one Infinigar versus two of the other guys products.  One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space and one a global fortune 500 financial services coming. Just some real world examples. And all those, by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of Infinigar on February 9th. So Eric, I'm just kind of sketching out the business case.  So you're lowering costs because you're consolidating. So that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I can do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time. So that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere. Recovery is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery. All this lowers my risk and I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss and then what that means to my business. Am I getting it right? Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage.  Every time you turn on that backup to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify, but you are taking the impact of backup and basically reducing it. If you will shrinking the backup window. So their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup. Well, they're still trying to run that SAP better Oracle that SQL workload. And you're not a backup software vendor. So I can, I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular apps. Absolutely. So Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned as we were talking about the end users, they use two different backup packages, two of them. So two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So we're very flexible. The user picks what they want from a backup software perspective and we can work with anything. So whatever they want to use is fine with us. We integrate with all of them. We have integration, for example, also with VMware for VVols and other aspects and container integration. So, you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, Infinigard, or what we do with the Infinibox, we always make sure we integrate with a surrounding environment because storage is not an island. Storage needs to exist in your data center or your hybrid cloud data center or what you're doing for containers. So you make sure we have integration with our Infinibox, our Infinibox SSA All Flash, and of course the product we're enhancing today, the Infinigard. Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions. They're busy, they don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay, Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. Great, thank you very much, Dave. Always love talking to theCUBE. Okay, in a moment, Stan Wasaki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's gonna join us for a drill down on how Infinigard is impacting customers. You're watching theCUBE, your global leader in enterprise tech coverage. At Infinidat, we believe in better storage choices with no trade-offs. Our storage delivers blazingly fast performance and guarantees 100% availability. Plus, it's built for tremendous scale, from hundreds of terabytes to multiple petabytes. It's all about giving IT the best option for storing data. It means you can tick all the important boxes on your enterprise storage requirements, performance, availability, scalability, and enjoy a lower TCO and faster ROI than competing solutions. It's why our customers become repeat customers. It's what inspires our channel partners, and it's what motivates our employees. It's why we got into the storage business. And we just covered some of the critical aspects from Infinidat's recent announcement and the importance of cyber resilience and fast recovery. Eric Herzog is back and joining us is Stan Wasaki, who's president of Mark III Systems, Stan. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you, pleasure to be here. Tell us about Mark III Systems. You specialize in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. It says in your website, I'd love to hear more about your business. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think we're a little bit unique in our industry, right? There have been business partners resellers around for, we've been around for 26 years. And in 26 years, we've supported some of the largest enterprise customers in the Southeast with server stores, networking, virtualization. We have VCP number 94, so we've been doing that from the very beginning. But about six years ago, we realized that IT was changing, that business was changing, that the demands of the customers was changing and we needed to create a full stack message and a full stack practice. So we hired data scientists and developers and DevOps, MLOps, and gave them the environments and the tools that they could use to build experience around AI ML deep learning. So now when we engage with our customers, not only can we handle the entire enterprise stack that they have, but we can help accelerate them under adoption of open source technologies, cloud native development and AI and integrating that into their business processes. I love it. You got to keep moving. You've been around for a long time, but you're not just sitting still. I wonder if you could comment, and then Eric, I want you to comment as well. From your customer's perspective, Stan, what are the big trends that you see that are impacting their business and the challenges that they're facing? Yeah, that's great. So it kind of ties into what I just said. Today we live in a data-driven society. Everything that we do is really driven by how the customer wants to engage and that's both an internal customer and your end user customers on how they want to engage, how they want to consume, and how they want to interact with everything out there in the world. So the real trends is really around engaging with the customer, but that means that you need to be data-driven, you need to adopt AI platforms, you need to adopt a more holistic view of what you're doing with your customers. That drives up the importance of the data that you have in your shop. So then cybersecurity becomes extremely important, not just because of the technical skills of the hackers getting better and better, but because we're becoming more reliant on the data that we have moving forward. And we're proud to partner with Infinidat and leveraging Infinigard and Infinisave to really protect our customer's data. Great, Eric, thinking about the trends and some of the issues that Stan just mentioned, when you think about the launch and the announcement that you just made, how do you see it fitting in to Stan's business? How is it going to help the end customers? Well, I think there's one key aspect. As noted in the Fortune Survey of CEOs in 2021, the number one concern of CEOs of the Fortune 500 was cybersecurity, and they saw that as biggest threat to their business. As Stan pointed out, that becomes the importance of the digital data that all companies generate of all types, financial services, healthcare, government institutions, manufacturing, you name it. So one of the key things you've got to do is make sure that your storage estate fits into an overall cybersecurity strategy. And with Infinigard or Infinisave technologies, we can ensure that Stan's customers and customers of our other business partners all over the world can make sure that the data is safe, protected, and can help them for a malware or ransomware attack against that valuable data set. Well, I wonder if you guys could comment. I mean, we talked to CISOs and they've told us that they're, in part due to the pandemic, largely actually, their whole strategy has changed. Their spending strategy has changed no longer. They're just sort of putting up hardware firewalls. They're shifting their focus to different areas. Obviously endpoint, cloud security is a big deal. Identity access management, but ransomware is just top of mind for everybody. And as we talked about earlier, the exposure, now the weak links, whether you're working from home or, Stan, you mentioned greater sophistication of hackers. So what are you hearing from customers in this regard, Stan? Well, I think you have that, right? But then you always have, we've been doing this for 26 years. I've never heard of an IT budget that's gone up in any year, right? So with the sophistication of these hackers that are coming out and the different angles that they're using to get in, it is extremely important for our customers to be very efficient and choose their security strategy and products very wisely, right? I think I read an article a year or so ago that the average enterprise had like 27 different security products.  So for us to be able to leverage Infinity Guard and Infinity Safe and to be able to provide, you know, the immutable snapshots, the logical air gash, the physical airbags and offense network for recovery, that's all extremely easy to manage. I mean, I talked to my customers and on why they have chosen Infinity, you know, through us, right? And one of the things that they always talk about is how easy and how amazing the support is, how easy it is to install, how easy it is to manage. And normally when you have a simple product, right? You think you can sell that to an unsophisticated customers, but my most technical customers really appreciate this because of the way Infinidap manages itself and provides the tools saying, I mean, just for example, the host tools, right? It does it in the way that they do it so they trust it, so that they can focus on the more important tasks rather than the care and feeding of their storage environment. Yeah, thank you. You know, when you talk to CISOs, you ask them what's the number one problem they'll tell you. Lack of talent and you just nailed it. You've got on average 27 different tools, new tools coming out every day. You're getting, you know, billion dollar, you know, VC investments and more and more companies are getting into it. It just adds to that confusion. So, Stan, I wonder if you could talk about specifically Infinigard, how it fits into your stack, like where and how you're applying it. Maybe you could talk about some specific use cases. Oh, yeah, definitely. You know, we have customers in pretty much every vertical that we're supporting their storage environments and Infinidat plays in all of those verticals with all of our customers. You know, one in particular, a healthcare account. One of our very first Infinidat customers and over the years has become the de facto standard storage platform that they have. And they also now have Infinigard as the backup target for Commvault. And this is one of those examples of the very technical discerning customer that really demands excellence, right? So they love the, you know, the three controller setup versus a dual controller setup. They love the availability and the resiliency. But then when it comes to the cybersecurity, before they moved on to this platform, they did have some ransomware attacks and they did have to pay out and it was very public.  Excellent. So, Eric, I want to bring you in. So let's talk through some of the options that customers have.  What is that, you know, the logical air gap, if you will, and then the physical labor. What do you, what patterns are you seeing with customers to really try to protect themselves against some of this ransomware? How are they approaching it? Well, first of all, obviously we, with the Infinigard as a purpose-built backup appliance can work with all the various backup vendors. But because backup is one of the first things, the sophisticated ransomware or malware entity is going to attack, right? Otherwise the CIO will just call up, say, hey, do we have a good backup? Let's recover from that. So secondary storage, AKA their backup estate is exactly the first thing they're gonna target. And they do it certitiously, of course. So one of the key things we do is we allow them to take those backup data sets, Commvault, for example, and in Stan's example, or Veeam or Veritas or IBM Spectrum Protector, many other packages, even directly with databases like with Oracle RMAN, and allow them to create immutable snapshots. Can't delete them, can't change them, can't alter them. And then we air gap them locally from the management framework. So in an Infinigard, we have a technology known as our data dedupe engines, our DDE's. Those are really the management schema for the entire solution. So when we create an immutable snapshots, we create a logical air gap where those DDE's cannot alter the immutability characteristics, they cannot shorten them, they cannot lengthen them. In short, we take that management schema away and create this separation. We also allow them to replicate those backup data sets to a remote Infinigard box. You would set up the exact same parameters I wanna make an immutable snap every day, every 12 hours, every six hours, and then you've got the duplicate. Remember, the average length from breach to closure on a cyber attack is 287 days. So once the attack starts, you don't know until they ask you for the ransom. It could be going on for 50 days, 100 days, 150 days, and it's all done, if you will, on the download, hidden. So if, by the way, you happen to have a data centerfire or you happen to have a tornado or an earthquake or some other natural disaster, you still want that data replicated to a secondary site, but then you still want the capability of the cyber resilience as Stan pointed out. So you can do that. We can create a then a isolated fence network and we can do that on one Infinigard. Most of our competitors require two data protection appliances and it's public, it's right on their websites. So we save you on some CAPEX there and then we can do this near instantaneous recovery. And that's not just of the data set. Some of the cyber resilience technology you'll see out there, including on primary storage, only recovers the data set. We can recover the entire backup data set and all the surrounding environment. So the second that beam or Veritas or IBM Spectrum Tech or Commvault backup is available. The backup admins or the storage admins can immediately restore it's ready to go and we can do that in 15 to 30 minutes. Now that is being fast to react to a problem. So thank you for that. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about the best practice. Eric was just sharing the local air gap and then the secondary. Is that really in the case of a disaster or is it also to isolate the network? What are you seeing is the gold standard that customers are applying with your advice? Yeah, definitely the gold standard would be three sites. We do have a lot of our customers. The one healthcare customer in particular is split between two sites and they are actually working with us right now to architect the third site. Just for that fact, we're down in Texas. Hurricanes can come in 60, 70, 80 miles inland and then there's hurricane Harvey with all the flooding and stuff like that. So they do want to set up a third site. I think that gives them the peace of mind. And you know, the whole thing about it is right. You know, having an environment like this means the CISO and his team can focus on preventing attacks while they're very confident that their infrastructure team can handle anything that slips by them. Okay, great, thank you. We're about out of time, but Eric, I wonder if you could kind of bring us home, give us a summary of how you see InfiniGuard impacting customers. Where's that value, that business case for them? I wonder if you could just tie that knot for us. Sure, well, we want to make sure that we tie everything back, not only technical value, as Stan very, very eloquently did with several different customers, but what we can do from a business value perspective. So as an example, one of our InfiniGuard customers is a global financial services company and they were using a solution from a different purpose built backup appliance provider. They switched to us, not only they were able to increase the number of daily backups from 30,000 to 90,000, so they get better data protection, but on top of that, they cut 40% of their costs. So you want to make sure that while you're doing this, you're doing things like consolidation. One of our other customers, which is in EMEA in the European area, they had 14 purpose built backup appliances, seven in one data center and seven in a second data center. Now they've got two, one in one data center, one in the other, they of course do the local backups right then and there, and then they replicate from one data center to the other data center as both data centers are both active data centers, but DR for the other data center. So from their perspective, dramatic reduction of OPEX and CAPEX, 14 physical boxes down to two, and of course the associated management of both the manpower side, but why I love to call the Watts slots power and floor, all of those things that go into an OPEX budget, they were cut dramatically because there's only two systems now to power, to cool, et cetera, et cetera, floor space, rack space from 14. So wow, did they save money? So I think it's not only providing that data protection and cyber resilience technology, but doing it in a cost-effective way and a standpoint it out in a highly automated way that cuts back on the manpower they need to manage these systems because they're overworked and they need to focus on a standpoint it out. Their AI infrastructure, what they're doing for AI applications don't have time to do with it. So the more we automate, the better it is for them and the easier it is for everyone from the end user perspective as well as up and through their entire IT chain of command. Okay, if you want more information, you can go to infinite.com or it's markiiisys.com and check it out, learn about their full stack solution, a little bit about AI gentlemen. Thanks so much for the conversation today. Great to have you. Thank you, Dave. Now in a moment, I'm going to have some closing thoughts on the market and what we heard today. Thank you for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. Hi, I'm Ken Steinhart. I'm the field CTO for the Americas and what gets me excited to get up in the morning is when I have a performance to give, whether it's a musical performance or even a session recording here in my studio or if it has to do with infinite ad, it's probably something like a customer presentation or maybe even running an internal training session or even writing an article. But what it all comes down to is those things really are all the same. It's about telling a story and engaging your audience and hopefully doing something that's valuable for them. It was really more a set of random haphazard events I think than a path. I started in software development and systems analysis, then became a sales rep for a very large computer company and then got into sales training, sales management, marketing management, competitive management, managed large SE organizations, I managed field sales support, managed business development, competitive analysis and then eventually I became the vice president and CTO for all of global products at EMC, but then I retired, which was an interesting part of the path and went back to my roots as a professional rock musician. Came out of that after a few years to do product marketing and competitive work for Pure Storage and then have found my way from there to Infinidad. It's all about supporting the field. It's all about integrating what the field needs with what headquarters needs and ultimately both of those serve the customer. Everything is all about satisfying your customer, understanding their needs and ultimately hopefully providing them with things that make them successful and make them happy. That's what it's all about. So thank you for letting me share some of this with you and share your stories. What are you doing? As we enter the new reality of hybrid work, the exposures that companies have faced as a result of the pandemic and their consequent shift in technology strategies and spending, it demand new ways to protect data. Now we heard today from Infinidad and one of its key partners, Mark III Systems, how these two companies are coming together to help customers respond to new threats. Now key factors that customers should consider are how to back up data as quickly as possible and at the same time, isolate critical data in the case where hackers are attempting to hold your data hostage. In that instance, it's critical to have an isolated save copy of the data because as the saying goes, backup is one thing but fast recovery, that's everything. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Thanks for watching.


us for this award ceremony. It's the second edition of the UNODC Africa Digital Forensics Challenge and we're so glad that the competition went well. Everyone has joined us so I think we're going to kick-start the competition with a few words from Carmen. Carmen, over to you. Can you just give us a welcome remark and kind of like give us generous stats on the competition this year. Hi everybody, thank you Glory and Glory. You're still sharing the screen from Teams so just to let you know about that. It is really a pleasure for me to be able to be here and be part of this ceremony with all of you that are able to attend today. It's really a joy. So my name is Carmen Corbin and I am the head of Counter-Cybercrime Programming for UNODC's Global Cybercrime Program in Africa and my team is the one that has developed this CTF competition and is working throughout Africa on building capacity on digital forensics and understanding cybercrime investigations and cybercrime in general. So this is a really cool event that we get to do and this is now our second one and so you know with that we have still been learning a lot, still been trying to understand a little bit better about how to run this competition but truly this has been an exciting year for us and we've seen a lot of changes from what we actually did last year. So I don't know that all of you participated last year or if any of you participated last year but we had a few changes around what happened from last year. So this year again was the second edition of the competition and we had a groundbreaking number of people who actually registered. We had 1027 eligible people from 45 African countries which is amazing who registered for this year's CTF competition. So that is in comparison to last year which was 282 participants and there was a percentage increase of over 265 percent. So that's awesome and I think that the more and more that we're getting experts like you to join and really participate in this competition is fantastic because we're spreading knowledge and understanding of what digital forensics is and why it matters across the African continent. We had 21 percent female participation this year again which was similar to last year and also really good and it really goes to show that competitions like this one truly have their place on the African continent. So during the four weeks of competition there were five tip videos that Joshua put out and they were published to help the participants navigate the different tasks. 56 challenge questions were ultimately set in the competition and the different tasks issued varied from electronic evidence searches to open source investigations to dark web investigations and to cryptocurrency. So of the 1027 registered participants there were 149 teams that were created and these teams submitted a total of 1518 correct answers. So that's a lot of numbers but basically that is to say this was a great year. This was an amazing year and you guys were all really critical to to helping push this forward and really make it a fantastic competition. We all really work together to make this this edition of the competition a success and you know we hope that through this type of competition we can truly shine a light on the digital forensic talents and the skills that are on the African continent that are in you and that and what the African continent has to offer and that people in and African countries throughout the continent have these talents and skills that are available to fight cyber crime and work in cyber security. So that is an overview of the competition. So Glory I'm going to pass back to you. Thank you very much Camyn and of course Africa does have the talent and digital forensic and competitions like this that are going to help us continue to promote them to you know to the limelight. I think we're going to pass the mic now to Joshua. I think Joshua is going to give us a little more of like an overview but more technically of what actually happened because people like me will have no idea what's happening. We will have no technical idea on digital forensics can really tell you what really happened. So I think Joshua over to you now make it easier for the rest of us. Okay I don't know if I'll make things easier but I'll try. So yeah this year again we tried to do a lot different from based on what we learned last year. So last year we had four different data sets. One was like a computer hard drive one was RAM. I think we had network data traffic that they had to analyze and then I think a mobile phone and all of the different data sets were kind of related but also there wasn't an overall story really about it. So one thing that I really missed or I tried to do this year was actually build that story out so they could actually have a real case to solve which was a lot harder to make than I expected but anyway so this year basically we had a victim come in with their computer and we also had a RAM dump from that computer and they got the entire data set at the same time and then that got them so far and then in that system there was some cryptocurrency things they had to investigate and then that also took us online for online tools for cryptocurrency investigation. There were also some leads that took us to the dark web and then they had to analyze a real dark web server which I think people thought was pretty interesting based on the based on the answers that were coming in and then that finally led us to the suspect and the last week was getting basically the suspect system that kind of ties the entire story together and then we tried something that I've never seen in a CTF before so I really wasn't sure how it would work but it seemed to go okay and that is actually writing a final forensic report as one of the questions and the people who submitted reports it was amazing they did so good and it was just like a small little box to put your report in but they were like full professional reports it was it was really great actually so hopefully this year people saw that it was an entire case and then you actually had to not just answer a question but you have to think about what's going on and and what is the actual case and all of the details going on here. The problem with that though that I saw is that this year it was much harder so I think I think this year although it was I hope more realistic it was also more difficult so I need to find a good balance there because I really liked last year that anyone could kind of join any week and still get something out of it this week like this time you could kind of do that but not as not as clearly as last time so I've still got some things to think about if and when we do this next year so anyway I hope everyone enjoyed it it was a lot of work and I had fun like looking at what everyone was was submitting in the back end so I hope you liked it thank you very much Joshua actually so some participants did share their forensics report on Twitter I visited some of them I had no idea what it was all about but it seems kind of cool so so I guess that did a great job on that one okay so I think we're going to move on to the our proper and we're going to call in our friends from chain analysis who kind of like I would say our collaborators for the year they are the ones that are going to present the award that we're going to give to the top three winners of this year's CTF so I think we're going to move on to Yasin and Yasin is going to give us like a presentation of what the award is all about and how winners can use it to their advantage so Yasin over to you yeah thanks thanks glory and thanks everybody for for having us should I go ahead and share my screen of just the the few slides that we had okay let me go ahead and get that right so you might just have to make me a presenter real quick so I think usually if you're able to right click on me in the attendees list it should be able to give me a few extra special permissions there we go um all right open I did it glory awesome all right and I am hoping you all can see my screen with a chain analysis overview here on the right yep great awesome so um you know again thanks for having us we are really just tremendously humbled and honored to to be a part of you know this um this capture the flag um the second edition of the capture um the flag challenge um for digital forensics across the african continent so I'm going to be very brief I'm just going to give you guys a quick overview of who we are and then I would love to introduce you to my colleague Julie Montrose who is really going to do the the presentation of the award so um you know as Joshua was mentioning you guys did have a few cryptocurrency elements here this year um where you had to go online and use things like block explorers and other open source uh tools that are available uh to folks but um you know us as a company we uh we were founded in 2014 and really what we are is a blockchain data um and and forensic slash analysis um you know company so what we do is we're we're actually providing you know um data on various blockchains like what you see on the screen here we work with various uh verticals of government as well as private sector companies um and really around the world we've got over 750 plus customers we're operating in 70 plus countries I think you know very soon you will start to hear about new offices for chain analysis opening on the african continent to support um you know all all of the the fine talent that is there and and you know we've got plenty of folks including myself that have you know african heritage or background that work at the company today um you know we've got over 700 plus employees and we do um you know recently have had the um the honor of announcing you know a bit more funding to continue um on our mission here at chain analysis and so you know I'm just going to leave this on on the screen these are a few law enforcement or type cases that uh chain analysis has helped um you know whether it be law enforcement governments uh private sector entities as well right in some of these cases these are massive hacks that private sector institutions have had to um to kind of mitigate and figure out what happened so um you know if you if you just really quickly take a step back um when things get more complex there are tools out there in the market that can help oversimplify things and really help you follow the flow of funds um when they are in a digital format if you will so um that was really it I didn't want to go too deep I just wanted to kind of again thank you all for for allowing us to participate as a partner here um and with that Julie I will turn things over to you um and move on to the next slide. Awesome thank you so much Yucine such a quick but thorough um overview of what we do at chain analysis so super excited like Yucine said to be part of this initiative um this year my name is Julie Montrose and I lead university recruiting at chain analysis since we are um a newly formed startup since we've been around since 2014 we've actually just started our first official interim program this past summer with a cohort of 17 students and hopefully we'll be expanding to um other areas where we operate in the near future so um this is really an awesome gateway for us to get a little bit of the taste of the talent that's available um on the african continent so um with that we noticed that there was a skills gap when recruiting students um coming into the crypto and blockchain space and um we wanted to launch an initiative that allowed students to get um equipped with blockchain and crypto fundamentals and we launched something called crypto capstone crypto capstone is a four-day virtual session that teaches students all about blockchain crypto um alternate coins block explorers so all kinds of really good stuff to help you um get a little bit more emerged in the space and this is a free student opportunity where you get to attend a four-day virtual session with chain analysis and at the end have an opportunity to sit for your cryptocurrency fundamentals examination which will grant you a certificate that you can post on your linkedin page and use on your resume and um many of the students know here you need a lot of good content to talk about in interviews and this is um another reason why you should um participate in this certificate program so we launched this uh cohort back in may and we're going to run another cohort this coming january because we've had so much awesome feedback and it's been such a success to help us pipeline students for our upcoming opportunities and spread the um the and close the knowledge gap in the near future so um some of the winners from this competition will get um a chance to participate in our next cohort in january we're super super psyched about that not only will you have a chance to get your certificate but you'll also get to meet um employees across chain analysis and learn about the different careers that they have here and then um you'll get chain analysis swag we're going to send everybody an awesome water bottle and then last but not least we do give away two one thousand dollar scholarships so two students from the cohort um will have a chance to randomly win one of those scholarships um so yeah that's a little bit about crypto capstone like i said we're excited to include students that are winners from this competition but more more information on that um gloria will share with in a moment so glory back to you okay thank you very much uh yesine and jolly that sounds really great i have no idea what crypto capstone is all about but i'm pretty sure it's going to be very exciting for our participants who are actually maybe professionals or interested in this field okay so i think we are going to move on to our presentation of awards to our top three top three teams uh joshua we're coming back to you because our top three teams need to have something at the end of the day so what are they going back home with sorry i'm getting sorry here um so yeah the top three teams uh because it is um uh quite a few people i think it's almost 15 or so um d4 science was trying to think about what what we could give people who already had a pretty high skill level because they won the ctf um so something that would be interesting for them but that we could also give to a lot of people um so we tried to um uh what we found was um probably try hack me or not probably probably we found try hack me certificates that way um people can i'm sure everyone who's who's on the top team has probably heard of try hack me before and probably used it quite a bit they have um beginner through super advanced um uh security and digital forensics like challenges that are available so i think everyone who actually does the ctf enjoys challenges and i think that try hack me probably fits them the best for that so um the top three teams are going to get uh try hack me certificates so watch out for that um and also um i'll just i'll just add it here the top um 10 on uh teams and individuals will all get uh digital badges so that way people can put it on their social media and actually say that they have achieved something amazing out of a thousand people you were the top 10 so um great great job on that so you'll get the badges and top teams will get the uh try hack me um certificates so thank you so much okay thank you very much Joshua that sounds really exciting and uh i wanted a top three to come in those who want the competition just wanted them to come in and tell us about the experience in the competition and what they and how they aim to move forward after this competition so i think i'm just going to give them the floor to do that and i think we're going to start with uh save uh save can you turn on your mic and your camera and you know we have two minutes so you know wow us hi save you hear me yes we can hear you okay so first start with competition okay uh this year was really great okay uh but um what i didn't like uh most of it was uh the brute forcing challenge that's all but i like i like too much and uh that it is connected together the whole case is connected together that's it okay so if thank you i wanted to actually this bit about the the prize that you're going to be receiving from chain analysis how do you feel about it do you think it's something that is going to be a plus to you and to your career uh again uh about the the award the the capstone that you're going to be receiving from chain analysis uh what do you think about it do you think it's something that is going to be another uh bonus to you a plus to your career yeah i think it would be great okay so we we hope you have a great time participating in that uh in the capstone thank you very much save uh we're going to take in mamadu now mamadu hi can you turn on your camera and your mic hello hi mamadu hi hi everyone thank you very much for joining us uh thank you uh first of all thank you for uh for for the un dc and for everyone uh to to uh to organize such such cgf it was very interested and thank you joshua again for for your page on youtube and we don't know a lot of with with uh with that one and it was very interesting uh ctf and i um i learned a lot and i think it will be a plus in my career i'm kuta i'm from moritanya and we don't have much uh a lot of uh i would say people who work in the cyber in cyber security so i think it will be very great for my career and thank you again thank you very much mamadu uh we were supposed to take shakshakshakut i can't see him is he here can you turn on your camera and your mic if you're here i can't i can't tell if you're here i can't see your name okay so because i saw him earlier but i maybe he dropped off or something uh anyway i think okay still not here okay i i think we're going to move on we are we're ahead of time we're supposed to be here for 30 minutes and we still have like six minutes left on our time which is uh i'm pushing now if i can say goshua do you want to say something i see you with your hands oh okay yeah yeah i had something real quick i just um you know i've seen everyone from their screen name for a really long time so it's super interesting to see their faces i like um yeah it's really cool it's nice to nice to finally see you guys so i think we're going to ask everyone to turn on their camera just so we take a screenshot of uh of it and i think we're going to put them on social media so can everyone turn on their camera say if mamadu lassisi everyone joining us i don't know why she could decided not to join us but hey thank you for saying everybody hello juniors hi it is so nice to see everybody's faces okay i think we're going to take a screenshot real fast okay ready is everyone ready big smiles big smiles say cheese thank you very much so i think we have uh taken the picture we want to thank everyone for joining us it's quite unfortunate that she actually couldn't be here to you know give us this opinion about the competition gloria coming he's trying to join right now i think he's trying to join right now do you see him not really if you see him can you let him in yeah you can see him okay yeah he is he's finally joined us thank you i think you fell out there for a while but thank you very much for coming back yeah i have some issue in my connection i'm actually on on vacation but i want i want to thank you and i really enjoyed and learned a lot of this it was my my first four and six years and it was cool thank you okay thank you very much uh shea good it was it was a pleasure to have you too i was so happy that you enjoyed it and that you you loved it and we hope to see you guys next year too if it's possible tell your friends let them join we need to have more people join the competition we want to see more people come on show that aprica has this great talents here that they can show to the world so we'll love that for next year we're waiting to see every one of you i hope you have a great time participating in your channel as it's capstone and for the team is participants participating in the hack it and have me competition so come in i'm going to pass over to you to uh to close the ceremony thank you glorie and thank you all for joining whether you're on vacation or you have challenging connection i too am on leave as well right now but this was such an important event that i wanted to be here too to see you all and to really extend my sincere congratulations i cannot tell you how exciting it is for our program to really be able to highlight the talent that is in africa i think that a lot of times this is not something that the media says and that you hear around the world but we are trying to highlight the work that you guys do because it is truly amazing and i know i joshua and i talked about making this year's competition a little more challenging a little harder a little bit more complex and i'm happy to hear that you all enjoyed a little bit more of the complexity about that and and we're able to really learn something from it chain analysis our partners there we are so gracious to have you be on board with us on this activity and to again further highlight the talent that is in africa i you guys i hope you enjoy the capstone come back to us tell us about it tell us what you did tell us how this is helping you because we want to do more of it and the more you tell us the more we can probably do so we're going to hold another ctf next year so be sure to keep your eyes out we want to see you bringing in new people we want to hit 2000 participants or more next year that's a little talent um but really i'm i really want to just send my sincere congratulations to all of you you are the future of africa and we are really happy to help continue to support you and to try to show your talents across the globe so have a lovely day everybody enjoy your prizes that you get the digital badges and also the participation participation and the different trainings and we'll see you next year i just wanted to close with a round of applause for all everyone yes everyone who participated thank you and we wish you all the best bye bye everybody bye thank you be the best bye


Coming to you from RGIS Studios, I am Anisia Antoine and this is your Mayday News Brief. The new Larry Shoe's Road is approximately 95% complete with current paving of the finished surface as part of the final phase. The project consisted construction of 1.6km of road, dual carriageway construction, construction of drainage systems and utility transfer work. Federal experts from the Department of Infrastructure were on site recently for a first-hand update and assessment of progress. Permanent Secretary Mr. Ivor Daniel says from all indications, the newly completed paved surfaces as well as other aspects of construction appears to be up to standard. It is scheduled for completion within four weeks. Dialysis services offered to renal patients in the south of the island is expected to be enhanced as the St. Jude Hospital recently installed three new states of the at-dialysis machine. Chairman of the St. Jude Hospital Board, Wayne Harrow, says that he is very pleased that the dialysis machines will assist the hospital in facilitating kidney patients amid the increasing numbers. The St. Jude Hospital now has a total of nine dialysis machines available to the public. The St. Lucia Bureau of Standards has launched a committee to spare head and participate in work on the adoption of international standards for cannabis. This committee brings together representatives of educational and research institutions, states and non-state actors. Representative of the Cannabis Movement of St. Lucia, Randall Bain, said that the move provided comfort that there will be structure when St. Lucia is ready to get on board the cannabis train. The committee is expected to meet four times annually to review the standards for development that are under the work plan. The Department of Sustainable Development, through the increased St. Lucia's capacity to monitor multilateral environmental agreements, implementation and sustainable development project, continues to build the competence of the public and private sector to facilitate the coordination of environmental information. A training workshop recently concluded sought to further greater institutional, systemic and individual level understanding of environmental issues among non-governmental stakeholders. This has been your media news brief. Thank you for watching.


Hello. My name is Hunter Thompson. I'm the director of telecommunications with the public service department. We are here at the third public input session for the public comment draft of the 2024 10 year telecom plan. So as a brief overview, this meeting, how this meeting will go is that we'll get started. Alex will briefly go over a slide deck which describes the 2024 10 year telecom plan. And then we will open up the session for public comment. Just as a reminder, this session is to solicit comment and is not necessarily a conversational piece. So we will take all the comments we get, whether verbal or written and respond to them in the final draft of the 2024 10 year telecom plan. Just so folks know at five o'clock recording was started on this meeting. So you are being recorded. And I think with that, we can get started. If you're all set, Alex, thank you for covering again. Appreciate it. All good. No problem. Can everyone hear me okay? Yes. Great. So thank you, Hunter. My name is Alex Kelly. I lead the broadband team at rural innovation strategies Inc. We're one of the contractors who've been helping the public service department with this plan. Just as a reminder, this presentation is not a note for note rendition of the plan. The plan is quite lengthy and detailed. So this presentation is simply meant to draw people's memories or or help frame the conversation, but encourage anyone who wants to make a comment to refer to the original text for specifics. If you have questions. Another note before we begin is that if you have your comments in writing, please do submit those in writing as well because that will help us with the transcript that we're producing at the same time. Harley, you can go to the next slide. So I'm going to start by giving a little context about the 2024 plan, why this plan is different, what the landscape is that this plan has been created in response to. I'm then going to go into some of the research and analysis that was done to support the plan, the findings and recommendations. Then I'll review some of the findings and recommendations in the categories listed on the screen. So findings and recommendations about wire line coverage, my wireless coverage, affordability, public safety and Vermont statute. So the 10 year plan as it is every year is guided by two pieces of stat. It's got by multiple pieces of statute. Primarily, it is created to advance the telecommunications goals listed in 30 VSA 202C. And it is also created using a process that's established by statute and that can be found in 202D. At this moment in time, the state of Vermont has had access to significant federal resources for connectivity and in particular last mile broadband deployment. That's through the American Rescue Plan Act Capital Projects Fund and now be the broadband equity access and deployment resources. Those resources are attached to a federal planning process dictated by federal statute and operationalized by the NTIA that has meant that in parallel to the creation of this plan, the Vermont Community Broadband Board has been leading a simultaneous plan to lay out how those resources will be applied to last mile broadband. Because of all that work happening in parallel and because this plan can't supersede that federally required plan in certain areas, this plan that I'm about to talk about addresses all the statutory requirements but places a special focus on some of the elements that are not being addressed simultaneously by that work happening over at the Vermont Community Broadband Board. Next slide please. Great. So here is the summary of some of the qualitative and quantitative research that underpins the plan. First of all, we did a phone survey, both landline and cellular numbers of a statistically significant sampling of residents. Some of the results of that phone survey are sprinkled into this presentation but I encourage people to look at the results in its entirety in the actual document. We also did online surveys of Vermont businesses, healthcare professionals, and public safety professionals. We did interviews with over 55 public and private stakeholders and we did a statewide mobile engineering, mobile wireless engineering and coverage analysis to look at where the gaps in mobile broadband, how have they changed over time, what will it take to close them moving forward. And we also did use an input output methodology to assess the gaps in our current broadband construction workforce. What this basically is is an analysis of based on the anticipated level of spending that will need to happen in the state to build all the broadband we want to build. How does the workforce need to grow in order to meet the construction demand? Great. First of all, addressing fiber coverage. I think this is probably obvious to everyone listening in. The fiber coverage is expanding rapidly as we speak in all corners of the state. Nevertheless, through our conversations and analysis, we did identify some small challenges that include some of the challenges listed on the slide. But just to kind of go over the statistics, the houses with access to 100 meg symmetrical, more than doubled between 21 and 23. And as everyone knows, Vermont's goal is to pass all on-grid premises with 100 over 100 service. And at this point in time, Vermont is on track to meet that goal by 2029. We also found that Vermont needs to grow its broadband construction workforce. That sector shrunk between 2018 and 2022 isn't right before all this construction kicked off due to kind of natural contractions in the industry and certain technological advancements that allowed these ISPs to operate with fewer workers. Anyways, long story short, if we need to build $700 million of fiber deployments over the next five years, that will require growing our workforce by about 750 workers. Now, a lot of those workers are in the direct installation roles, line workers and so forth. But our analysis encompasses the top 12 occupations that need to apply themselves to broadband construction projects. So, another finding is that as part of utility hardening exercises, a number of fiber infrastructure owners may need to bury portions of their network within the next 10 to 15 years. And infrastructure owners are not as clear as they would like to be on how that will be operationalized, who pays for what. And that information is important to be looking at now because the business plans and the viability of entities receiving grant money now need to have those costs and responsibilities incorporated into their business plans now because of how utility business plans work in order for us to be very clear and confident with how we are building our networks. Another finding is that the Agency of Transportation, which was issuing right-of-way permit waivers for a number of years, has recently stopped doing that. And what that essentially does is it increases the cost of deployment in unserved areas with those extra permitting fees for people who are bringing broadband to the very financially difficult to reach places that are very rural in our state. So in the mobile wireless department, you know, stakeholders were very adamant and very vocal about how critical that service is across a number of sectors and usage. And I think that the headline is that our analysis found that coverage has not expanded very much over the past five years. And that's based on comparisons of drive tests in 2018 and 2022, I believe it was. So digging into the details here, 80 percent of businesses surveyed indicated that Vermont's mobile wireless coverage is inadequate for their business needs for a number of reasons related to how they need to communicate with their employees, to how their customers find them, and how their customers communicate with the business. 64 percent of people surveyed in our phone survey agreed that the state should use public funds to improve mobile wireless coverage. So a clear majority there. We also found that even though coverage has not expanded much, minimal improvements in the actual geographic area that is covered by mobile wireless download speeds have increased by quite a bit. And that's due to technology upgrades primarily. And if you look at the state as a whole, approximately 412 miles of road do not have mobile broadband coverage from any provider. So looking at all the providers that were included in the road test. Lastly, and this is a really important piece, our engineering analysis showed that, you know, if you look at all the unserved places, tackling the easiest to serve areas without wireless coverage can be done very efficiently with what we are calling small wireless facilities. So a traditional tower, a cell phone tower, you might say, is usually around 140 feet. Small wireless facilities that are 50 feet essentially placed very strategically can be an efficient way to close the easiest half of our broadband, mobile wireless broadband gaps, especially with increasing fiber presence across the state. Now you still need, you may need those big towers to efficiently close the hardest 50%, but due to our topography and actually due to the curvature of the earth and the way that coverage, you know, you get more incremental gains the higher you get at a certain point. Our analysis showed that these small wireless facilities can actually efficiently close the easiest to close mobile wireless gaps. So affordability is a big concern in the state. Many, many stakeholders wanted to talk about that with us. And one of the big things on everyone's mind is that the affordable connectivity program known as the ACP, which is a $30 a month subsidy provided by the federal government is expiring. And it looks to be expiring next month at the end of April according to predictions of when that funding is going to run out. So that program also importantly only offers a subsidy for either mobile or fixed service, but not both. So once that expires, approximately 24,000 Vermont households are going to lose that $30 a month subsidy that's helping them with their connectivity bills. There's some interesting crosstabs about who in particular that impacts, but you know, as a whole 24,000 low income Vermont households are going to have a harder time paying for their broadband after April. And just as an example of the importance of continuous connectivity, healthcare workers in particular spoke very eloquently about how important mobile coverage is that's both available and affordable to unhoused Vermonters because that is a lifeline to services. And it's the by far the best way and most reliable way for service providers like healthcare workers to be able to contact their clients and make sure they're knowing their appointments are nowhere to go are on time and just their connection to care really relies on mobile coverage and access to a device. So in the public safety realm, there was a lot of ink used in the plan to discuss the potential to consolidate public safety answering points. And this was because various legislators have been discussing this idea. So we spent a good amount of time talking about the advantages and disadvantages to taking that approach. In across New England, some states have consolidated their PSAPs to some degree, some states have not. The advantages include, you know, well, first of all, potential long term cost savings, which is one of I think the primary drivers of wanting to consider this, but there's some staffing flexibility benefits. There's different ways that you improve coverage 24 seven with that consolidation. There might be more resources for statewide emergencies as well. But there are also some challenges or potentially disadvantages to this. So there's different governance systems and processes that you need to implement. There's a upfront cost to that system migration that you would need to understand and cover. There's different issues with, you know, centralizing things means that you don't have as many people from different corners of the state answering calls. And of course, you just as part of new systems, you need new resendancy and new failover processes as you establish those new a new framework there. So other than that, you know, most public safety stakeholders cited funding as some of the primary barriers to completing their goals. For example, the goals and statewide communication interoperability plan. And then we also took a look at FirstNet. And according to our conversations and analysis, there have been 50 FirstNet sites deployed. And FirstNet is the program with AT&T that provides dedicated network access to public safety and first responders. You know, some of those 50 sites have been new builds. Many of them have been upgrades with new technology to existing tower sites. So despite the 50 FirstNet sites in the state, it is well worth noting that only 5% of public safety survey respondents reported never losing mobile service in the job. So clearly, we have a long way to go. Lastly on the next slide, Harley. We at the request of the JITOC committee, we did an analysis of some of the statutes governing telecommunications. And our conclusion is that they could be more specific and better aligned with current state strategy in a few critical areas. Number one, you know, broadband speed definitions and minimum deployment parameters are starting to lag behind other states and they're not fully aligned across different elements of statute. Another example that we call it on the plan is that the statutorily mandated end date for the Vermont Community Broadband Board is likely to occur before all of the bead program activities will be completed. And again, they're overseeing the bead program in the state, especially some of the enforcement and auditing that needs to happen after construction was over to make sure everyone built exactly where they said they were going to build and are offering the services that they said they were going to offer and so forth. And then in general, the statutory goals, some of which were drafted almost 40 years ago, contain overlapping in non-specific language that at this point, given the telecommunications landscape and the strategies the state is taking on could be much more refined to really make sure that all telecommunications stakeholders are aligned and rowing in the same direction as they do their work. Moving on to the next slide. Sorry, Harley, can you pop over to the next slide? Oh, great. Awesome. So, you know, again, I'm going to go through the same categories that I went through when talking about our analysis and findings. So, first, talk a little bit about wireline deployment. As I mentioned, it's ongoing. There are very specific rules and parameters that the state needs to follow dictated by their attachments, writing on the funding that we received from the federal government from the NTIA. However, there's a couple things in here that we noted that could make those deployments easier. First of all, if the agency of transportation would reinstate their permit fee waivers, at least until the state achieves its goal of 100 over 100 meg symmetrical broadband, that would alleviate a cost that the entities trying to build broadband in the hardest to serve areas and most expensive areas would have to pay. So that seems like an easy lift to make things better and more achievable. Number two, I mentioned the need to grow the broadband construction workforce by about 750 workers across a number of job categories. Vermont has some training programs they've implemented with a number of entities working in collaboration, but we encourage those entities and recommend that those entities really work as hard as they can to scale those programs to the size of workforce that we need. And so, as I mentioned, 750 jobs across a number of categories, and given the challenges of broadband, the broadband trades, essentially, you often need to set a goal to recruit three times as many workers in those categories as you think you need because of the natural turnover that happens in the industry. It's hard work after all, and retirements and so forth. So our recommendation is to aim high with that. And then lastly, on this point about the possibility that infrastructure owners will need to pay for the burying of their infrastructure in the next 10 to 15 years, the state of Vermont, and particularly the VCBB, is in a good position to lead a study that works towards resolution on that front. And so what this would involve is documenting and understanding the process that's going to happen, who's going to pay for what, the potential impact to the financials of all the entities who own fiber, but more importantly providing a kind of centralized view of opportunities for savings and alignment. And so how do you align the work that needs to happen on the telecommunications side with the electric infrastructure side to try to create as frictionless and efficient of a process of doing that as possible? So on the mobile wireless side, a recommendation, a primary recommendation centers around implementing what we're calling a small facilities wireless grant program. And we think the state should implement it in a kind of pilot phase at first, for some reasons that I will get into. So this grant program would provide grants for the deployment of, again, small wireless facilities, and these are the ones that we believe are equally if not more efficient from a financial standpoint into closing the easiest 50% of coverage gaps to close. And they also preserve the landscape and the aesthetic by being less obtrusive, smaller, right? You can nestle them into the hillside and they don't, they're not as noticeable an element in the landscape. So we think two to $3 million is the right amount for initial pilot program. And in the plan, we provided a list of data that we think the state should collect as part of this pilot program in order to then refine that work moving forward. And data includes everything from costs broken down by different category to what partnerships are coming together, where are the most viable places to build, where you get applications, who's applying. And so all of this will help the state refine this program and do it better in the future. So the second big recommendation in this category is we made some recommendations around the state's data collection practices, which we think if the state were able to make these changes, it will strengthen the planning abilities, while at the same time helping them better measure and track progress against our goal of increasing the mobile coverage in the state. So the drive test in 2018 versus 2022 was done using a different methodology. Obviously, we're recommending repeating the 2022 methodology so that you have exactly the same data to compare it to, do the drive test every two years. We laid out a number of very specific parameters for what a crowdsourced drive test would look like, especially if the state would like to be able to collect data for all roads, not just the primary roads that the drive test covers. Another element to this is we think the state should request that 248A permit recipients notify the public service department when they complete their tower builds, because at this point, it is not always obvious or clear to the state if those permitees, I guess, if and when they execute on the permit they've obtained. On the affordability front, we are recommending that the state, first of all, work on affordability for both wire line and wireless service. So whereas the federal ACP program was a one or the other element, based on all of our stakeholder interviews and really profound contributions across the public and private sector, we are very sure that Vermont stakeholders see these two types of services as equally important. And so acknowledging that importance means working on affordability for both at once rather than one or the other. Our recommendation for a benchmark and a way to measure is that we believe that 2% of monthly income should be the definition of affordable for low income Vermonters. We've got kind of charts and documentation in the plan about what that actually means. But ultimately, we think a state runs based on the typical cost of those services and our benchmark for affordability, we think that a state runs subsidy program that provides $67 a month to low income Vermonters, again for both of those services, is the right is the right level to address the affordability concern for both types of subscriptions. And then lastly, as an auxiliary piece to that, especially for unhoused Vermonters and the importance of continuous access to mobile coverage, we think that the state should establish a program to provide fully subsidized devices and subscriptions to those Vermonters and work through human services providers, just again to ensure that everyone who everyone who doesn't have a home in Vermont has continuous access to services. So on the on the community emergency communication systems front, you know, I think the state our recommendation is this that the state really take a look at what elements of our communications needs are available, have have federal grants available to support them and what don't. And it is a funding barrier, as I mentioned to a number of the goals in the statewide communications interoperability plan. So, so, you know, that's one of our primary recommendations on that front. But I think the again, the kind of marquee piece in this plan on the emergency communications front is about the possibility of consolidating public safety answering points. And so I think that the plan says that if as all the stakeholders read and absorb the analysis we provided in the plan, if this still remains a consideration that the state wants to pursue again, some peer states have done it, some have not, there's trade-offs in both directions. Right. The next step is to actually create a consolidation plan and that plan should have specific costs and consolidation in Vermont's particular context, weight against the long-term savings. And that is a large undertaking. This recommendation is not made lightly because it is a big lift. But that would be the next step if the state stakeholders who read our analysis of the advantages and disadvantages believe that that it is appropriate to move forward with that in the state of Vermont. Great. On the statutory front, you know, I think this is an anticipated recommendation, at least at the legislature, who knows that the statutes need to be revisited. But a summary of this recommendation is that the state should modernize the statutes that guide our telecommunications policies and practices. There's a few ways in which statutory goals in different sections need to be made more specific. Again, they're overlapping and unspecific. We could make them more specific. They should be aligned with X-71 and speed tiers and everything else across all of our telecommunication statutes should be cohesive. We do recommend extending the Vermont Community Broadband Board's sunset date so that they can provide adequate oversight and monitoring of B-deployments. And we also are recommending that the legislators take a look at the statutory goals and take a look at our deployment strategies and make sure we are creating goals and deployment strategies in concert. You know, one example, we are spending significant resources, as we should be to ensure that in the most rural areas of the state, everyone has access to a fiber provider at 100 over 100 megs. Those are very, very difficult places to serve with even one provider. And so, you know, there's a state goal of increasing competition in the state, which is an appropriate goal. But what that goal is getting at is that we would like some of the byproducts of competition, better speeds, lower service, better customer service. Those are benefits and values that can, but don't always arrive in under a competitive environment. But that's really what we're driving for. And so, our hypothesis or what we're laying forth for the legislature is, do you want to be setting a goal of competition for competition's sake? Which, again, gets very, very expensive when there isn't even enough economic base to support one provider, much less multiple, or what you actually care about some of these things that are potential byproducts of competition? And if so, is that a better framework for the goal? And so, we're just prompting the legislature to think about some of these questions as they iterate on and modernize the statutes, which again, should reflect the legislature's goals for the state. Thank you all very much. And I believe now we are going to go into public comments. And if you could please keep your comments civil and start with three minutes till we get everyone, then we may come back to you if there's more time. That would be great. Thank you, Alex. So as Alex said, we'll open the meeting to public comments. We'll start with anyone on the phone. Have a comment. If not, we will go to the room. They can unmute and or raise their hand. No, we don't have to do that. It doesn't look like we have anyone on the phone. So Mr. Whitaker. Steve Whitaker from up there. I'm a bit dumbfounded that even after having provided the information a week ago about the Department of Public Safety and the Public Safety Communications Task Force efforts, that this presentation is still so misguided specifically regarding the consolidation of PSAPs. I'm going to cover a number of points here and I'll probably run over three minutes. So if you notice anybody else jump on, I'll take a pause. Statute is statute 202 C and D in Title 30 are not to be wished away because we're trying to get away with writing half a plan or impose a new ideology on Vermonters. So found your transcript kind of useless. So statute is statute Act 71 is not a binding factor on or it's not a notwithstanding clause that allows you to violate 202 D with regard to how you go about this plan. If you've you can't even the department in the telecommunications division cannot advocate its responsibility to make sure 202 D is adhered to strictly even though you've signed a $400,000 contract with Reece, which I consider snake oil. They failed us last time. They're failing us this time and we need to put a stop to it. Every prerequisite as laid out into 202 D must be met before the plan is prepared and these hearings are held. I pointed out to you a handful of prerequisites that have not been met. I've seen Hunter nodding in agreement. Every element such as public participation an effective public participation process must be met. Coordination with the access media organizations must be met. Are you not at all suspicious that only one person showed up last Monday and only one person appears to be here tonight? That you haven't met your basic threshold of an effective public participation process? And you must address every element it set in the goals and policies of 202 C. Those aren't optional where it says shall support competitive choice for consumers shall support open access for competitors. These are not things you can let your contractor try to wish away and write a plan that dodges them and pretends we're going to just get lower costs and higher service by wishing it were so. That's delusional thinking. Statute actually says that we'll have 100 by 2024 and yet the failure to write a plan over the last decade has left us in a place where we still don't have a plan to get it done by the end of this year. So our fiber strategy is fundamentally flawed and yet it's also been left out of the plant this draft. The CUDs aren't even happy with this draft because it's all focused on, you know, wireless and other priorities that don't address the merits or the guidance or the retuning of the fiber strategy. In recent, since this program was initiated, build costs have increased dramatically as has have labor costs as has the cost of money. Additionally, the CUDs have not built the right of way charges into their economic models.  That would be a supreme disaster and yet y'all are keep supporting this keeping of unnecessary secrets of the financial models. This keeps dying out or is that a screen keeps going black? I've been looking at you. I'll wash the screen now. Only if you can read sorry language. The secret financial models will not lead to affordable broadband. We need a network design over overall the whole state and this was defeated by the language was put at act 71 to allow a unified statewide resilient engineer fiber design and the broadband board ignored and proceeded with this hodge podge of different strategies of non network architectures that don't support competition that don't support failover in resilience. So we need remotely reconfigurable. We could have and should have built on the Velco architecture and required every CUD to buy a compatible remote add drop multiplexer that can be even managed by Velco and keep and reroute around fiber breaks during big storms all from a single console in Rutland. That would have been the most affordable way to go about this. But the backhaul trunking in place on an existing networks. We need to be using first lights fiber CCIs fiber. We have open access conditions on some of first lights fiber because we granted the money to sovereign that in the beginning. That has never been a lab elaborated or elucidated in the plan exactly where do we have what rights of access at what cost to sovereign that's fiber that we paid for under the B top program. Similarly with consolidated communications as a condition of a service quality investigation they accepted millions from the FCC and they built the interoffice fiber of the remote terminals. We should have open access to that fiber too before they get another incentive rate plan approved. And this same firm recommended oh don't tie open access fiber to your inside of right plans. That's the only lever we have with regards to incentive rate plans is the teeth in this telecommunications plan. I would encourage you to get familiar with 226 B in title 30 and understand that this plan's most effective statutory leverage is in no incentive rate plan can be adopted or approved by the public utilities commission if it's not found to be consistent with this plan. So that's a way that we could have and should have implemented open access to the interoffice fiber that was paid for by that settlement. There's been some talk of carrier grade there's some analysis which is useful and then you have Evan Carlson who was here for the FOA TCAB meeting saying that we're all building carrier grade and FX saying we've been at 13 years and we're nowhere close to providing carrier grade. So you've got to disconnect there but public safety grade carrier grade utility grade the distribution utilities are implementing an architecture of distributed storage is distributed generation big battery containers and solar fields and wind turbines that can be accessed and access the grid and even fail into micro grids to keep folks online when the whole regional grid might go down. That can't be done with consumer grade fiber designed for you know that that requires a level of engineering that we have failed to do here and we can't afford to waste this money and do a half-baked job. So we need an integrated planning process. It's going to be challenging to change paths at this date but we must we must if we're not going to waste this money end up with the job half done. We need integration of dense wave division multiplexing building off of the Velco network. We need active fiber ethernet we of course need internet that's what we're seem to be fixated on. We need fixed wireless access. It's not going to be economical for the Northeast Kingdom and many other areas to do you know an extra mile of fiber to serve one address. You know it will never pay itself back. If everywhere that fixed wireless access can provide a final or replace a fiber drop it'll leave more money to get the job done in the more dense areas. We need neutral host LTE to fill the dead zones and to provide public safety failover when first net fails again. We need a failure failure analysis. We've had fiber cuts I believe three in my memory in recent years that took down all the state systems and yet there's no analysis of that what caused it or how to prevent it in the future in this plan in this draft. We need an analysis of cloud hosting our state government home system our zoom and teams video platforms our Cisco video platforms are all hosted on out of state cloud servers that will not be functional after a big storm and a lot of backhaul is taken down. So what state applications are dependent on remote cloud and what needs to be hosted on in-state cloud so to in order to support restore from a disaster. GMP underground there's let's can't mention of that. GMP has begun and done a few pilot projects of a underground burial of power cables. It's called a vibratory plow and it can bring four tubes at once vary four tubes at once in one pass repacking over the top four feet deep. That's typically going to be three phases of AC current and a second conduit for that can be used for communications. That begs the question which communications carrier is going to get in there first or are we going to insist that that be a neutral host top neutral host platform that any carrier can ride in those spans. This is urgent because once those ditches are open and closed we're not going back to redig them in the same place and that machine can only reach so far off the road. There needs to be statutory authority to constrain what municipal officials can make unrealistic expectations of how far off the road they're asking the vibratory plow to go. So the machine can't reach 20 feet off the road so if we're going to do this who's going to pay for settling later if as this ditch settles and culverts or whatever need to be fine tuned. Is that the electric grade payers? Is that our green mountain powers? Is it on the fiber conduit? Is it on the contractor? These things need to be addressed or we will have another huge missed opportunity to not get. I'm especially concerned with getting buried cable up to the mountaintops where our emergency communications are located already or will additionally be located because we can't afford to have a windstorm or an ice storm tear down our backhaul to our emergency radio systems. So the pole-owning utility should be building and maintaining the fiber including repair obligations. That's the only economical way to take maximum advantage to adhere to the open access statutory requirement. I mean have y'all not called your contractor on the absurdity of ignoring the open access requirement that's in statute and pretending oh we'll just fix that with changes at the statute later? Are you really thinking of allowing BC to get away with that? You can't have written a contract that allows that. The contract says you will adhere to the statute and are you just overlooking that? That's smoke and mirrors. Anybody new need to talk? No, it's still you Stephen. So we need to rethink our design and pursue a statewide integrated design. We need to address the secrecy of CUDs and what is legitimately critical infrastructure, what is legitimately security sensitive and what is legitimately trade secret and everything else should be public. Again that information analysis is missing. So again the integrated planning is required now with Green Mountain Power, First Light, CCI, VTEL, the CUDs, Velco and Lumen. I know AT&T still has a few strands of fiber from the old days. I'm not sure if we would try to get on any of that. The neutral host LTE infill strategy is going to require spectrum, it's going to require towers, it's going to require engineering and maintenance expertise, it's going to require billing, it's going to require roaming agreements.  We will not see success and this has to be totally integrated with the work that Mission Critical Partners is doing for the Public Safety Communications Task Force. You really need to get up to speed and get, again I don't have any illusion that we're going to be able to turn this sows ear into a silk purse by June. I think we're going to need to postpone the adoption of this plan for another year and figure out what team is going to clean up the mess after Reece fumbled it for a second iteration and $600,000 of public money later or go after a return of some of that. You need to get busy with the prerequisites for a plan and the AMO coordination to get the public involved to participate in this. You can't just run on and pretend you're going to get away with carrying on a charade of a statutory required process and implement this plan. Thank you. Thank you very much. Do you still have still have 13 minutes left? Comments. Okay go ahead. Distance education, public meetings, statewide public meetings managed by the statewide channel that was part of the settlement with the access media organizations, prisoner visitation, courts, arrangements, etc. We need high quality sites for along the VIT model where the lighting, the microphones, the bandwidth, the speakers for people who are present in the room are all first rate. We cannot compromise the rights of prisoners. We cannot have the historical archive of our public meetings be unintelligible as some of these transcripts and as some of these recordings are based on insufficient attention to detail of where these people are trying to connect from. It may be that remote participation in legislative process or in these hearings should have to be at a certified site that has the proper lighting microphones and bandwidth to support proper participation and recording. Same with Distance Ed, the nursing program lumped everybody out when the colleges switched to Adobe platform. Literally more than half of the students flunked out. It just didn't work and so we're and now let's touch briefly on the wireless. The initiative that we did at the beginning of COVID throw a lot of wireless access points out there and and not check whether the back hall connectivity was sufficient to support any number of users at a time and then let that whole system atrophy. We should have planned that properly and strengthened it so that the next storm or disaster people know where they will be able to go and pick up some Wi-Fi if all of their home systems are down. Locating what's in the public right away needs to be a priority. Comcast has been hiding for years behind the fact that their amplifiers that power the nodes the green boxes this you know two foot cube boxes those when those lose power from a car accident or a meter getting smashed or whatever an entire section goes dead and no one can make a 911 call and that can't be allowed. We need to strengthen that network and as well as strengthen solutions for all point customers new and emerging current and emerging to have emergency calling access regardless of the grid status. I think those were the couple points I had forgotten. Thank you. Sure nobody wants to talk about why there's nobody here. We've got a cricket recording on there Aaron for us. I have doorbell recording. I'll make these meetings a little bit more interesting. Snacks. Snacks. I had fun. So I got all my kids sparring it. Snacks. Or Hill Farm Edward. I don't farm. It's their best selling IPA. What was the problem with the screen? I'm unsure. I came in earlier today when I was in the office and it was working. I don't know if it maybe needed to be rebooted if someone rebooted over the weekend. I know Friday they continued to have issues with it so it could have been a windows update and a windows updates happened last Tuesday statewide and that's caused other issues elsewhere. So it's hard to tell with this device. This device is this is the only thing it's used for. It's like the camera connected to it's not really a tablet because it doesn't really do anything except fill the needs connected to the TV. Well had it been a full VIT site with 50 people in the room we would have been we should have had used HP slices. The VIT doesn't exist anymore. Next Gen VIT exists on paper. Yeah the original was all run on TDM stuff. Not really obsolete near the end. So a few of those up. It was an interesting work for a company in this kingdom. Let me get some of that work. There's no reason they can't run on gigabit ethernet. That'd be broadcast quality and scale to stream governor statewide addresses and things like that. That would be a good chapter. That would be a fun chapter to write for your plan. Got all year to do it. It'll be interesting to see how the telecommunications division team can develop the courage and the integrity to either persuade the importer in Juneteria or go to the legislature of the governor directly and expose this farce this hoax. And we should go after Reese for some of the funds they've accrued without delivering specifically every count of the last plan that was not did not beat the statutory requirements for their contractual requirements. And similarly this time we can cut bait for 100,000 and have 300,000 to find another contractor. One of those rabbit ears in your cork bag. Oh I see you're streaming. It's a signal up to the college. It's like it's just not how to put it together. I think that's connected. But is it you don't know if it's using LTE or is it using the Wi-Fi and the building? Too unreliable. Yeah I was thinking of that three minutes ago. The broadcasts CAX and BTZ they have like a box multi-thousand dollar box or even tens of thousands with four or five LTE cards in it. So they're bonding together LTE data channels to get the bandwidth they need. It is 5.59 so we are going to wrap up the meeting in anticipation that it takes me roughly 60 seconds to get through this last piece. Thank you all for attending. Again if you have comments and you would like us to receive them in writing that makes it much easier. Otherwise we'll go through the transcript and we'll include your commentary in the final draft of the 10-year telecom report. I think that is about all we have. Any other comments before we close? Some reports will be planned. Thank you for your input Mr. Whitaker. All right thank you everyone for attending. Have a good evening. Bye bye. Bye everyone.