A podcast series centered around important and innovative technology topics through a new and fresh lens creating an easy digest format for very complex technology. For today’s topic, our special guest is Herb Kelsey, Dell Technologies Security Strategy Program Lead from Office of the CTO. And we will spend time on Herb’s favorite topic “Zero Trust."
Mei Zhou
Hello, my name is Mei Zhou Dell OEM engineer solution, managing director. I am super excited to be here today to cohost this brand-new series called Bourbon and Tech podcast theory with Carahsoft Technologies.
Maryam Emdadi
Hi everyone, my name is Maryam Emdadi, VP of sales at Carahsoft Technology, and cohost with me today to launch our Bourbon and Tech podcast series. So may let's tell the audience how this is going to be a little different than your traditional podcast.
Mei Zhou
Well, first of all is different because we're not in a podcast room, we're actually at a really cool steakhouse bourbon bar here in Virginia. And we're inserting some fun into our Tech Talk series. And, you know, the idea is about how do we have kick off a conversation that bring some fun factor to it, but at the same time, how do we really tell the stories around the technology in a more easy to digest format, something that people can relate to break down really complicated topic into something that everyone can understand. And then really just to inspire people to get behind of the technology innovation. So today, our very first guest speaker with us today is Herb Kelsey, Dell technology, our security strategy program lead for from office of the CTO. And our topic today is going to be Zero Trust.
Maryam Emdadi
And before we get started on the topic of Zero Trust, we're here in McLean, Virginia, at the famous American Prime Steakhouse. So this is the fun part of our podcast. Rick Hardy are co-owner of American Prime and co-founder of our wonderful partner FedData Technology Solutions has offered up the space for our podcasts and he also happens to be an expert in bourbon and whiskey. So Rick, tell us a little bit about what we're tasting today.
Rick Hardy
Thank you, Maryam. Thank you, Mei. Thank you her for being here. Dell Technologies. Carahsoft. Proud to be here, glad to host this in smart enough to know that I'm going to pass the mic over to Claudio, who actually is an expert on bourbon and whiskies to give us an overview of what we're having kind of why we picked what we picked within the Weller family of bourbons.
Claudio
Thank you, Rick. Thank you very much, everyone. Alright, so buffalo distribution company, they've been around for over 200 years. So we chose some of the very finest ones to taste tonight. We'll start with the flagship, the buffalo. So you will get some spicy notes in vanilla. As you can see, it's a rich smooth, long finish is sweet. Pleasant with vanilla, sometimes the barrels so this one has been aged from six to eight years. And the marsh build here is going to be tougher. Hence why less spices. We're moving to the second one, where it's gonna be the eagle rare. This one has been aged for 10 years. The same thing the magical is gonna be 10% in this one as you can smell is gonna be different. This one's gonna have a long finish. More lingering, I would say.
Herb Kelsey
Are you sure you want me to go through the whole round before I talk? I mean, we can.
Claudio
You're just gonna sleep. You're just gonna sleep. So definitely this feels more dry than the buffalo. Still though they're both rich. And they're close in that category. But I would say that you get more almonds in this one. And then we can go to the third one where we change a little bit on the flavors. So just ordered Blanton's is going to be is the first single barrel that has been distributing in us now there is a difference. Yeah, first of all the marsh bill in this one we have from 10 to 15%. Right. So that's why most dominant is gonna be the spices you get some nutmeg there. Yeah. And then the finish is a medium but also, it's not very long. You get that knocked back honey and then it goes away at the house. Well, then we're gonna finish with a one of the very special from IoT collection. This is gonna be the jersey stack where has been aged for 50 years. You can smell it already. is gonna be different from all the previous ones.
Mei Zhou
Wow, that's smooth.
Claudio
So what especially the Justice like I said this collection has been aged for 15 years. What we have here on the nose, we have some on the island as well. But on the flavor, you get more rich, intense, very bold. I will say some tobacco dark chocolate in there getting but yeah, at the end. It's something very special and definitely all of them they have a different character personality within their family. I guess deal. Since all the spice Yes, yes, it's they’re good bourbon and definitely defined most of the American, especially when it comes to bourbon, I said Buffalo Trace has been around for over 200 years. And they're defined by perfection, especially when it comes to Bourbon.
Mei Zhou
Wow, what a special treat. Thank you so much.
Claudio
We thank you very much.
Mei Zhou
So I'm privileged to be part of the tasting group here. And now that we have taste some amazing beverage. And let's get into the main topic of today. So herb, you've had a long, impressive career, supporting the government focused on security, what made you decide to move to Dell Technologies to focus on Zero Trust?
Herb Kelsey
Thank you, me. And I think every podcast should start with bourbon tasting. I think that's a great start. What kind of what brought me to Dell. So I have been in this business for quite some time. And one of the things that I became passionate about five or six years ago, was realizing that I saw a chart in the chart showed that about 1015 years ago, the largest companies in the US were all industrials or oil companies. But over the last decades, it's become technology, Apple, Google, Facebook, and so on. And what I realized from a security perspective was that that put the internet in the front and center of the largest companies in our in our economy. And if that had a problem, that became the single point of failure, and that concerns me, and so I've spent my time in my career trying to work on that. And Dell was a good place to do that, based on the relationships that it has based on its place in the industry. And so I've been very happy to be here over the last year, year and a half.
Maryam Emdadi
So thank you for that background. You're a technologist, you're passionate about technology are passionate about security, on the topic of Zero Trust, for people in our audience that are not technologists, how would you describe Zero Trust, and what goes into it the components that are the most important in our day to day?
Herb Kelsey
Sure. So Zero Trust has been around for quite some time, but it's evolved most recently over the last four or five years. And the key elements of that are understanding the identity of the people and the devices that are interacting with, with the, with the networks and with the systems. And so when you focus on that, and you know who a person is, you can understand their behaviors. And you can make much better choices about whether or not you want them to have access to particular elements of your organization in particular data. The other thing that's really important about Zero Trust is the idea of automating the responses, organizations get attacked, they get hundreds of thousands of attacks a day against them. And so when you have that volume, it's very hard for humans to keep up with that capacity. And so a large part of Zero Trust is this idea of being able to use AI use machine learning to automate the responses to these attacks, so that the responses can be as fast as the attacks come in.
Mei Zhou
So, let me ask a different question. So you know, where are you in technology? So we deal with the topic of security all the time on the enterprise side and supporting the government. However, in a one talking when talking about Zero Trust, you know, with our family or friends, that that term might be very foreign to them. So how does I know technology is related to everything we do now? So if we have to kind of explain Zero Trust and what does this mean for them and how does this impact our everyday so family and friends lifestyle? How would you explain it?
Herb Kelsey
So great question, Mei. So in terms of in terms of what Zero Trust might mean to you, as a, as a general citizen, you know, if you look at the headlines, you know, you'll see things like the city of Atlanta that was crippled by a ransomware attack. Well, the fact that that could happen means that paychecks go out. The fact that that happens means that, you know, fire responses might be delayed, or 911 responses might be delayed. You know, other things that you see in the headlines are things like Colonial Pipeline a few years ago, where there was a ransomware attack that brought down essentially, gasoline service up and down the East Coast. And so those are some of the examples of things that hit everyday life, that are the types of attacks that Zero Trust is meant to prevent, and keep from happening. And I think that, you know, as more and more, it becomes easier to use the internet to attack various systems, we just need to start paying attention to the fact that even though it's a technology term, it does impact us fairly directly, when, when these attacks occur, and are successful.
Maryam Emdadi
Right, and to talk about our customer, specifically, the US government has been on a journey to implement Zero Trust. For the last few years in, it seems like it's very complex to find a working model to roll out to, you know, the entire to the entire US government that is not complicated. So why is that? And what's the complex parts of it and finding one model that kind of fits all?
Herb Kelsey
So the complexity is because cybersecurity touches so much of our systems. What the government, I think is struggling with in part is that typically, the government gives general advice. You know, here's some guidelines for how you configure something, or here's some guidelines for how you measure the maturity of where you are on a particular journey. In this case was Zero Trust, the government has decided to be prescriptive. So both the US Department of Defense, and DHS have put out architectures that say, this is how you should go about building a Zero Trust environment. And then further, they have said, here's how we're going to assess if you've reached that point. That's a different behavior than I think, integrators and end customers of the government expect. And so I think that's part of it. I think another part of it is that, in order to build a Zero Trust system that does meet that criteria, it takes more than one company. In fact, for what we announced, back in October, when we were when Dell was saying that we are starting a center of excellence for Zero Trust and doing that out of Columbia, Maryland with Missy, we, we knew that we were going to be integrating a large number of partners. So if we fast forward to what we just talked about, in April of this, April this year, we announced an ecosystem of more than 30 partners. That's a lot of technology to integrate, it's a lot of technology to keep track of in terms of versions and, and configurations. And so the integration burden makes it a challenge for the government to roll out something, the fact that the government is being very prescriptive about what you should do to solve this problem, I think is a bit different. But we're starting to see budgets, we're starting to see we certainly had the Executive Order, we're starting to see budgets for Zero Trust rollout. And so I think that's going to create momentum to having a set of solutions that are consumable and more readily understood.
Mei Zhou
I have a question. So, so basically, the government put out a really complex recipe on how to make this all come together. And we're all part of that, you know, kitchen crew to figure out how to build out this final product. So what makes it you know, the Dell Technologies approach differently than what previously a lot of industry partner have attempt to do this before?
Herb Kelsey
Thank you. I think that some I think that is a key point for us. So I mentioned briefly, in October of last year, what we announced was that Dell was going to establish a center of excellence. That Center of Excellence was so that we could configure and build a system that we could then sell back to the government and sell back to private industry. So I think the fact that we are trying to build a composed solution and deliver a specific technology solution makes things a little bit different. I do think that the choice that we made and why the partnerships with Carahsoft and fed data are so important, the choice that we made, not to try and do this just ourselves, but to bring in the best componentry that we could find in each element of the Zero Trust environment, and be the integrator for that. I think that's differentiating us. And then the last thing that I think that's differentiating us is that we've been clear in our discussions with analysts with the public, that we will be evaluated by the US government that we will, quote, take that test, and be deemed as advanced Zero Trust and meet the criteria for the 152 activities that the US DoD has put forward. So the fact that we're building solution, the fact that we are working very closely with a large number of partners, and that we are we're looking and willing to be assessed by the government, I think are things that that at least stand us apart from the other, from the other partners that we've been that we've been seeing in the marketplace.
Rick Hardy
Very good. Herb, based on Dells, roadmap progress in the Zero Trust architecture arena, what do we expect to see from Dell this year?
Herb Kelsey
Great question. And thanks for your help with the things that we've been working on. We started, we started this journey in, in what probably October of last year, actually building out the system. And we had several milestones. So we've hit our design milestone, we've hit our build milestone, right now we're in a testing and building out our test plans. But what you can expect from us next is that we will go through an assessment by the US government that will be fairly rigorous, to say the least. So we'll go through that assessment. And once we have that assessment, what we will start doing is we will put together a private data center that people can purchase, we will also look to provide that as a managed service, we will bring that down from the enterprise level so that you can do edge computing in a Zero Trust setting, which is of interest to people who have, you know, remote sites or remote locations, and they may be wanting to do data collection and do artificial intelligence there at that ad site. We're also deploying a tactical edge, which for us is a is a mobile command center, that we'll have Zero Trust and 5g combined to show some of those use cases. But the real thing is a small form factor. So that if you have if you have the need to not have a lot of power and a lot of cooling, we'll have that. So we'll have the accreditation, that will happen this year. And then we'll start deploying in these multiple form factors. And we'll have that truck infected at Dell technology world later this month.
Rick Hardy
Oh, that's great. So a quick interesting thing that I learned earlier today and talking to her was that we have an interesting thing in common on 9/11 2001. Herb was downtown New York.
Herb Kelsey
You were at the Pentagon.
Rick Hardy
I was in Arlington County. Yeah. And both of us. Were just in positions to mobilize in order to help you with telecommunications communications in New York, us with communications on the ground with the Pentagon. And it was it was interesting to talk about that considering it was over 20 years old at this point.
Herb Kelsey
It absolutely is. And what's interesting, and you know, the plug is wouldn't it have been nice to have a mobile command center that had its own communications that you knew were secure, that we could have rolled out that you could have rolled up to the Pentagon? Or we could have rolled up down at the mayor's office and allow those first responders to be more effective and efficient. So we've come some ways in those last
Rick Hardy
we have we've worked hard to get here exactly, no, we're both excited about it, because it's been a long time in the making couple of decades. But we're at a point where the technology has matured, our capabilities matured. I believe that I could be wrong, but I believe us and a whole lot of people have worked really hard to mobilize to be able to protect our country, protect our families.
Herb Kelsey
Well, and the partnership So I've matured right willingness to our willingness to interact across the technology sector to, to fulfill a mission. I think that that that thinking has matured as well. And like I said, it's been amazing to be able to work with, with me and her organization in OEM and to work with distributors and integrators like yourselves to be able to do this. That willingness has to be there as well.
Rick Hardy
Very good. So thank you, Dell. Thank you, Carahsoft. One last question. Dell World, Dell technology world is less than a month away. What can we expect to see Dell technology world?
Herb Kelsey
So Dell technology world is less than a month away, and don't we know it? So we've been doing a lot of press, but it's think it's May 22nd to 25th. In Las Vegas, please come. If you come, you will see a focus on security and a focus on Zero Trust. The mobile command center that I spoke about will be on the show floor, it'll be big and blue, you can't miss it. We'll have a number of our partners there that are part of our Zero Trust ecosystem that can talk to you about their components and what they're doing. There'll be pressed our executive leadership is there. You can set up meetings to meet with specific subject matter experts from my team and around the company. And of course, it's Las Vegas, but I will say is there will not be a bourbon. So, you know, you might want to come here for the bourbon and then head out to Vegas, but no, absolutely. Thanks for the poker. All right, no, come to Vegas and meet us at DTW.
Rick Hardy
Great. Thank you, Herb. Thank you, everybody.
Mei Zhou
So I mean, we had an amazing tasting today as well as you know, important topic on Zero Trust. Thank you, Rick, for hosting us in the weather. Amazing. Taste. Cheers.
Maryam Emdadi
Cheers everyone. Thank you for joining us here.
Mei Zhou
All right, that's a wrap.