InterConnect 2017 Conversations: Kevin Jackson talks with Dez Blanchfield

The following is a transcript of a “fireside chat” podcast with Kevin Jackson recorded at IBM InterConnect 2017 in Las Vegas ( USA ).

Listen to the podcast here => http://j.mp/IBMInterConnect2017KevinJackson

Dez Blanchfield:

All right, folks. It’s Dez Blanchfield here. I’m your host for this podcast, and I’m with the legendary Kevin Jackson. Kevin, thanks for joining us.

Kevin Jackson:

No. Thank you very much, Dez.

Dez Blanchfield:

There’s some backstory here. We’ve been chatting for quite some time on Twitter.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah.

Dez Blanchfield:

This is the first time we’ve actually met in person or in real life as they say.

Kevin Jackson:

Right. It’s amazing how the type of relationship you can build over social media.

Dez Blanchfield:

Isn’t it just? What’s interesting is walking around the floor here at IBM InterConnect 2017 at Las Vegas.

There’s like 25,000 attendees, including IBM staff and the folk on the floor with the stands, and the number of folks walk up and say hi and they’re followers and they’re engaged online but you haven’t actually met them in real life.

Kevin Jackson:

Right. There was a gentleman from AT&T. I was just walking and he came up to me and said, “You’re Kevin Jackson,” he said. Oh yeah, I mean, it’s like roadies around.

You don’t even know it. He shook my hand. He said he had been following me. The whole social media thing has created a community.

Dez Blanchfield:

Yeah, absolutely. I think we’ve now transcended, if that’s the right word, from this experience of meeting people in real life and building friendships that way to building friendships through any medium we can, whether it’s LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah.

Dez Blanchfield:

You’ve got a following of like 67,000 people, so it’s little wonder you bump into people in the hallways of events on a regular basis.

According to your profile, you’ve been online and tweeting since 2008. What kind of switched you on to Twitter in particular, and what’s the whole Twitter experience been like for you?

Kevin Jackson:

I actually started writing my blog, and from a social media point of view, that’s where I started. I remember sitting on my porch one day and just reading about blogging. I said, “Oh that’s seems pretty interesting. Maybe I’ll do something.” I just started, and that’s how Cloud Musings began.

It’s grown pretty significantly. We’re getting about 90,000 views a month on that, but I started tweeting to interact with my readers on Cloud Musings.

That just exploded, and started to meet people but also learn more about what’s going on with respect to cloud computing and cyber security from a global basis I got out of my local bubble.

Dez Blanchfield:

It does have a global reach. I’m always astounded by the number of people from different countries that just hang out and reach out as if they’re sitting across the table from me, and just the connectedness as if sitting opposite the table from me as we are now, but I could be talking to someone from anywhere in the world whether China, India, Germany, Ukraine, wherever.

Let’s just quickly talk about some of the topics that you generally focus on. The homework I’ve done on this so far, you’re a technical author, which we’ll get to in a moment with regard to your book. You are a consultant in infrastructure.

You cover cloud computing from top to bottom. You’re across cyber security like no one I’ve ever read before. You’re a solid brand in cognitive computing, and all around I think it’s fair to say you’re a though leader at so many levels I couldn’t count them.

Kevin Jackson:

Thank you.

Dez Blanchfield:

You’re also a certified cloud security instructor, a CCSP. What brought you to become a CCSP?

Kevin Jackson:

I’ve always been focused on cloud computing. When I was at IBM, I left IBM in 2006, but before then I was in mobile wireless and voice. I was a worldwide sales executive for that.

The service oriented architectures, mobile devices and e-business, all of that merged into cloud computing. It was a natural for me to transition into cloud. The very first obstacle you ever get when you’re thinking about cloud computing is security.

Dez Blanchfield:

Indeed.

Kevin Jackson:

I started reading more and more about security, and because of the changes in business models and mission models and the need for the IT professionals to really understand what their business and mission owners are doing, I just started focusing on the data and understanding how to protect the data.

That’s how I got into teaching the certified cloud security professional. Most IT professionals really pride themselves on their ability to do things, how to configure things, what the technology is, how many letters they can get behind their name.

In cloud computing you don’t get the opportunity to touch the technology. It’s abstracted from you, so how do you do security if you can’t even touch the technology? That’s why it seemed to so important to teach IT professionals the difference.

Dez Blanchfield:

You’re absolutely right. One of the first things I learned when I started moving things to the cloud was a phrase that I had heard many times where people say a cloud is just other people’s computers. It’s so true, but you hear these lines about Microsoft and others say we’ve got 3,000 people working on our cloud platform. They’re always going to beat you at security, trust us, etc.

I found a lot of the standard practises and standard design principles and patterns that I would do with hypervisors could, in effect, be put in the cloud, but I couldn’t touch the things. I couldn’t see the routers and the switches.

Couldn’t see the SAN and the server itself. I couldn’t check the bios. I couldn’t see if the encryption was actually really configured on the discs or not. I had to then wind back and un-bundle all those pieces, and effectively work from the worst possible trust scenario and make sure that I ticked and crossed all of the Ts and Is.

It’s interesting you’ve gone down that route. I think when we think about what we’re doing now, particularly what we’re hearing this week at IBM’s InterConnect 2017 when they talk about data first, it’s an interesting view that I think when you go data first, you start naturally to think about the protection of your data and the security of your data and then the ecosystem around that, right?

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah, absolutely. I always say that the first rule of cloud computing is never to trust the infrastructure. The second rule is never to trust the user. This is all around data security. You have to not only understand the data, but classify the data, and understand who you want to share the data with.

You may not know how they’re going to share it or how they’re going to use it. In fact that’s one of the benefits of cloud computing. You don’t need that much knowledge, but you still need to understand how it’s being used, where it’s being used.

Dez Blanchfield:

Definitely. One of the things I’ve also found on the topic is that when people come out of the traditional legacy environments. Let’s just say it’s a big DB2 database. It’s a known and trusted platform. People have been using it for decades.

Then you start using the new modern database platforms that are in the cloud that people tend to lead do, whether it’s NoSQL or Bimodal, you often do an ETL dump and put your data up into the cloud, but a lot of the metadata around the controls and the access and the security components are lost.

You’ve got to refactor that in many ways and say, well who should see this row and field and record and table, and who’s got access to the schemer? That’s a nontrivial exercise in my experience.

Kevin Jackson:

Right.

Dez Blanchfield:

Is that your experience? Do you think it’s more the case that the databases are ultimately similar in that metadata does still carry across?

Kevin Jackson:

Actually, you touched upon two distinct massive changes when it comes to cloud computing. First of all, going from relational database construct to the NoSQL. That really represents the rapid change from structured data to unstructured data. It also is looking at the change from serial data processes to parallel data processes. Cloud computing really is valuable because you can do parallel processes. Traditionally that was very expensive and very hard.

The other thing is that storage used to be very expensive. More’s Law took care of that so storage is cheap. Google really revolutionised the business with search because they recognised that storage was cheap, and there was no need to structure data in order to save money on storage. They leveraged the power of parallelism and that’s why we Google everything today.

The second aspect you touched upon was the metadata. Metadata, or data about the data, is really what you need in order to classify your data. If you don’t know that you’re holding data on, let’s say a European Union citizen where privacy laws are completely different than privacy laws in the United States, you need to understand how to handle that data. The metadata gives you that information and that insight, and the insight is needed so that you can change or modify your processes, your business processes.

Dez Blanchfield:

I think that’s probably one of the most poignant things we’re going to cover this morning. That is the new regulatory requirements from Europe.

We’ve always had very stringent requirements from North America. Australia along with Germany are probably one of the most stringent on privacy. We’ve had this privacy act that goes back forever around what data can and can’t be held inside government, outside government, domestically, outside the country.

In fact there was an interesting thing, I’m sure you know this, said that software’s going to eat the world. I think we’ve learned more than ever, particularly last year at the World Watson event, certainly now at IBM InterConnect, that I think it’s a given that data is actually eating the world.

Kevin Jackson:

Absolutely. The thing that’s really driving decisions in the background, people don’t recognise it, is this data sovereignty issue. Just recently, Russia actually shut LinkedIn down because LinkedIn wasn’t following the laws with respect to the use of data on Russian citizens. This was basically a shot at any international organisation. Today, if you’re on the cloud, you are inherently international.

Dez Blanchfield:

It’s a given, right?

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah.

Dez Blanchfield:

You never know where your next user is going to come from, whether it’s a local or whether it’s someone from the other side of the planet.

There was a great comment, and I forget who it was unfortunately, I wish I could credit them with it, but there was a great comment in one of the keynotes yesterday where someone said that regulatory requirements and governance is only going to continue to increase.

It will never reduce. I wrote it down at the time because I thought this is a really solid punch line that I need to take home with me back to Australia. That is that we are never going to see a time where the regulatory requirements on organisations of any size, whether it’s a mom and pop organisation in a garage or somebody the size of IBM, where the rules that they’re going to have to follow are going to reduce.

They may consolidate in some form into a slightly bigger policy, but it’s going to get more and more complex, particularly now that people are more and more empowered with this whole, I guess, celebrity experience, where people are now taking control of the data, taking control of the experience around their data.

Companies are having to now meet the user at their game rather than telling users to meet them at their game. It’s kind of an interesting time. I want to segue quickly. There was a great quote actually just to jump into here. On your Twitter profile actually, I’m going to read it out quickly and just get your comment on it.

You say that analytics inserts punctuation around data, ordering it into sentences and paragraphs we need to gain basic understanding and new insights. It was interest because I think that in a single sentence paraphrases what this whole week here in Las Vegas has been about, in that when we think about data itself, I think we are entering an era when data almost describes itself and the business logic follows that data-

We’ve seen people come up with concepts like cloud computing, edge analytics, edge computing. Once upon a time we bring all the data back to a central data station, database or a data centre, and then we started moving into centralised cloud locations.

Even with content delivery networks we sort of still had copies of the data in fairly centralised locations, but now when we’ve got aeroplanes that generate 2 1/2 terabytes per flight. I did the math once.

There’s like 87,400 flights a day domestically here in the USA. The new Airbus A330-1000 is going to generate 2 1/2 terabytes of data per flight. With that math, if every single plane in America was at the current level of bios of the modern plane, that’s 220 petabytes of data. We’re never going to copy 220 petabytes of data across any network to a central location or mobile network.

Kevin Jackson:

Never.

Dez Blanchfield:

I think more than anything, the line that you’ve just given us there describes the challenge that we’ve got ahead of us. That is that we have to start thinking about not just the data first, but also the kind of workloads and analytics we want to perform on that data, and what we want to get from that data.

In the day-to-day work that you’re doing, not so much just in security alone, but across all of the data analytics, is it a punch line that you coined because of what you’re seeing, or is that something you saw ahead as a thought leader and now it’s sort of started to ply in people’s minds to get them to think along those lines? Did you witness that and make a comment on it?

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah.

Dez Blanchfield:

Or is that a comment that you put together as a thought leader?

Kevin Jackson:

I was asked what was the power or why is data analytics so important. You brought up the fact that a single aeroplane is creating out data. What about all of the autonomous vehicles that are running around?

The cars and underwater vehicles, even the drones that are going to be delivering your next package from Amazon? Where is that data? What are the laws or the rules that are covering that data? This is why the IT professional really needs to broaden their understanding of the world.

You’re not running the infrastructure anymore. You are really managing the data of the world, so you have to understand the legal ramifications, the business ramifications, the personal privacy ramifications.

In the past, you’ve always been told as a professional, don’t do anything without talking to your lawyer. Do you think your lawyer understands cloud computing? No. Your lawyer is going to be coming to talk to you.

Dez Blanchfield:

Absolutely.

Kevin Jackson:

Analytics takes data, and then delivers insight about that data. The insight is what drives the actions of an individual and of an organisation.

That’s what I meant by put the punctuation around the data. Without punctuation and words, you would just have a bunch of letters and it has no meaning, but once you put the punctuation in, then it goes, it transitions from just data to information. With information, you gather insight. That was sort of the thought process.

Dez Blanchfield:

That drives us into the idea that we are now more and more data driven entities, organisations. Humans think that they’re in control of their lives, but really they’re driven by the data and the influences around them that are powered by data.

That leads us into an interesting thing, because you mentioned autonomous cars. I did some homework on autonomous cars recently for another event I was a part of and speaking at. It turns out that the average autonomous vehicle is estimated to produce 4 petabytes of data a day.

Kevin Jackson:

Right.

Dez Blanchfield:

By the time is has lidar and sonar and other things, and then all the other tracking and tracing. Now obviously it doesn’t store it and keep it, but it just generates the data. Then it brings us to an interesting question.

Which of that data needs to be then kept and stored? In a scenario where, for example, Mercedes has put out a prototype of one of their autonomous vehicles and they’ve made it one of their most expensive models by the sounds of things.

They’ve actually come out publicly and stated that they had to get their programmers to codify philosophy in that they’ve had to get to the point where there’s a logic built into the car as an autonomous vehicle to work out who to kill in an accident.

Does it drive into a pole and stop the car quickly and potentially hurt the passenger that owns the car or is paying for the service, or does it run over an elderly person on the corner who’s got his life lived?

Kevin Jackson:

Right.

Dez Blanchfield:

Now we’re asking programmers to think about data in real time, particularly the scale of like 4 petabytes of data in an autonomous vehicle, and codify philosophy. Again, data drives a lot of that thinking because what data have I got access to, and how quickly can I get access to that data to make a decision?

This car is doing 50-60 kilometres an hour at the least in a built up area and needs to instantly make a decision. I’m about to have an accident. I’ve detected a scenario where I can’t get out of having an accident. Do I run over the puppy dog? Do I run over the grandma? Do I hurt the guy in the car?

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah.

Dez Blanchfield:

That’s a whole podcast on its own, but do you think that people even have begun to conceive that challenge that you just alluded to a moment ago which is, or even highlighted more around the fact that people are having to think about data in such different ways and understand the holistic view of the world, not just what am I doing with this user subscription form or what am I doing with this bank statement.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah, and I think you have unwittingly crossed into another area, and that’s cognitive computing.

Dez Blanchfield:

Absolutely. Nice segue.

Kevin Jackson:

A human, even if you had all that data, your brain cannot process and respond to it in enough time. Naturally you would need to have something like the IBM Watson that’s collecting all that data.

Now who makes the decision if the puppy dog goes or Grandma goes or you go when you go into the tree? It’s going to be a cognitive computer somewhere. It’s not just Watson. Things like the Salesforce Einstein. That’s all about customer relationship management. There’s more and more cognitive beings being created.

Dez Blanchfield:

In fact there was an interesting line from the fellow from Twitter the other day on day one’s keynote. He said that when we think about what we’re doing with cognitive, and I think the folk from Salesforce said the same thing, that businesses now don’t need to think about finding users. They don’t need to think about where the data is coming from. Platforms like Twitter provide the users.

Platforms like Salesforce have already got the customers, adding cognitive into that. Now it just allows those people who are leveraging those platforms, who use Twitter for social and some sort of social enterprise engagement in my view, or whether it’s Salesforce for their CRM and other functions because it’s an extensive platform, they can now start to think how do I apply cognitive to some of the challenges I’ve got? Do I use it to classify PDF documents people are signing by hand and scanning and sending in? Whatever that use case may be.

With what you’re doing every day, are you seeing people come to grips with what cognitive is going to mean to them or are they adopting it? Have they started to do some trials and proof of concepts? Are they putting it into practise? What is your general sense on the ground on a day-to-day basis of what you’re doing professionally beyond these events?

Events like this are great because you’ve got 25,000 birds of a feather, but when we go back home, in your experience with who you’re seeing, is Einstein being used broadly through Salesforce? Is the Watson data platform being used in places in your experience, or are people still just figuring out how to start?

Kevin Jackson:

I don’t think the masses really understand the advances that we’ve seen in cognitive computing over the past few years. Think about it. You go and do your taxes in the United States, and you sit down at a computer. People are used to things they can see and they can touch, not the virtual infrastructure that’s behind that computer.

The fact that the cognitive being, Watson, is sitting there interacting with you just doesn’t register. When you are a sales person using Salesforce, I really don’t think that day-to-day you say, I’m talking with Einstein, yet another cognitive being. The fact that, one, Einstein, the other, Watson, are now going to be communicating to one another, what does that mean?

I’m sure you’ve seen Terminator. That’s what people think when they think about cognitive beings, but that’s not reality. I love Terminator just like everybody else, but we won’t get there any time soon, ever, I believe.

Dez Blanchfield:

I totally agree. I’m very much of the view, and people poo-poo me on this, but I don’t think we’re ever going to get to Terminator.

Kevin Jackson:

No.

Dez Blanchfield:

When we think about Terminator the movie, we’ve essentially humanised this concept of a robot and a AI and a whole range of other things. Robotics is really hard. Getting things to be bipedal is really difficult. There’s a whole bunch of labs doing it around the world. The cognitive piece is hard.

Then the sentience is really hard. In fact there was a really interesting comment made by Ginni Rommetty when she was on stage yesterday. She said that humans make around about 5 percent of errors in a number of things, whether it’s listening to a sentence spoken, written, whatever the case may be, and she said that at the moment, they’ve got Watson down at 5.5 percent.

Kevin Jackson:

Right.

Dez Blanchfield:

It’s essentially half a percent away from being relatively similar to human cognitive, but as you said, it’s behind the data entry form, it’s behind the analytic engineer, it’s behind the database platform, and it’s making decisions similar to us in that it can potentially see and hear and speak, but it isn’t packaged up in a Terminator style robot that’s going to chase us and put us through the back window, right?

Kevin Jackson:

No, not at all. Right.

Dez Blanchfield:

I totally agree with you. My personal experience has been very similar to yours in that, and I’m going to jump into a segue with that in a minute with regards to Australia, in that not only are people struggling to come to terms with the concepts that the likes of Watson and Einstein present because we’ve been exposed to the likes of Siri, for example, for nearly a decade, let’s say. Then we’ve had the Google assistant.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah, Alexa and all those.

Dez Blanchfield:

Alexa, exactly. People have thought they were AIs when they’re not. They’re really just digital systems. You can’t have a conversation. I made this comment the other day to someone and I said, “Well, do you talk to your phone or do you talk with your phone?” They’re very, very different.

They’re talking to it. Speaking to my phone saying, Alexa or Google or Siri, what’s the time? That’s just speech to text, a database query for example, or whatever the case may be, or some other business logic component and then text to speech again. I’m talking to my phone as opposed to talking with my phone.

Kevin Jackson:

With my phone, right.

Dez Blanchfield:

I think that’s the shift we’re now seeing with what we can do with Alexa and Watson, where we can talk with our phone, which would be awesome. Do you think humans are ready for that though?

If we take the Terminator image away and we strip all that down just to the current experience with have with computers where we’re talking to them potentially, do you think we’re ready as humans to talk with our computers and our apps? It’s quite a big leap, I think, for humanity in general.

Kevin Jackson:

It is, but you also, if you think about it, humans just don’t communicate with words. There is an analogue aspect of communication that these machines, actually we’re not even using, not even addressing. Watson is great, but if you’re talking to Watson you can’t see the facial expression. You can’t see the hand wave, and 75 percent of the communications that you have with a human is nonverbal.

Dez Blanchfield:

Absolutely.

Kevin Jackson:

Even if all of the sentient beings in the world were human-like, you would still miss maybe 75 percent of the communications capabilities.

Dez Blanchfield:

Ginni Rometty actually touched on that at World of Watson actually, just a recap on that. One of my biggest takeaways from that event last year was when she got up and front of a stadium in front of I think it was 23,000 people and she touched on five key points which I won’t go into in detail now, but it was essentially like health and music and a range of things around that.

I made a note about the fact that they were humanities topics. They were topics about humans and human beings and human interest.

You’re absolutely right about the gestures. Just us sitting here and the eye contact and the hand gestures, that’s a big leap away from software just helping to fill in forms. When you go to Google and it predicts what you’re going to type, and we think that’s AI when it’s actually just predicting based on an algorithm that said that a million other people within the last 20 minutes looked for the same thing.

I don’t personally know if humans are ready for it. I think the beautiful people, the 1 percent, are ready for it because we’ve had exposure to a lot of technology. Then other people I talk to argue that maybe the rest of the world is just going to switch on to it and just get it in the same way they just got mobile phones. Smartphones came out and they just got them.

Maybe I’m wrong and I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t think they’re ready for it to learn about it, I just think there’s going to some sticker shock element to people that have had little to no experience with technology in general, and then going directly from that experience we’ve seen with villages in the Amazonian forest where aeroplanes fly over and-

Kevin Jackson:

Right, and they start shooting arrows at it. Right.

Dez Blanchfield:

I think there’s an element of that coming where the bulk of humanity hasn’t had access to technology, hasn’t had access to the kind of stuff we’re talking about.

Kevin Jackson:

You’re right.

Dez Blanchfield:

I think it’s been an interesting time. My parents’ generation and their parents’ generation saw TV and radio come in and that was an interesting little shift for them. We’ve seen internet and computers come along in a completely different sense than my parents’ generation.

I don’t really know if we’re ready for cognitive at that level. Definitely in the applications for form filling, I just know if we’re ready for the human piece. I’m going to jump into a quickie here. There was an OMG moment yesterday, by the way.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah.

Dez Blanchfield:

One, I want you to explain how your ear became famous. You got a selfie with Ginni Rometty. How did that happen? Walk us through what happened there because everybody was leaving the stadium and you must have hung around and met her. That was wild.

Kevin Jackson:

It was kind of interesting. I was invited here as a social influencer. One of the things you always want to do as a social influencer on Twitter is try to get a picture. As we’ve said many times, it’s not real unless you get a selfie. I happened to be fairly close to Chairwoman Rometty, so I said, why not? Go for it.

A couple of other of people were there also. Joe Wiseman for one, and he asked, as he said, just a random person to take a picture as we do often nowadays. We all got together with Ginni and took the picture, and behold, the only thing of me on the picture was my left ear.

Dez Blanchfield:

I laughed for two minutes at that. I couldn’t catch my breath for two minutes. I saw you tweeted that. Well, I’m famous. My left ear. I did notice you got the full horizontal selfie.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah, shortly after that.

Dez Blanchfield:

You look like a very happy fellow.

Kevin Jackson:

Shortly after that, Ginni was very gracious enough to say, okay, let’s take a selfie together, so I got my OMG moment with the chairwoman.

Dez Blanchfield:

That’s fantastic. Those are the kind of things you just take away for life. She seems so down to earth.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah, she is very nice, very smart, and was just amazing to be able to sit there and talk with her.

Dez Blanchfield:

When you think about who she is, as Marc Benioff from Salesforce probably did the best job I’ve heard for a long time of essentially just congratulating her or even recognising her as a person beyond the CEO, beyond the chairman role, beyond IBM, I mean globally here’s a women who’s working for LGBT rights, women’s rights, girls who can code, etc.

She just came back from China and put together a deal with the Wonder Group. Who would even imagine that this person could do all that in one day and still run one of the most successful and long-running and physically large organisations on the planet and still catch her breath and get on a plane and come to an event like this?

Kevin Jackson:

What’s really amazing-

Dez Blanchfield:

And take a selfie.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah, and take a selfie. Think about the vision this woman has. She not only has the vision, but the stamina to execute on that vision. This is just simply amazing.

Dez Blanchfield:

I’m certainly envious. We talked about this earlier on, so I hope you don’t mind me jumping into it.

Kevin Jackson:

Sure.

Dez Blanchfield:

I want to throw a couple of these rapid-fire, 30-second thought sound bites at you. There are three key things in particular that we’ve taken away from the last couple days that IBM has presented to us: the concept of enterprise strong, data first, and cognitive at the core.

If you don’t mind, can I just throw these at you one at a time and get your 30-second quick, off the top of your head, not overly thought through? Enterprise strong, what does that really mean based on what you’ve seen the last couple of days? What’s IBM trying to convey with enterprise strong as a concept?

Kevin Jackson:

Ready for business, ready for the mission. Whatever you need to do, enterprise strong cloud means that you can do it with the assurance that your data, your private data, is protected, and that you can also leverage that data to communicate and interact with your ecosystem. That’s enterprise strong.

Dez Blanchfield:

Perfect. You touched on a key point there where IBM highlighted at one of the keynotes I went to, where you put your data in a cloud, and they’re not going to monetize your data for their gain. There’s going to be governance and control around who has access to your data, even within your organisation.

Whether it goes into Watson, whether it goes into the Watson data platform, whether it goes into Watson machine learning, any insights, any value that comes from that data is exclusively yours and there’s governance around that to protect that, which I thought was a really interesting take away because that’s one of the big fear factors as you outlined around security early on.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah, absolutely.

Dez Blanchfield:

Second point, data first, 30-second rapid fire on data first. What’s IBM conveying with that topic?

Kevin Jackson:

Data describes the world, and without that description you can’t get insight into what’s happening and you can’t make decisions. The first place you start has to be the data.

Dez Blanchfield:

Fantastic. Third one, cognitive at the core. I really like this. I’m going to get T-shirts printed with that on them.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah.

Dez Blanchfield:

We’ve heard it for three days actually because it was also tabled at the open tech summit on day zero, I’m calling it, on Sunday, which was really a birds of a feather meet-up for open source techies. Cognitive at the core in 30 seconds.

Kevin Jackson:

That means having a vision for the data. Just having data doesn’t mean anything. The metadata is very important, but cognitive is bringing meaning out of the data and the metadata. If you have a vision that your cloud is cognitive to the core, that means your cloud has the vision to help you analyse, understand, and draw out the true meaning of your data.

Dez Blanchfield:

Wow. They’re almost like tweets just written into the data. I’m going to circle back to you now, because the main driver for not just getting time with you with this podcast was to get to know you, Kevin Jackson.

You founded a project called GovCloud Network in 2013, so that’s roughly about 3 1/2 years ago. Can you give us a quick outline in a couple minutes of what GovCloud Network is and what brought you to create that concept and how that’s running so far?

Kevin Jackson:

Sure, absolutely. GovCloud is government cloud. A few years ago I was in an enviable position to be helping the federal government develop governance around the federal risk and authorization in management programme, or FEDRAMP.

This is the governance for the United States government community cloud. I had the opportunity to meet and work with Vivek Kundra, who was President Obama’s chief information officer.

Dez Blanchfield:

Wow.

Kevin Jackson:

I also worked with NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. There’s a group of us. GovCloud had its genesis there because many organisations really didn’t understand what cloud was.

In fact, the agencies couldn’t do anything, they couldn’t contract because there was no official definition of what cloud was. When Vivek Kundra announced the cloud first policy, they actually couldn’t do anything.

Dez Blanchfield:

Yeah, there’s no rules there. There’s no policies.

Kevin Jackson:

There were no rules, no governance, no policies.

Dez Blanchfield:

No one knew where to start.

Kevin Jackson:

Right. GovCloud Network was my attempt to start to educate the government marketplace on what cloud computing was, what FEDRAMP was going to be, how agencies could enhance and improve their missions through the use of cloud computing.

Since then, other industry verticals have actually looked at cloud and to be honest, they’ve overtaken the government industry with respect to the use of cloud. Now GovCloud Network actually supports multiple industry verticals with respect to digital publishing and education.

Dez Blanchfield:

You touched on an interesting point there. I spend quite a bit of time consulting to federal government myself. Not so much state government. They seem to be a bit more tuned in. When you said that enterprise was able to overtake government, they don’t necessarily have the same compliance and regulatory requirements.

We often see the digital natives or the cloud natives as people talk about them, whether it’s the Ubers or the Facebooks. They make up the rules as they go in many ways. They do things and ask for forgiveness later, but you can’t do that with government, can you?

Kevin Jackson:

No. No, you can’t.

Dez Blanchfield:

You eventually go to gaol if you don’t do the right thing.

Kevin Jackson:

You can do that. Some recent history in the United States, you can see how that happens.

Dez Blanchfield:

Or you leave the country and don’t come back.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah, leave the country and then don’t come back.

Dez Blanchfield:

Tweet from Russia.

Kevin Jackson:

There is a big difference between commercial industry vertical and the government. In commercial, a CEO makes a decision and everyone else says yes sir or yes ma’am, and you go ahead and do it. The measure is the stock price. If it tanks, you’re no longer CEO.

The government, on the other hand, has a much broader mission. You don’t keep score by the amount of money the government makes or the amount of money the government spends. You keep score by how the constituents feel, how they live, how they act. It’s a completely different mindset.

Dez Blanchfield:

I often look at it from this point of view. I once came up with this coinage where when someone asks me the difference between working with federal government versus working with enterprise, I said, “People leave the office at 5:30 on a Friday and go home and go to soccer and football and baseball, and they don’t sweat the detail. If government goes home on Friday night, the lights go out on the country.” It’s a different ball game.

You were recently in Australia for this purpose. You were in my capital city.

Kevin Jackson:

I was in Canberra. Beautiful city, by the way.

Dez Blanchfield:

Tell us a bit about what you were doing there and who you were doing it with, or you probably can’t disclose it necessarily, but tell us how did that come about, and what did it entail, and when can we expect to see you back in Australia?

Kevin Jackson:

First of all, I hope to get back there as soon as possible.

Dez Blanchfield:

Fantastic.

Kevin Jackson:

I was invited to come and present a course. As you said earlier, I am an instructor for the course, the Certified Cloud Security Professional. Some of the government organisations are looking at leveraging cloud and, as always, security is the very first aspect.

I delivered a five-day course on cloud security and how to best leverage cloud with respect to the government mission. While I was there I had a couple of meetings with the cyber security organisation there in Australian government. They hope, I believe, they asked if I’d be interested in collaborating with them, so I’m looking forward to going back and working more with the Aussie government.

Dez Blanchfield:

I’ll be definitely helping to engineer that for you. Interestingly, there was a delegate from Australia that came across for a security conference recently. The government actually reached out to a bunch of us.

Unfortunately I already had another commitment so I couldn’t make it, but the Australian government was pulling a whole range of cyber risk, cyber security professionals, particularly with a cloud focus, and also big government analytics. They didn’t touch on cognitive though, which was disappointing, and they put them across from, I think it was the RSA conference.

It was just a resounding success because all of a sudden the government was leading again in a space that it had been in catch-up mode. With that in mind, how do you think countries like Australia rate on a global scale? Not necessarily just against America, but against the rest of the world?

How did you perceive the Australian government to rate as far as their preparedness and readiness, their awareness? On a 1 to 10, are we kind of a 3 or a 5 or are we a 7 as far as how we’re coping with cyber risk, cyber security, and cloud preparedness?

Kevin Jackson:

To be honest, I would say that Australia is probably on par with countries like the UK and the US. They’re really focused on trying to leverage it. The countries that are really out in front are Singapore and Estonia, where they have taken this idea and they started working it years ago, and they had smaller populations.

Because of their government structure they were able to operate and work much faster than these larger countries. Those are the ones in the world.

Dez Blanchfield:

I guess they can bet the farm on it in many ways. I remember recently Estonia essentially transitioned the entire nation to Blockchain for example.

Kevin Jackson:

Yes.

Dez Blanchfield:

What’s your take to that kind of shift? That’s a holy grail move. It’s like all or nothing, isn’t it?

Kevin Jackson:

Yes, it is. Blockchain is really amazing in that this is not new technology, just like cloud computing isn’t new technology. Cloud computing is efficient and effective because of standardisation and automation.

Blockchain is taking things that were basically just laying around on the floor and putting them together so that you have immutable data so that you could create information and data and prove that it hasn’t been changed in any way.

Dez Blanchfield:

It’s a really big math problem, isn’t it? I recently drew on a whiteboard. Someone said explain Blockchain to me. I said, imagine this is block zero and it’s got checks off. Then we link block one to its checks off is made up of its own content and the prior block. I did that up to five or six blocks and I said, well that’s not so bad.

You get to the fifth block and you can still technically do the math by hand, but then you get 5 billion blocks out. With Bitcoin for example, I read recently and I have looked at the latest stats, we’ve created more Bitcoin than there are particles in the known universe.

That’s a really big number. To get to the last block in the Bitcoin, and to try and change it, you have to go and recalculate the checks off for every one of the other blocks in the chain.

If there’s more Bitcoins than here are particles in the universe, it’s a very nontrivial mathematical problem. So much so that Bitcoin mining is actually one of the greatest consumptions of power in the planet.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah, I heard Bitcoin mining is now effecting global warming.

Dez Blanchfield:

That’s quite scary, right?

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah.

Dez Blanchfield:

Then when you think about the fact that there’s just one copy of them, and I think the last time I looked there was roughly 2,600 copies of the full block chain replicated around the planet, which Australia proudly is out in front of, you then go to trillions of blocks, recalculations.

Then you’ve got to have roughly 2 1/2 thousand copies of those trillions. It’s not only a nontrivial exercise, you just physically can’t do it. We don’t have the math, even with a quantum computer it would take a few seconds I’m sure.

We touched on it in the last couple of days with some of the stuff people are talking about here at InterConnect, but I think it’s still quite a long way as far as people coming in groups of things like just big data cloud analytics.

Cognitive is still kind of leading edge, so I think Blockchain is going to be one of these things where I don’t know that we don’t need to be ready for them. I’m really keen to get your thoughts on this.

My view is I don’t know if people need to fully comprehend it or get ready for it because I think like databases, Blockchain would just be built into the technology and we’d just take it for granted. Is that your take on it as well?

Kevin Jackson:

Right, absolutely. Blockchain isn’t really about Bitcoin.

Dez Blanchfield:

No.

Kevin Jackson:

It’s about data provenance. Everything we’ve just talked about is being driven by data. If you can leverage Blockchain to ensure data provenance no matter what infrastructure you’re using, you can really then see the power of combining Blockchain and cloud computing. This is one of my biggest take aways here at InterConnect 2017.

IBM has taken the giant leap forward to say, look, this is really about the data. It’s really about data provenance, and if you can take Blockchain, put it with cognitive, and protect the data and deliver it anywhere through the IBM cloud, it’s a game changer for any industry.

Dez Blanchfield:

I think we get to the point now where things like Blockchain are going to have to be built into the DNA of things we have for all those reasons.

Kevin Jackson:

Yes.

Dez Blanchfield:

When we think about the key themes of this particular event that I made note of, Watson data platform, Watson machine learning, the whole concept of data management, platforms like Hadoop and Spark, and all the other things we’re seeing being presented. The key theme is data, data, data.

Kevin Jackson:

Yes.

Dez Blanchfield:

It reminds me of the quote from I think it’s Sherlock. Data, data, data. I can’t make bricks with clay. There’s very little we can build without data.

Coming back to that point of data governance, when we think about the challenge of data governance, of not just putting things on the cloud but we’re then cloud bursting from on-prem to public cloud and maybe there’s secure public cloud.

There’s things like the Watson data platform and putting data in there for various reasons, with Watson’s machine learning. We’re moving data in and out of tools and platforms.

What’s your thinking around the challenges that organisations are facing when they may have a data leak in the cloud, but they’re pushing out into platforms like Hadoop and Spark that might be using machine learning on demand to do some form of classification.

The challenge of tracking and managing the governance around that data movement, general thoughts on what that looks like from a control point of view given your experience in security in particular in the cloud?

How do we get our head around the idea that I’m going to take some data and just push it into a machine learning engine for a period of time like the Watson machine learning platform and then bring back the insights?

How do I get my head around the idea that my little bubble that I would normally protect my data with gets a few little spikes poked into it to get to other systems?

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah, this is one of the biggest challenges around IT today. Things are moving so fast our culture can’t catch up. A culture change necessitates understanding and knowledge and experience. That’s where we are falling behind. The faster technology changes, the less percentage of society actually experiences those changes.

If you don’t experience the change, you can’t learn from the change. That means the culture doesn’t change. This whole idea of data, being able to exchange data, machine learning, the industries, the companies, they haven’t built governance to take into account all these changes.

Dez Blanchfield:

When I started doing some writing on this topic years ago, I used the example of the impact of radio.

Kevin Jackson:

Yes.

Dez Blanchfield:

The impact of TV, right? When you talk about the exposure to data that people have and the experience they have with it and the transition of their coping mechanism with it. When radio came along it was in our face.

We could hear it and we were impacted. Things like advertising, there weren’t laws around advertising so people got away with murder for a little while.

Kevin Jackson:

Yes.

Dez Blanchfield:

Then we controlled it. Then TV got the same thing. If you look at things like the Vietnam War, America reacted very badly to that because of the release of colour TV and cheap TVs on people’s kitchen tables. The news and the data was right in front of them.

Their reaction was very solid and strong and immediate, and there was governance and controls and laws around it. When it’s things like data and the tools, the machine learning tools, the analytics tools, the cognitive tools behind the scenes, we don’t see those. I think you’re absolutely right. In fact I think we should blog that.

It’s a tangential thing. We get the output and we experience the benefit, but we don’t interact directly with it necessarily. Even talking to Siri I’m really just throwing words at her. I don’t really know what’s happening with the thousands or hundreds or millions of machines behind the scene and the software, whereas TV and radio was right in my face.

Kevin Jackson:

You stopped at radio. What about Twitter. We’re now getting all of information interaction through Twitter. There are no rules and laws on Twitter.

Dez Blanchfield:

Wow.

Kevin Jackson:

Some say that the current US president is the first Twitter president. Some actually credit his ability to leverage Twitter to sway the electorate. All of that is data. Who is using that data? How is it being used? Where is it being used? This is interesting.

Dez Blanchfield:

I think it’s well and truly on record, in fact, that Obama was famous for having leveraged data and analytics to get into his first and second term.

Kevin Jackson:

Absolutely.

Dez Blanchfield:

I think the current president, Donald Trump, not only did that but leveraged social and other components that modern people, certainly young voters, were being influenced and it was their new reality. I want to circle back to a topic that we just got done with, machine learning particularly. I think AI and cognitive and a whole range of these things like Blockchain, they’re all well and good because they’re coming at us.

They’re not necessarily in everyday life yet, but I think machine learning is in everyday life in my experience, and it’s being used in a number of ways because it’s fairly accessible technology.

Even if it’s the case of I’m filling in a form and sending it in and a computer looks at the PDF and pulls things out of it and makes some sort of determination around whether I’ve completed the form correctly and whether it’s going to take that semi-structured data and put it in a structured data or into a traditional SQL database.

Can you give us your views on what the impact of machine learning has been of late, with the types of organisations that you deal with day-to-day?

Kevin Jackson:

The power of machine learning is actually not in interactive, not in the interaction with humans. It’s in the interaction between machines.

Dez Blanchfield:

Good point.

Kevin Jackson:

It’s the machine to machine space. It’s the ability for your car to talk to the car next to you. It’s the ability of the washing machine to talk to Watson and then to talk to Haven, for instance. This is where everything is going to revolutionise our lives and revolutionise society. We won’t see it because it won’t be with us. It will be part of the fabric of life.

Dez Blanchfield:

Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. With that in mind, you mentioned before there’s a big shift from on premise and the traditional database environments to cloud and cloud hosted environments, NoSQL databases and so forth. Machine learning is completely changing the way that we do that behind the scenes, inside the fabric, heavy lifting of some of the thinking.

What does that mean to the likes of DB2 and other what some people might call legacy database platforms? I don’t really like the word legacy because they’re still being used every day.

There’s an entire stream here for it. With the likes of DB2, what does it mean for DB2? Does machine learning just make it more relevant? Does it give it current relevance? Is it going to go away? What are your general thoughts on platforms like DB2 and other large traditional OLTPN and relational database systems?

Kevin Jackson:

I’ll address that by saying aren’t we in a paperless society? Why are you sitting here with a paper and a pen and trying to write when you have a computer? Because that’s the right tool for the job.

Dez Blanchfield:

Good point. Yeah.

Kevin Jackson:

DB2 is the right tool for some jobs. If you have a serial process, if you have where it may not be economically feasible to change a process or to rehost a process, the relational database, the tools that we use for that will always have a place in the world.

Dez Blanchfield:

You’ve nailed it. That was the best 30-second sound bite ever. I’ve been hearing it from CIOs and DBAs around the whole country of Australia that they are absolutely fed up with this cloud, cloud, cloud concept because they see less than 2-5 percent of the data going to the cloud for any reason immediately, and their stronghold is we’re staying with the DB2s of the world or whatever it might be.

That’s what we know. That’s what’s solid. That’s what’s secure. That’s what we’ve proven. That’s the technology we currently have. We’ll start to think about cloud when it makes sense.

I think you’re absolutely right. I’ve actually written it down because I like that line. DB2 is the right tool for some jobs. Relational database management systems and SQL in particular is not going away.

Kevin Jackson:

It’s not going away.

Dez Blanchfield:

There’s still a lot of investment going into it, and a lot of adoption.

Kevin Jackson:

There’s a lot of value.

Dez Blanchfield:

Absolutely, yeah. We don’t want to put all those petabytes running around into an e-database or even in the cloud. Do we really? With the topic of data links, what’s your general sense of the size of the average data link? People talk about data links in petabytes and so forth.

My general sense is that they’re not. They’re hundreds of terabytes of unstructured data. What have you seen out there as far as the day-to-day protection goes as far as the average size and scale of the data link?

Kevin Jackson:

I don’t know what the average size and scale is, but I do know that people still horde and protect their data as if it’s their own. It’s just like the older versions of data centres. How did you build a data centre?

You’d go to the organisation and say, “What do you expect?” You would carve out a particular square foot. That was their data centre, their part of the data centre.

Data links are the same. We’re not integrating the data in data links yet. Every organisation has its own bit of the pie because they haven’t figured out how to apply governance across the entire organisation.

Dez Blanchfield:

That leads me to one of the last couple things I want to touch on because I know I’ve taken up a lot of your time. We’re getting close to the hour.

Kevin Jackson:

Oh no problem.

Dez Blanchfield:

I wanted to tell you thank you very much for a gift you’ve given me. The listeners are not going to be able to see it so I’m going to describe it. I’m holding a hard copy cover of your Practical Cloud Security:

A Cross-Industry View, a book you’ve written on the whole topic that you focus on. It’s personally signed. Thank you very much for that.

Kevin Jackson:

No, my pleasure.

Dez Blanchfield:

Nothing gives me more joy than reading somebody’s book and having a signed copy. Give us a couple minutes on what brought the book about, what caused you to write it, what’s in the book, and why people are going to now go and buy it straight away and have the same experience I’m about to have, and thank you very much for it?

It looks like a fantastic tome of everything I could imagine I need to know about practical cloud security. Give us a couple minutes summary on what kind of drove you to write it, what’s in it, and what can they expect when they buy a copy and read it?

Kevin Jackson:

Sure, absolutely. We’ve talked a lot about data, but we haven’t really addressed what’s distinct about data. Yesterday at the IBM chairman’s talk, she talked about the fact that Watson understands different industries.

Industry A uses data and sees data different than Industry B. Doesn’t it make sense that if you’re going to be in a cloud, you’ll have to protect it differently.

You have different laws. You have different rules. You have different regulatory bodies. That’s what the book is about. Data protection, yes, is very important but the industry to which that data is related is also important, and it may drive or limit the security steps that you may need to take for that data.

In this book we looked at data for healthcare. We looked at data for finance. We looked at data for government. We said all of these are going into the cloud, but each of them have different priorities with respect to how and whether to protect the data and what the regulatory controls are on that data.

Dez Blanchfield:

Looking through the table of contents, it covers almost everything I could imagine from general cloud use, the economics of cloud computing, all the way through to deployment models, managing risk in the cloud, all the way through to policy and compliance.

This is a really in-depth book. How long did it take to prepare and get from the idea to a first draught and publishing?

Kevin Jackson:

My co-author, Melvin Greer, he’s currently with Intel, and he’s driving a lot of the work at Intel around the internet of things. We worked together for quite a few years around cloud and cyber security.

We were talking about the fact that cloud, the general cloud, was overshadowing all the distinct differences with respect to industries. That drove our discussion. We also did a study for the Cyber Security Institute in Washington, D.C.

That study was a bunch of interviews with active chief information security officers. We asked them things like, are you going to the cloud? Why not? Which type of hybrid IT infrastructure do you expect to use?

What type of training are you having or do you give to your team? What type of support? Do you sit at the table with respect to decisions? The responses to those interviews also showed a wide disparity between different industries. That actually drove the book.

Dez Blanchfield:

I can’t wait to read it. It’s called Practical Cloud Security: A Cross-Industry View, by Melvin Greer and Kevin Jackson. Check it out on Amazon, I guess.

Kevin Jackson:

Yes, it is available on Amazon.

Dez Blanchfield:

It looks amazing, and thank you very much for it again.

Kevin Jackson:

No, thank you for the opportunity.

Dez Blanchfield:

Before we wrap up, because we’re getting to the top of the hour, and thank you so much for making time available. I absolutely loved meeting you in person. We’ve got some great selfie moments.

Kevin Jackson:

This is good, yes.

Dez Blanchfield:

I’ve got this fun pun, if you like, play on words, around what’s on the horizon for the rest of 2017.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah.

Dez Blanchfield:

Watson the horizon. IBM’s going to love it. In a couple minutes, just to wrap up really quickly, and thank you again for your time, what do you see coming up for the rest of 2017? Just this year, not beyond that, but just this year.

We’ve still got the bulk of the year ahead of us. In rapid-fire form, what’s the general sense of what the rest of the year looks like within the context of what we’ve seen this week? I think we’ve seen some pretty astounding things this week.

Kevin Jackson:

Yeah. First of all, it’s not about cloud. You may now be surprised by this statement, but it’s about hybrid IT. It’s leveraging cloud with traditional IT with IT that you have an IT that you don’t have. This is at the heart of the digital transformation of just about every organisation in every industry.

This digital transformation demands understanding. It demands the knowledge. This year, organisations need to gain that understanding, gain that knowledge, in order to be successful. This year is about how do I leverage digital transformation and how do I leverage cognitive computing in order to build my position within my industry.

Dez Blanchfield:

You touch on something that we refer to generally as bi-modal. I had someone recently on Twitter refer to it as bi-muddle because she thinks that people are fuddling through. I said that I’m a Harry Potter fan, so I think it’s actually bi-muggle. We need some magic in this whole thing to make it work.

Kevin, look, it’s been a fantastic hour to hang out with you. Thank you so much for making time to catch up with us.

Kevin Jackson:

No, thank you Dez. I really enjoyed it. We need to do it again.

Dez Blanchfield:

We’ll have to do this again.

Kevin Jackson:

Yes.

Dez Blanchfield:

We’re going to find reasons to get you back to Australia. This time you’re going to stay in Sydney, not Canberra.

Kevin Jackson:

All right.

Dez Blanchfield:

Again, thanks so much for the book.

Kevin Jackson:

My pleasure.

Dez Blanchfield:

It’s been an absolute pleasure hanging out with you for an hour. I can’t wait to do it again soon.

Kevin Jackson:

Great. Thanks.