Information Security

TAKEAWAY: INFORMATION SECURITY

Well, Joe [Tucci] could give a complete lecture on this topic [of information security threats]. We were in Davos together, and I actually saw him give a great talk in front of Bill Gates and a whole bunch of CEOs from the technology industry from all over the world. It’s a race without a finish line. The one thing that we have learned is this Snowden situation has raised and heightened the awareness of security to a completely different level. If you go not just in the United States, but especially if you go to Europe or places like Germany, there is just tremendous concern around security.

So I think companies that have great solutions, like EMC, VMware, and hopefully, as well, SAP, we try to provide security and secure clouds in particular as our way of saying, put your business and your risk in the hands of the best ones. Because security and the way you manage those customer relationships are going to be so important.

But what I also see is a very difficult situation in getting people to agree on global clouds, where they’re much more interested now in the European cloud or the US cloud or the China-only cloud. This makes things difficult, because it makes things difficult to share knowledge and share information across borders. So we got to work on it. It’s a two-hour seminar in and of itself. But it’s a race without a finish line. The bad guys are bad. They’re getting worse all the time.