Welcome everyone to 5 Things You Didn't Know About TechSoup's Donation Programs. Thanks so much for joining us today for TechSoup's webinar. Before we get started I want to make sure everyone is comfortable using ReadyTalk, the platform you are joining us on today. You can chat in at any time to let us know if you have any technical issues, need help, or if you have questions for our presenters using the box on the lower left side of your screen. You don't need to bother with raising your hand. You can just chat in when you feel moved to do so, or if you feel like sharing any expertise or experience you may have with any of the information we are sharing, and we will share that back out with you, our participants. Like I said, you can chat in to ask any questions. We will keep all lines muted today so we get a clear recording for you to refer to at a later time. If you are hearing any echo play through your computer speakers you may be logged in more than once and will need to close any additional instances of ReadyTalk. You may also find that the slides and audio may not stay in sync, and if that is the case we recommend dialing in using the phone number that is toll free that Susan chatted out into the chat window for you already. We are recording today's webinar and you will be able to find it on techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. That is also where you can find a list of our upcoming webinars and you can also view them on our YouTube channel at Techsoup Video. Within a few days you will receive this full recording and the slides that we will be presenting today as well as any additional links that we want to share. You can tweet us at Techsoup or using the hashtag TSWebinars. My name is Becky Wiegand and I will be your host for today's event and presenting. I am the webinar program manager here at Techsoup. I have been with the organization now for 8.5 years and prior to that spent a decade working with small nonprofits in Washington, D.C. and in Oakland, California and was frequently the accidental techie and also a user of Techsoup services at all three of those organizations before joining the staff. We are also joined today by Catherine Svobodny who is a program manager at Techsoup managing the Techsoup Boost subscription program that we will hear about a little bit later. In addition to Boost she works to connect nonprofits with training and services to make sure they are getting the most out of their tech donations. She has experience working with a number of different nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay area and beyond. She is now in I believe Seattle area, Washington focusing on poverty and homelessness issues, economic development, and small business development. We will also hear from Cameron Jones who is the Vice President of Technology Solutions and Services here at Techsoup where she is responsible for the development of innovative solutions and services to better support the global nonprofit sector. And I will talk a little bit about Techsoup's reach in just a moment. This work includes managing global implementations of programs and initiatives with new business models such as Techsoup Boost that we just mentioned to bring more benefits to nonprofits and IT service and support to help nonprofits better adopt the technologies that they need to fulfill their missions. You will see on the back end Susan Hope Bard, Techsoup's training and education manager she will be on hand to help you with any issues and to flag your questions for our presenters as we go through the content. Our objectives for today we hope that you will come away from today's webinar with a better understanding of the Techsoup donation programs and resources that are available to you. In particular, we will be highlighting five things you didn't know about our programs today and we hope you will get even more than that out of it. We hope that you will come away having learned at least three different technology programs that are available to your organization and that you will have expanding your comfort that you will be more comfortable with accessing them through the Techsoup website. And we hope mostly that we will be able to answer your questions. So if you have questions about anything that Techsoup does, feel free to chat out to us and we will do our best to answer them today. I am going to just do a quick overview of Techsoup for those of you who may not be very familiar with us yet. But we mentioned that Cameron's role is helping with our global technology sharing and spreading. And every place that is blue on this map is where we are in the world, which is just about everywhere. We would love it if you would chat in to let us know from where you are joining today. And go ahead and just let us know. We are in the San Francisco Headquarters office here at Techsoup but we are working all over the world now to help build a dynamic bridge to enable civil society organizations and change agents around the world to access those resources that they need to make a more equitable planet. So thank you for joining us from wherever you are joining in the world today. If you are joining us from outside the United States, we recommend you visit Techsoup.global and selecting your country from the drop-down. The crux of today's content will primarily focus on the Techsoup.org website which is focused on the U.S.-based audience. So if you are joining us from outside the U.S., some of these programs may differ, some of them may not be available in your area. It really just depends on from where you are joining and what options are available to you in your local country or region. We have delivered technology products and donations and grants to NGOs to the tune of more than $5.4 billion to be. And so I'm like I said not only proud to be a staff person but also proud to have benefited from those programs myself as a small nonprofit. So I'm going to get started with the content at hand today. One thing that I wanted to highlight in particular is something that is what I consider a missed opportunity very often. Many of you are probably familiar with our donation programs or at least some of them. But most organizations go through the course of the year and don't maximize those donations. And by that I mean go through the year without realizing that they have only accessed one donation program or maybe two. And maybe they've only gotten one actual product and not 400 products that may be available to them. And so I wanted to just talk briefly about one, the types of organizations who can get technology donations in case you're new to us. It's nonprofits and public libraries with 501c3 status. It is public libraries within the IMLS database. So if you're listed in the IMLS, if you operate a friend of the library program or library foundation group, if you are a foundation, whether a big foundation, a community foundation, a family foundation, or whether you're a church or a house of worship, synagogue, mosque, with or without 501c3 status, we can often verify your status if you are part of a branch of churches or a diocese or what have you. These organizations are generally, well we should say qualified to access donations through TechSoup. Now all of our donation programs have different requirements and eligibility restrictions. So you may qualify for some – you may qualify to be a member of TechSoup depending on your org type. You may be eligible to only receive certain donations depending on what kind of work you do. So if your mission is a soup kitchen versus an animal shelter versus a save the watershed organization or a community foundation or historical society or an arts organization or a church, all of those may have different eligibility and different donations that they're able to receive through TechSoup's programs. But the reason I wanted to highlight this is that so many organizations are eligible for so many things that they don't realize that they actually can receive. So I wanted to quickly highlight a couple of things. Many folks are aware that we have a fiscal year end which for us is June 30th every year. And some of our donation programs reset. So that means that between July 1st and June 30th you can request a certain number of donations from that donor partner. So it's very tiny print. But you can see Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Autodesk, Bitdefender, BlackBod, lots of these programs in here reset. So these are ones that are affected by the fiscal year meaning that they reset every year. You can get a certain number of donations within that timeframe. That said, all of these other programs on this side which includes things like Box, Causebox, fundraising, Citrix, Dell, GrantStation, Microsoft, they are not beholden to the fiscal year. Which means you may be able to request donations anytime of the year. You might be able to request 10 times a year for some of these just depending on the different program requirements. And you may be able to request like for the example of Microsoft, you can request up to 50 licenses in a given group of products. So you could have 50 licenses of office and you could request those three or four or five times over the course of a year. You do have a maximum and they do have their requirements around how much you get in a given timeframe. But there is a two year calendar, not a one year calendar. And it's not set to July 1st to June 30th. So this is where I mentioned that you should really look into the details of these different programs and just be aware of how many programs there are. So if you are looking for help with developing your own learning management system because you want to deliver trainings, well there is a program called LitMost here. If you are looking for a web conferencing program, there are Citrix. You can run GoToWebinar, GoToMeeting, GoToTraining. These programs are all available to you whether you realize it or not. So the reason I mentioned that is because I think it is really important to take a moment and really study up what's on our site because there are tons of things that people don't realize are in here. And most organizations don't request their allotment of what they can get in the course of a year or in the course of a two year window. Some products will say you can only request one item in a given timeframe. Some will say you can have up to four, but most of the organizations don't actually do that. So I wanted to highlight that there are so many things available. And I want to go ahead really quickly and share my desktop because I would like to show one thing that I think is pretty great on TechSoup's website. Let me know in the chat window if you are not able to see the site. I am at TechSoup.org right now. There is this great tool if you are not aware of it already under Get Products and Services. If you scroll down to check your eligibility. This is a great tool whether you have already registered with TechSoup or not.  And I would agree with that sentiment to log in first. If you aren't already registered, you can complete the quiz without doing anything else. You can complete the quiz just to see what you may be eligible to request. But once I log in, I have a bunch of different test organizations in here. So I'm going to just select one of those. So if you request donations on behalf of more than one organization, it will ask you. But without having to even complete the quiz, I can see this organization is eligible to request donations from all of these. So if you are not sure what type of donations you can get through TechSoup, this I think is your number one stop. Come to this, Check Eligibility. Again, it's under Get Products. Down here, Check Your Eligibility. If you are already registered, you just pick your organization if you have more than one listed. If you don't, you'll just have it show up with the one organization that you represent. And you can see, oh okay, I'm eligible for Adobe and Adobe Cloud and Amazon Web Services and I'm eligible for Boost and I'm eligible for Bites of Learning. What's that? You can see what all of these are and then just click off to those pages to find all of those different donation programs and learn about them. So I think it's a terrific way to see the wide variety of products that you may not even know are available to you. Like, oh, I can get Dell stuff. I need new computers. Well, let me check that out. And we'll go over some of these other programs in detail as we highlight some other things we think you may not know as much about. But I wanted to highlight this as the first stop because I do think it's so important to recognize how much is available to you and to really look at what those restrictions are because there's probably a lot more that you can get than you may even realize. And so I'm going to jump back to the slides. And did we have any questions that have come in at this point? I don't think we have. Okay, good. So I'm going to continue. And I mentioned the Microsoft donation program a minute ago. I wanted to highlight a couple of things within the Microsoft program in particular because it is our biggest donation program. And this software assurance is I think one of the least utilized but most awesome things about the Microsoft donation program that I think is really not well understood and yet so, so valuable if you know how to use it. And it has a name that I just wish Microsoft could sexy up their names a little bit because software assurance is not super exciting sounding, but it actually comes with a whole slew of benefits. So those of you who are familiar with the Microsoft donation program you can find it at TechSoup.org slash Microsoft or just Microsoft Software Non-profits where we have a special landing page where you can get your donated Office, Windows, Windows Server, Office 365, all kinds of things. One thing that you may not be aware of is that almost all of the products through Microsoft's donation program with TechSoup with some few exceptions come with software assurance. What is it? Well, software assurance is this amazing benefit and I'll show it on screen in a moment too where if you get Office Professional Plus and here it doesn't say what year or what version it is, you just know it's the Professional Plus version, you get a whole bunch of benefits that the retail market pays hundreds of dollars extra to purchase along with their software.  And that allows you to do a number of things that you may want to do including if Microsoft comes out with a newer version of that product within a two-year time frame that you can upgrade for free, no cost. So you can have the latest, greatest version of that product within that two-year time frame and not have to pay anything. And you don't have to go through TechSoup again to do it. You can just go directly to where you got the software to begin with from Microsoft and just upgrade to the newest one. It's pretty great. It also allows you to downgrade. So if you have say Windows 10 and you need to backup a version to Windows 8 because maybe you have a piece of hardware or software that isn't compatible, you can downgrade. You can step back a version. It's usually only one version. So depending on what version is out there currently on the public market you can usually backup one version. And when I say backup I mean you can downgrade one version. So you can also get multi-language packs. So if you serve a community that has a lot of people who speak Vietnamese or Chinese or French or Spanish or German you can access the multi-language packs of these for no additional cost. There's also home use program which allows you to pay I think it's like $10 to be able to extend the license that you have on your office computer, the computer that your organization owns. It allows you to extend that license to use on a home machine so that you can do the same thing at home that you can do at the office. And this is all provided through Microsoft Philanthropies that they make these different donations including all of these cloud products available. And they're delivered through Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center which is where if you receive, if you request donated Microsoft products through TechSoup you would get an email that says okay your donations are ready, come here, here's where you get your license keys, here's where you download your software. And you can see here from the VLSC that's the short version of it that we've got these different screens where you can download, you can access your licenses. Well there's this tab for Software Assurance. And once you click into that you can access all kinds of things. So here I'll mention eLearning courses. They have free courses that come along with many, many of the products that you request. So say you have requested Microsoft Visio or Microsoft Project. Once you have that product through TechSoup and the Volume Licensing Service Center you can go into this eLearning application section under your Software Assurance and you can see what free trainings they have available so that you can train yourself on that product. And some of them are like 20 hours of videos on Microsoft Office for example if you want to learn all of the different Office applications. But those trainings are only available for the products you specifically receive. So I can't go and get trained on Visio if I don't actually have a license of Visio. But it's a great benefit and it costs you nothing in addition to your general request through TechSoup. Like I mentioned the Home Use Program, Office Multilanguage Pack, but all of these things are available. And they change, this is actually an older screenshot so it shows Windows 7 for example, but that's not actually in there any longer because that goes back too far. But these are the kinds of benefits you can activate. The Home Use Program, the eLearning, and it's not super user friendly from my experience to go in and click through. But it is there and you can get to it and it costs you nothing. So keep that in mind if you have requested Microsoft donations, look at when you did. You can go into your order history on the TechSoup site to view what you've requested in the past. And there is a Microsoft donation center where you can see your Microsoft donations and what the date is that you last requested that also determines the date that you can upgrade if they release a new version. So if you received Microsoft Office on July 3rd, 2016, you have until July 2nd, 2018 to be able to upgrade if they release a new version. So if that makes sense, you can see those details in your order history. So with that I'd like to go ahead and stop listening to my own voice for a few minutes and invite one of our co-presenters here today to talk to us a little bit about another program that you may not know about that TechSoup offers called TechSoup Boost. So Katherine, I'd love to welcome you to the program. Hi, sure. Thank you so much Becky. I'm so happy to join today. So I did want to talk about the TechSoup Boost program. This is a fairly new program through TechSoup and you may not have heard about it because it's a little bit different than what we've offered in the past. So Boost is an annual subscription program. It's a one-time fee that you pay for access for an entire year of TechSoup Boost. And during this year you unlock discounts, special offers, and really a kind of higher level of access with TechSoup that you may not get through the regular product donation program. So really TechSoup Boost is the channel to get the best deals that we can offer through TechSoup. Like I said, it's an annual subscription. You can sign up any time and then you have access to Boost special offers for the next 12 months. So included in the Boost subscription you have special discounts on hardware and software products. And we have waived the admin fees on certain products. So this includes some of our most popular ones, Tableau, Adobe, access to our Dell affiliate program where we completely waived the admin fees once you have enrolled in Boost. Also when you sign up for the program you have a $25 voucher upon sign up that you can use for any of the products that aren't already discounted by Boost. So anything from the product catalog that you've had your eye on, you have $25 to credit to that. We also offer some special discounts from across the nonprofit sector that you won't see through the regular TechSoup product catalog. Right now we have a couple of great discounts on training from the Foundation Center, one of our partners that we first started working with through Boost. And also you can let us know what you are looking for. So if you have special requests or things that you would like to see a discount on, or things that you would like to see in the TechSoup product catalog that you haven't yet, definitely let us know. And the Boost team will try our very best to find those deals for you. So you can see here on this page is a screenshot of the landing page for TechSoup Boost. And you can find out all of what's available there, techsoup.org backslash Boost. And we actually just came out with a couple new offers for Boost. So we're always adding more to the product mix. And as I mentioned you have access to these throughout the year. So we just added a couple of new things we've had the Adobe Photoshop and Premier Elements Bundle that we're offering with No Admin Fees. We also have the Tableau Data Visualization Software with No Admin Fees. And then we have a couple of discounts on some of our newer products, the Question Pro Survey Tool, DocuSign Standard Edition. And then we also have some really great hardware discounts. So if you're looking to buy some tablets or some laptops for your organization we do offer those at a discount through Boost. And the savings can add up pretty quickly especially with the $25 coupon. So the Boost Admin fee for the subscription it depends on the budget size of your organization. It starts at $79 for organizations under $2 million, sorry, with a budget size under $2 million. And any registered organizations at TechSoup can request Boost. But once you're a Boost subscriber the eligibility restrictions for these particular products still apply. So take a look and see before you sign up what's available to you. And please let me know if you have any questions. Great, thank you for that Catherine. I think it's really something that a lot of organizations can take advantage of particularly if you are a smaller organization and you want to have access to a lot of different technologies and resources and services. I love that Boost also includes some trainings and some consultations for free. I think that kind of stuff is really not something that a lot of particularly smaller organizations can access without a lot of expense. So it's a great thing to look at. And if you don't mind I will go ahead and show the page on our website so people can see what all of the different variety of things are that are included in Boost. I'll scroll down through it quickly but I'd like to just make sure everyone can see it. So let me know in the chat if you can't see it. But TechSoup Boost is just TechSoup.org slash Boost as Susan chatted out. But you can see the waved admin fees on a variety of these top products like Tableau, Adobe's Photoshop and Premiere Elements 13 bundle or Pepe as we call it internally. The Dell affiliate fee is waved. You can get extra savings on a variety of these products. If you keep on scrolling down you can access things like mobile hotspots which having worked in a tiny organization before coming to TechSoup was a huge thing for us because we often had to work out of different spaces not we had shared office space that didn't always have very good internet. So having hotspots was a huge boon for us because we could work from anywhere particularly with remote staff, tablets. You can get to know a little bit more about Boost with this quick little video here. And then down here these are some of the things I wanted to mention quickly and the reduced fees for training and consultations that you can access trainings and assessments on things like Office 365 or Salesforce for $0 which is huge when you don't know if those are choices that would be good for you. So definitely check that out. $79 plus you get that $25 coupon if you're under $2 million budget that you can get that $25 coupon to apply to any other kind of thing. So it makes it really affordable to access a huge range of free things and additionally discounted resources. Okay, I'm going to jump back to the slides and have Cameron Jones talk to us a little bit about IT Assist which is another new program that can help nonprofits really learn how, not learn how, but take the burden of managing their IT off of their own backs which is often very, very burdensome. So thanks Cameron, tell us about IT Assist. Hi Becky, thank you very much. So IT Assist is a new program recently launched on TechSoup and it is a managed IT service offering. And for those of you that are not familiar with that term managed IT service, this is a common service that lets you outsource the management of your IT to us. We have a large group of specialists that are spent all day every day troubleshooting, monitoring, upgrading, patching software, hardware, servers for nonprofits around the United States. And we will basically offer this service to nonprofits to help support their IT. It's sort of like outsourcing your IT to a third party and having an entire IT department at your disposal. Let's see if I'm going to move the slides forward. There we go. Did that work? Becky, would you mind moving the slides? There we go to the next one. There we are. So this is a program that TechSoup launched to serve only nonprofits and public libraries where available or where public libraries are able to take advantage of services like this. I know that's restricted in some places. In order to keep the costs as low as possible, we provide the support services virtually. So all of the monitoring of both servers and desktops and laptops, we do from afar and we provide help desks support so if somebody forgets their password or needs accidentally downloaded a virus and their computer is blowing up, we have a whole hotline or a whole help desk support staff that you can call or email and request help and any of your staff can do that. It is unlimited help desk support so you're not limited to five hours a month like some services do that. It's offered live within kind of standard business hours and then there's a ticketing system for 24-hour support and then the urgent issues get handled immediately. The service mostly monitors the security and performance, manages the backups, makes sure all of your data is backed up every day. We know this is a really critical problem particularly we saw this as a big problem with nonprofits in areas of the country where you experience disasters, earthquakes, hurricanes, snowstorms. We've had a lot of nonprofits come to us over the last couple of years having lost all of their data because it was all on a server in the closet. It wasn't being backed up and it was a disaster for those organizations to lose all of that information and try to figure out how to piece it back together. So the system does daily backups of everything into a cloud to make sure that you can recover after any kind of an event. In addition, one thing that makes the service a little bit more unique than a lot of managed IT service offers out there is we do regular meetings with all of our customers to talk about what your IT needs are, where are your constraints, what's the best strategy for upgrading your hardware? Say you just got a grant and you say, look, everybody needs, everyone's hardware is really old and terrible, let's upgrade everybody's hardware. That might not be the best option for you or you might want to upgrade some people with new computers and you might want to go refurbished for other people who don't need the fanciest highest performance computers. So we do have this technology expert and expertise and advisory service that is part of this where nonprofits can discuss with us what their needs are and we can help them figure out a strategy for meeting those IT needs. The program includes a free booth subscription which you just heard about from Catherine and it also includes a hardware update program and so this is, again, if you decide that you often will find nonprofits, everyone in the office is running a really old version of software and they're doing that because their hardware is badly out of date and they can't really upgrade. We have put together a plan for helping nonprofits upgrade their hardware so that they can do it over time in a kind of a thoughtful planned way that's financially sustainable and manageable for them. So that, again, is part of this whole process and I see a couple of questions coming in over the chat about pricing. So because every nonprofit is different, some nonprofits have 10 people, some have 100 people, the pricing is variable depending on the number of staff you have, the number of locations you have, the amount of data that you need back up, and the number of applications you need supported. So there are about five different criteria that go into determining pricing and I will get to how you find out the pricing in a second. There is another question about, is ITSYS provided over remote desktop virtual workstations or supporting local workstations? If local, how do you deal with hardware virus related failures? So the service is managed remotely. We do have the ability to come in over remote desktop to troubleshoot computers when they need help. We also do have the ability to send in a staff person, you know, if we really do need somebody to come in on site and actually look at the situation in your office, we can certainly do that. That's something that's easy to send somebody in. So again, the sort of the value that TechSoup, TechSoup launched this because we heard so many nonprofits complain about how their IT was unmanageable, but it was too expensive to hire IT staff. So we really are trying to fill a need for nonprofits that need high quality technology, advice, and management and we're trying to do it at the lowest possible cost which is why we do most of our work remotely. It costs money to send somebody into an office to have a conversation with somebody. So again, the focus is really on trying to keep the cost low. TechSoup is a nonprofit. We only serve nonprofits. This is our focus. We really understand some of the pain points that you have around funding, around grants, around managing capital expenditures versus operational expenditures. And so that's, you know, we're trying to bring the best value and the highest quality service for the money that we can. So the way you find out more about IT Assist is that you go to our website at techsoup.org slash it-assist and we have a form that you fill in that you can provide some basic information and then somebody from our staff will give you a call and we'll talk through your specific needs. You know, and every nonprofit is really different. Some have servers, some don't. Some have a lot of Macs. Some have Macs and PCs. Some have no Macs. So we'll put together kind of a custom quote for your organization to help you, to give you a sense of what the cost would be for your organization to manage this. So go to techsoup.org slash it-assist and fill out the form and we will be in touch with you within a couple of days to set up a time to talk. One other thing I wanted to say about IT Assist is it becomes most cost-effective for organizations that are kind of 8 to 10 employees or staff members and greater. From a cost management, cost effectiveness perspective it's often cheaper for really small nonprofits that have a staff of 2 or 3 people to find somebody local. I'm just going to be totally honest. I'm not trying to sell something to an organization that doesn't need it. Likewise for nonprofits that are larger that do have IT staff, IT Assist can be supplemental to that existing IT staff. We can take on the help desk support, helping those people reset passwords, get rid of viruses. We can take over the monitoring and managing of your system so that your IT staff can think more strategically about what you need to do from an application implementation standpoint from your IT, your overall IT strategy. So we can handle both. We can be supplemental or we can take on the whole management ourselves. So again, visit IT Assist, submit some contact information, and we'd be more than happy to talk to you about how we can help you out. Thank you for that Cameron. I'm going to go ahead and share my desktop again just to show what the question, the form looks like on IT Assist. You can quickly fill this out if you're interested. And this came about because we got so many requests from organizations over many, many years for actual tech support, for real help. So this is what the form looks like. It asks a handful of questions. How do you do your IT now? What kind of support are you looking for? Is there anything specific you want to share with us about your current technology or your organization? So it's a pretty simple form. Maybe take five minutes to fill out, and then folks would call you to get an idea if it really is a good fit for you. But yeah, we have gotten so many requests for two decades to really provide more day-to-day support around technology. And that's where this came from. Oops, I'm sorry. I'm meaning to go back to my slides. And instead you're seeing an email. Sorry about that. So we hope that you'll check that out if it's something that may be a good fit for you. If you're not sure, you can fill out that form and get contacted, have that conversation, and really determine if it makes the most sense. If you're looking for local tech support and you determine that IT Assist may not be a good fit, or that you just want to go a different way, there are great affinity-based groups like NTEN has 501 Tech Clubs, and I'm happy to share some of these resources in different cities around the country. Former empowers that were I think 12 or 13 of them around the country, many of them have different names now. But those types of organizations can also help with local assistance for nonprofits. Many times your state nonprofit association also has resources they can refer you to around helping support your technology. If you decide you need something in your town, in your city, but we wanted to have this option available to you, and so we created it and hope that you'll check it out if it seems like it might work for your needs. With that in mind, one of the big parts of our mission at TechSoup is helping to provide resources for you to connect with local experts, for you to connect with the educational resources, so you can best learn how to use those technologies, or optimize the technologies that are already in your hands to help you best achieve your mission. And so I wanted to highlight some of the education and expertise that we have available to nonprofits and libraries as part of our programs. And some of them you may know about. You're here on a webinar, and so you know about our webinars at least to this degree. But we do offer webinars. Usually each week we have one, sometimes two, sometimes three webinars a week depending on the topic. And they are primarily geared toward nonprofits. Sometimes they are geared toward a specific audience like we may do a webinar specifically for religious organizations, or we may have webinars specifically geared toward libraries from our TechSoup for Libraries.org program. Those happen usually once a month, the library ones. But we do them on a wide range of topics, and our webinars are free, so you're always welcome to join any of those. And you can see that full calendar of what's coming up at our events and webinars page. But we also make I think a couple hundred of those webinars that are still moderately up to date are available for free anytime to watch on our website. You can watch them there. You can download slides. You can click through. You can share the slides. You can present them in your own community because we license our webinars Creative Commons, meaning that you can take what we have created and usually you can share that back out with your own audience. So feel free to share with your friends and colleagues any of those webinars that you see on our site. We also have created a new learning management system platform that, well we haven't created the platform, but we are using a new learning management system to bring you a catalog of courses that you can take 24-7, 365 days a year at your own time. So rather than coming to a webinar at a specific time on a specific day, these courses are available to you to access when you need them and however much time you want to spend, how little time you have to spend, and we are making them available. Every few weeks we are trying to put new courses up. We did just launch this in August, late August, so it's very new to TechSoup. But I'd like to go ahead and show you really quickly when we get to the right page here and then I'll show you what it looks like because this is a labor of love for both Susan and I that we've tried to create this full platform for you to access courses. I'm going to share in my desktop. And Beverly is asking in the chat, are they free? And most of the courses are free. I will say that because we have just launched our first set of courses where there is a fee. And so we are offering the 100 levels essentially as free courses and all of our topics will have a free course or a free level of courses. And then as they get more advanced or more in-depth where we have to bring in outside experts to help us create those courses, there are fees. But they are in a similar vein to our donation programs with our products where the fee for those where retail you may pay $400 for that course, it may only cost $40 through TechSoup. So we are trying to keep that in mind. But as we have costs that have come up with having to contract with SMEs, Subject Matter Experts outside of TechSoup to help create those, some of them have fees. So for example, Tech Planning, the 101 level is totally free. The three other 200 level courses have a fee or you can purchase the whole package for a flat rate. But we also have Tech Training, that's free, how to learn, how to train your staff on technology. And so it's geared toward helping adult learners learn about technology which is often a big hurdle. And then we've got these Tech Planning courses. We will be adding more courses on everything from Adobe Photoshop, so specific software to the basics of design and graphic design, web design. We'll be having courses on security and fundraising, all kinds of things. So I'm going to just skip off of this page, but you can find the full course catalog at techsoup.course.tc slash catalog which I know that Susan chatted out. So I would recommend checking that out and just keeping an eye on it. Once you've created an account, which you have to create a new account on that platform, but once you've done that you can log in anytime to that catalog and see what's available for you to access for free. And the resources in there include everything from short videos, little quizzes to test whether you've learned what's being shown, activities, worksheets, all kinds of great resources to help you really acquire and learn these different skills. In addition, I mentioned we have a lot of different newsletters that have resources. Some of you I'm sure are already subscribed to many of them. But we have newsletters like By the Cup which is our weekly newsletter that includes lots of articles and how-to's and resources in addition to some of the products that are highlighted. We have the new product alert that's sent out usually twice a month and that is specifically to highlight what is new in our product catalog. So if you're looking to see what the new donations are, or if you know that, hey, every year there's a new version of QuickBooks and I want to know when it comes out, that's the newsletter that's going to tell you when it's available through TechSoup which just to wrap that loop, QuickBooks 2017 is now available. And then we have some specific newsletters like we have a newsletter for libraries specifically. So if you are joining us from a library, the TechSoup for Libraries newsletter will have library specific content, library specific webinars, products that we know that libraries can access and are more likely to use based on the needs that they've expressed to us. We also have a newsletter for NetSquared. If you're not familiar with NetSquared, this is a great way to access local experts on technology in your area. NetSquared.org has meetups in cities all around the world. And if there's not one local to you, and you would like to have one local to you, you can create one and solicit for experts in your area to help plan and host those events. And they usually take the form of happy hours or meetups where part of the time is talking about a specific topic. So it may be using social media one month. And then the rest of the time is just networking and mingling. And it's a great way to meet people to help you rebuild your website, help you maintain your computers, help you adopt the latest fundraising techniques. So NetSquared is a project of TechSoups. And like I said, they're all over the world with I think 25 or so happening in the U.S. all the time. And we do promote those upcoming events in a big blog post at the start of every month. And you can find that on that webinars and events page on the second tab. We highlight those. So it's another great resource to try and connect with local expertise. I'm going to go ahead and wrap us up and get started with questions that have been asked. But if you have other questions about TechSoup, whether it's about the things we talked about today, or other questions about our donation programs, how we work, admin fees, eligibility, anything that comes to mind, feel free to use this next 10 minutes as your opportunity to get questions answered because that's what we're here for today. I'm going to just point to some additional resources here before we get started with questions. But I have some links in the slides. Again, you'll receive these within the next few days, programs affected by the fiscal year end. And I recommend looking at the list of those that aren't affected and seeing what the restrictions are to see if you can maximize the number of donations that you're receiving. And then links to things like your donation request history where you can find out about when you last requested Microsoft. You can access those free upgrades. So those are just a handful of links there, but feel free to ask your questions in the chat window. I see that there are a couple in here now, and I know that Cameron answered one of these on the back end already, but I'm going to address it now anyway. She asked a question. Charlene asked a question about Microsoft not donating to back end or back office computers for library staff. And there are reasons for that, and we are always trying to needle our way into expanding that. But a big part of it is that many libraries are connected with their local government or municipality, and so Microsoft has a different channel for those staff computers to get their software through government programs that they have. Same like if you are joining us from like a K-12 school. Microsoft has an education program so it doesn't actually come through TechSoup and the nonprofit donation program with us to access those pieces of software. Now if you have a computer lab that's public facing or you have a station of computers or a handful of computers that your patrons or customers, depending on the type of organization you are, use, those public facing computers can access and can get the donated Microsoft donations through TechSoup. So I hope that helps answer that question, but it is in large part because of the makeup of many public libraries being part of their local government that Microsoft prefers that those libraries go through the government process. So I hope that makes sense. Let's see, we had a couple of other questions around organization size. And so I know Cameron, you mentioned the ideal size for a program like IT Assist is if you have 8 or 10 staff people or larger. If you are smaller than that, IT Assist may not be the right fit, but certainly you can check it out. Anyway, is it the same for other programs like what we talked about today? So for example, Boost, is that really something that would be valuable for any size organization or just certain sizes? What do you think? So this is Catherine. Sorry, this is Catherine again, and I can speak to Boost. I think it's definitely something that is valuable for any size organization, the voucher and also the additional discounts on hardware and software I think are things that anyone can use. I have heard from staff at smaller organizations that Boost can be really helpful if you are an accidental techie or sometimes you struggle making decisions around technology. It can be helpful to be a Boost subscriber because it gives you that flexibility to maybe try different things that you wouldn't have otherwise tried. If you are not sure if Tableau is right for you, if you are a Boost subscriber, you can try it really with no risk. And also the trainings and consultations that Becky pointed out are also really good services for small organizations especially if you are not sure if Office 365 is right for you. Those consultations can be really valuable if you are not exactly sure what your next steps are in your tech planning. But I would say that definitely all size organizations can take advantage of some of those special offers as well. Thanks Catherine. That's great. And I would agree with that sentiment that this could be good for any kind of organization. And really $79 if you are under $2 million budget plus you get that $25 credit toward other donations that you might request. I pay less than that for my gym membership every month than I don't actually go to. So that's a really great deal. If you use the $25 voucher and you get one or two of the no fee or discounted products, the savings add up really quickly. Absolutely. Well thanks for that. We have a couple other quick questions before we wrap up. Linda asks, what is the cost of TechSoup? And I will happily say it is entirely free to sign up. There is no cost to being a TechSoup member or user. You can use our forums. You can join those in that square event. You can do all of that for free. You can use our articles, come to the webinars. No cost at all. The costs associated with TechSoup are the admin fees for different product donations. So just to explain how that works really quickly, the different donor partners, some of them donate completely their products. Some of them discount substantially. And as part of helping TechSoup provide these services, we charge a small admin fee. And so again where I gave the example earlier where the retail cost of something might be $400 if you were to walk into Best Buy for it, TechSoup may offer it for $40 admin fee. So that's where the cost will come in and that's specific to each different donation you would request. So sometimes that cost might be $6 depending upon what it is. Sometimes that cost if it's a discounted product where you're only getting part of it donated, it might be $150. It really depends on the specific products. And some of those are products. Some of those are subscription services like an annual subscription to a grant searching website. Some of them may be consultations where it might be a one-time $15 fee for a 90-minute phone consultation with a tech expert to help you determine whether Salesforce is a good fit for you. So it really depends. But signing up and joining TechSoup is totally free. And so I recommend highly doing that. And I say that not just as a staff person but as somebody who again benefited an awful lot from using TechSoup for many years before joining the team here. Beverly has asked that she'd like to open a new branch library and housing authority in a city. Can TechSoup be a good start with that? Absolutely. We can help with hardware setup costs. We can help with wireless hotspots. We can help with some of the software depending upon what programs you need to have on those different machines depending upon whether they're public-facing computers. So if in the housing authority for example you're actually serving people with housing needs that come in and are searching for housing in a public computer lab type setting, we could help set up all kinds of stuff. And we wouldn't actually be doing the setup but you can get access to a lot of the technologies that you need for that through our donation program. So I would definitely recommend checking out our services and take that eligibility quiz that I pointed to at the beginning. Because if you put in your approximate annual budget, your organization type, and subtypes which those are determined by the IRS, those are not categories that we just really nearly came up with. But if you fit into multiple categories, test it out because you may legitimately fall into more than one of those different categories and you may find that one of them makes you more eligible than the other for different donation programs. And as long as you legitimately really do fit into that category with your work then you can access lots of different donation programs. So we are just about at time and I'd like to thank you all for joining us today. But I'd love to hear one thing that you've learned in today's webinar that you are going to take back and either try to implement or investigate further or maybe you've learned about a program that you really are excited to go and access. If you could chat in one thing that you have gotten out of today's webinar, we appreciate that just as immediate feedback on what we've helped you learn, what we hope that you've acquired today. We'd also ask that you share this information with your friends and colleagues who they also benefit from it and that you would complete that post-event survey that pops up when you exit out. We have a variety of upcoming webinars that I'd love to invite you to join us for including one next Tuesday on Search Engine Optimization for Beginners, Simple Steps for Nonprofits and Libraries. We also will have a webinar on Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Tools and Filters for Nonprofits on the 8th, and then Libraries Supporting Social Goods, so how libraries and nonprofits can work together. So feel free to join us for any of those and watch for more to come. And also check out all the new courses that are becoming available through our course curriculum. We'd love you to join us there and participate in those courses. Thank you to Cameron and Catherine for your contributions to today's webinar. Thank you to our participants and to Susan for helping on the back end. And lastly, thank you to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor for providing the use of today's platform. We would love it if you'd take that post-event survey to give us your feedback so we can continue to improve our webinar programs. Thank you so much everyone. Have a great day. Bye-bye.


look I think I can help lead us to the top that's why I'm here that's why I came back that's why I originally signed up to come here is that's what I'm chasing and you know just personally trying to continue and to improve and grow in this job and ultimately though the proof will be in the pudding you know I mean that we're trying to get there and I know a lot of people won't be satisfied till that till we are there and that goes for all of us that are working towards that goal anyway so


Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to talk about data protection in the age of ransomware. It's a top of mind topic. And with me are two great guests and CUBE alums, David Noy, who's the Vice President of Product Management at Dell Technologies. And Rob Emsley, Director of Data Protection Product Marketing at Dell. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. It's good to see you both. Oh, thanks so much, appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks a lot, Dave. Hey, David, let me start with you. Maybe we can look at the macro, the big picture at Dell for cybersecurity. What are you seeing out there? You know, I'm seeing an enormous amount of interest in cybersecurity, obviously driven by a string of recent events, but, and a presidential executive order around cybersecurity.  It's around a new class of malicious attacks that people just have to be ready for. And it's not even a question of when it's, if it's gonna happen, it's a question of when it's gonna happen.  And so we go beyond just thinking about, hey, how do you build in technical capabilities into the product to make it difficult for attackers? We actually wanna get predictive, we wanna use advanced technologies and capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning to go out and scan users' environments and look at their data, which is really the lifeblood of a business and say, hey, we can see that there is potentially an attack looming. We can start to look for dormant attack vectors. And as soon as something bad is happening, because we know something bad is gonna happen, we can help you quickly recover the restore or figure out which restore point to recover from. So you can get your business back and operational as soon as possible. Great, thank you for that, David. Hey, Rob, good to see you. We've seen a lot of changes recently, kind of as David was referencing. It used to be, okay, cybersecurity, that's the domain of the SecOps team. And the rest of the company said, okay, it's their problem. Data protection or backup, that was the backup admin. Those two worlds are kind of colliding together. We use terms like cyber resiliency now. It's a sort of super set up, if you will, of the traditional cybersecurity. So how can organizations get ahead of these cyber threats when you engage with customers? Do you have any sort of specific angles or tooling that you use to help? Yeah, Dave, there's a couple of things to unpack there. I think one of the things that you call out is cyber resiliency. I think there's a balancing act that customers are working through between cybersecurity and cyber resiliency. On the left-hand side of the balancing act, it's, how can I keep bad things out of my network? The reality is that it's very difficult to do that. There's many applications that customers have deployed to protect the perimeter. But as you know, many cyber threats are manifested from inside of the perimeter. So what we're seeing is customers starting to invest more in making themselves cyber resilient organizations. And as David mentioned, it's not the if it's the when. The question is, how do you respond to when a cyber attack hits you? So one of the things that we introduced probably about six months ago is a globally available cyber resiliency assessment. And we worked in collaboration with the Enterprise Strategy Group and we put out a free online assessment tool to allow customers to really answer questions around a big part of the NIST framework around detection, protection and recovery. And we give customers the opportunity to get themselves evaluated on are they prepared? Are they vulnerable?  What we found over the last six months is that over 70% of the people that have taken this cyber resiliency assessment are falling into that category of they're vulnerable or they're exposed. Right, thank you for that. Yeah, the guys at ESG do a good job of that. They have deep expertise in that space. And David, Rob just talked about sort of the threats from inside the perimeter. And any person, you don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomwareist. You can go on the dark web, you can acquire ransomware as a service. If you have access to a server and are willing to put a stick in there or do some bad things or give credentials out, hopefully you'll end up in handcuffs. But more often than not, people are getting away with really insidious crime. So how is Dell, David, helping customers respond to the threat of ransomware? So as I mentioned earlier, the product approach is pretty sophisticated. You're right, somebody can come and just put a USB stick into a machine or if they have administrative access, they can figure out a code that they've either been given because the trust has been placed in the wrong place or they've somehow socially engineered out of someone.  Someone who's gained access can potentially gain access to other systems by helping through them. We take a more of a vault-based approach, which means that when you create a cyber vault, it's essentially locked down from the rest of your environment. Your cyber criminal is not able to get to that solution because it's been air gapped. It's kept somewhere else completely separate from that work, but it also has keys and two keys to the kingdom are that it opens up only at a certain time of day. So it's not vulnerable to coming in at any time. It goes and requests data, it pulls the data and then it keeps that immutable copy in the vault itself.  If you find that there was an attack or if an attack has occurred, we're gonna attack real occur sooner or later, you can then basically prevent that attacker from getting access into that vaulted environment before that next opening event occurs. We also have to go back and look at time because sometimes these attackers don't instantiate all at once. I'm gonna basically go and encrypt all your data. They take a more of a graduated approach. And so you have to go and look at patterns, access patterns of how data has actually changed and not just look at the metadata, say, okay, well, it looks like the data changed at a certain time. You have to look at the data contents. You have to look at the, if there's a file type, oftentimes you can actually analyze that as well and say, hey, this given file, whether it's a PowerPoint file or Excel file or one of a hundred or a thousand different file types should look like this. It doesn't look like that inside. What many of the solutions that look for these attack vectors do is they're just looking at metadata access and then potentially just entropy. So how fast things are changing? Oh, it's changing more faster than it normally would. That's not enough. The attackers are just getting to get smarter about how they go and change things. They're gonna change it so that they don't change file suffixes or they don't change them with a very high entropy rate. And without using some kind of a system that's actually constantly tuning itself to say, hey, this is how these attack vectors are evolving over time. You're gonna miss out on these opportunities to go and protect yourself. So we have also a constantly evolving and learning capability to go and say, okay, as we see how these attack vectors are evolving to adapt to the way that we defend against them, we're going to also have the practices to make sure that we account for the new models. So it's a very adaptable kind of, really is an artificial intelligence form of protecting yourself. Can I ask you a question, David? Just a follow-up on the immutable copy. Where does that live? Is it going to live on prem? Is it in the cloud either? We're on both. So we have the ability to put that on prem. We have the ability to put that in a second data center. We have the ability to keep that actually in a colo site. So basically completely out of your data center, we have the ability to keep that in the cloud as well. Well, the reason I ask is because I just, putting my paranoid sec ops hat on, and I'm no expert here, but I've talked to organizations that say, oh yeah, it's in the cloud. It's a service. So okay, but it's immutable. Yeah, it's right once, read many. You can't erase it. Like, okay, can I turn it off? Well, no, not really. Well, what if I stop paying for the service? Well, we'd send a notice out. I said, I said, okay, wait a minute. So am I just being too paranoid here? How do you handle that objection? Of turning it off? Yeah, can I turn it off? Or can you make it so that nobody can turn it off? Oh yeah, that's a good question. So actually what we're building into the product roadmap is the ability to that product to actually self-inspect it and to look at whether or not even the underlying, so for example, if the service is running in a virtual machine, well, the attacker could say, let me just go attack that virtual machine and infect it and basically turn itself off, even in an on-prem, never mind in the cloud. And so we're looking at building or we're building into the roadmap a lot more self-inspection capabilities to make sure that somebody isn't going to shut down the service. And so that is actually, that kind of self-resiliency is critical even to a vaulted solution, which is air-gapped, right, to your point.  That's something that we need to protect again. So this talks, I think for the audience, this talks to the, it's like an ongoing game of escalation and you want to have a partner who has the resources to keep up with the bad guys because it's just a constantly upping the ante. Rob, you guys do a survey every year, the Global Data Protection Index. Tell us about that. What are the latest results? You survey a lot of people. I'm interested in the context of things like remote work and hybrid work. It's escalated the threat. What are you seeing there? Yeah, so as you mentioned, the Global Data Protection Index, we survey over a thousand IT executives around the globe. And in the most recent study, we absolutely started to ask questions specifically around, customers' concerns with regards to cybersecurity. And we found that over 60% of the customers surveyed really are concerned that they don't feel that they are adequately prepared to respond to cyber threats that they see, unfortunately on a day-to-day basis. Certainly, as you mentioned, the work from anywhere, the learn from anywhere, reality that many customers are dealing with, one of the concerns that they have is the increased attack surface that they now have to deal with. I mean, the perimeter of their network is now much broader than it ever has been in the past. So I think all of this leads, Dave, to cybersecurity discussions and cyber resiliency discussions being top of mind for really any CIO, their CISO in any industry. In the days of old, we used to focus out the financial services industry as a bunch of customers that we could have very relevant conversations with. But now that is now cross-industry-wide. There isn't a vertical that isn't concerned about the threats of cybersecurity and cyber attacks. So when we think about our business, especially around data vaulting with our Power of Tech portfolio, but also with our PowerScale portfolio, with our unstructured data storage solutions, we're really having constant conversations around how do you make your environment more cyber resilient? And we've been seeing rapid growth in both of those solution areas, both implementing extensions of customers, backup and recovery solutions, but also in the environments where we're deploying large-scale unstructured storage infrastructure, the ability to have real-time monitoring of those environments, and also to extend that to delivering a vaulted solution for your unstructured storage are all things that are leading us to work with customers to actually help them become more cyber resilient. Great, thanks. Last question, and maybe for both of you, maybe Rob, you start and David, you could chime in. I'm interested in what's exciting you guys, what's new in the portfolio, are there new features that you're delivering that map to the current market conditions?  You have to respond to the market changes over the last 18 to 24 months, whether it's cyber, ransomware, the digital transformation, what's new in the portfolio, and what's exciting you guys? So, Dave, yeah, so quite recently, we, as well as running an event specifically to talk about protection in the age of ransomware and to discuss many of the things that we've covered on this call, data protection is still a foundational technology to help customers become more secure and reduce their risk profiles. So, innovation that we delivered very recently was really in three specific areas. VMware data protection, NAS data protection, and then also, we introduced a tech preview of a direction that we're taking to expand the scalability and manageability of our power protect appliances. So, transparent snapshots delivers capabilities to help customers better protect their VMware environment without the concern of disrupting their production applications when they're doing backup and recovery of virtual machines. Dynamic NAS protection moves away from the age old mechanism of MDMP and provides a much more performant and scalable solution for protecting all of that unstructured data running on NAS infrastructure. And then last but not least, to say the tech preview of smart scale, which is our new solution and architecture to allow customers to pull together multiple power protect appliances within their data sensors and give them a much easier way of managing the power protect appliances that they have and scaling their environment by implementing a federated namespace to allow them to get support in that environment. Nice, some great innovations there. All right, David, bring us home. What's exciting you? You shared a little bit with the roadmap. Yeah, look, I think all of this is about operations today, every enterprise is 24 by seven. It doesn't matter what vertically in, right? Down time is unacceptable. And whether that means whether it's down time because you got hit by a malicious attacker, it means down time because you are caused by disruption of virtual machine instances to Rob's point during the backup process. And we can't interrupt those processes. We can't impact their performance. It means, you know, making sure that your largest unstructured repositories in NAS deployments can be backed up in a time that makes sense so that you can meet your own SLAs. And it means that with a smart scale product, their ability to go and say, okay, as you're expanding your backup target environment, we can do that in a seamless fashion without disrupting your backup operations and your day-to-day operations. All of this is around making sure that we minimize the amount of disruption that our end users experience either because of malicious attacks or because of day-to-day operations and making sure that those businesses really can't operate 24 by seven. And that is the crux of a really true enterprise solution for data protection. Guys, it's a very important topic. I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE, great conversation, and keep up the good work of protecting our data. Well, good, thanks. Thanks, Dave. All right, and thanks everybody for watching this CUBE Conversations. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time.


So when you look at the ancients across all civilizations, they regard truth, the reason, good, and beauty as the fundamental building blocks of their society. Notice beauty is up there. And the truest sense of beauty is the sacred. And as our culture becomes more antithetical and polarized, you know, I just reminded that we've all been here before. Every empire falls from the inside out, where the men become spoiled from the fruits of their fathers, and that same toxicity ventriculates onto the society's creative class, and the artist transitions from the preserver of truth to the spreader of vanity. When masculinity is not yielded properly in the arts, it is shoved underground to fester.


to make their own choices free from coercion. When it comes to America's national security, I believe one of our defining missions is to uphold our allies and partners. In that mission, each and every one of you plays an essential role. By your dedication, President Joe Biden and I along with our entire country are grateful, deeply grateful to each and every one of you, for your service and for your excellence. The United States military, without any question, is the strongest and best fighting force the world has ever seen. And that is because of you, each one of you. It is also because of your families, many of whom I saw as I was coming aboard, who are such an important part of this work. They, with you, have moved far from home to support our nation. They serve with you and to them, therefore, we are eternally grateful.  Your presence here defends international law, including freedom of navigation, both of which are vital for America's security and America's economy. Just think, billions of dollars of commercial activity flow through the Indo-Pacific every day. And your work enables a free flow of this commerce, which supports American workers and American businesses. And your work strengthens our alliance with Japan. As you maintain our readiness and capabilities, you demonstrate that our commitment to Japan's defense is ironclad, that our alliance with Japan is the cornerstone of peace and stability in the region. And that our presence here is enduring. President Joe Biden has been clear, our network of alliances and partnerships is a great source of strength for America. This network enhances our influence and our capacity. And our administration is determined to prioritize and strengthen these relationships. In addition, sailors, you are charged with defending a set of international rules and norms recognized around the world. Rules and norms that have provided for unprecedented peace and prosperity for the American people, and indeed for the people of this region. Principles such as the respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, the peaceful resolution of disputes, the respect for international law, and the right of all nations to make their own choices free from coercion. When it comes to America's national security, I believe one of our defining missions is to uphold the international rules-based order to defend it, strengthen it, and promote it. However, we must also acknowledge that these rules and norms are under growing threat. Russia is attempting to annex the territory of another sovereign nation as part of its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine. Just a few days ago, the DPRK launched a ballistic missile as part of its illicit weapons program, which threatens regional stability and violates multiple UN Security Council resolutions. In addition, China is undermining key elements of the international rules-based order. China has challenged the freedom of the seas. China has flexed its military and economic might to coerce and intimidate its neighbors. And we have witnessed disturbing behavior in the East China Sea and in the South China Sea. And most recently, provocations across the Taiwan Strait. Sailors last month, not too far from here, China used Speaker Pelosi's visit to Taiwan as a pretext for an unprecedented show of military force. A pressure campaign against Taiwan. A series of destabilizing actions. And we anticipate continued aggressive behavior from Beijing as it attempts to unilaterally undermine the status quo. The United States believes that peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is an essential feature of a free and open Indo-Pacific. And we will continue to fly, sail, and operate unjaunted and unafraid wherever and whenever international law allows. We will continue to oppose any unilateral change to the status quo. And we will continue to support Taiwan's self-defense, consistent with our long-standing policy. Taiwan is a vibrant democracy that contributes to the global good from technology to health and beyond. And the United States will continue to deepen our unofficial ties. As President Joe Biden said last week at the UN General Assembly, the United States does not seek conflict with China. And we do not seek a cold war. In fact, we will work with every willing nation to solve global challenges. And that is why the USS Howard is here. So do you say, Alex, I say, the United States is a proud Pacific Howard. The American people have a profound stake in the future of this region. And we will continue to promote an Indo-Pacific that is free and open, connected, secure, and resilient. Your presence here, the presence of the United States in the Indo-Pacific, is in pursuit of peace and stability and to support our allies and partners. In that mission, each and every one of you plays an essential role. So again, our thank you for looking out for our neighbors and friends, for pursuing the common good, and for always standing up for freedom, for country thanksgiving. May God bless you, and may God bless America.


Designed for senior professionals and managers with specialist regional knowledge, SOAS University of London's MSc International Business Administration by Distance Learning provides an in-depth understanding of the fast-paced world of international business. During the programme of study, you'll explore the nature of management practice around the globe, examining how the strategic plans of multinationals are implemented in their subsidiaries and joint ventures. You'll analyse the influence of corporate governance systems on performance, including the performance of individual firms and the allocation of capital within and across different countries, and the use of accounting information in strategic decision-making. And you'll be given the opportunity to gain extensive knowledge of the business environments and management practices in either China or sub-Saharan Africa. The course comprises six modules, including two core modules, the first of which is international business strategy. Focusing on international business case studies across a spectrum of industries, from retail to manufacturing, the module examines the causes and effects of success and failure, enhancing your strategic insight and risk management expertise, and looking at how marketing and pricing strategies can fly or flop, depending on localised factors in different countries. The second core module, Managing the Transnational Corporation, explores transnational corporations as distinct social, cultural, technological, economic and strategic entities, and highlights the challenges and opportunities this creates. You'll debate the theory behind why firms have become transnational, gain an understanding of the nature of international production, and explore case studies from major global and regional brands, relating to areas such as human resources, supply chain management, innovation and culture. You'll study four out of 15 specialist international business modules, ranging from banking strategy and corporate finance to management accounting and financial reporting. In the exciting and high-risk world of international business, the International Business Administration program is everything you need to go the distance. Click here to find out more.