Mitigating Network Security Risks & Leveraging AI for Threat Detection

Speaker A: People need to realize that AI here to help us just don't accommodate and don't be part of the AI. They will not be able to compete the next five years because AI speeds up and help you to do everything faster.

Speaker B: Welcome to Altitude, a uh, podcast by Aviatrix to help you rise above today's cloud networking and security challenges. Today, more and more enterprises are moving their business up to the cloud as the race to innovate continues in this multi cloud world, IT leaders and teams find themselves behind the wheel where they are confronted with both new challenges, new opportunities. On Altitude, we learn the voices and stories of the people who are overcoming these challenges every day to drive their business to the next level. Be sure to subscribe on your preferred listening app and stay tuned for this episode.

Speaker C: All right, welcome everybody to another exciting episode. I am honored today to have Sad Faraj, a seasoned IT leader and a cyber security powerhouse with over 15 years of commanding the tech battlefield in his current role at Accenture as a security consulting manager, Sarmid mastermind's solutions in the cloud infrastructure security that fortify and streamline operations with a track record of transforming IT infrastructures into formidable data centers and crafting disaster recovery systems that withstand. Not only is Sarmed a robust security policy and business continuity expert, he's also recognized for his acute business acumen, managing to optimize IT performance and effectuate cost savings even when resources are stretched thin. Welcome Sarmed. I really appreciate you joining me this week.

Speaker A: Jason, the pleasure is mine and thank you very much for taking the time and inviting me for this great, great opportunity. I truly appreciate it.

Speaker C: Absolutely, absolutely. So as I start every podcast, I really like to get to know my guests a little bit more, understanding how they got into the IT industry.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: As myself, I came from the auto industry. I was a customer service rep, moved into some banking customer service reps, and then eventually went back to school for it. You know, learning how the computers work and then finding my way into network engineering and now into the cloud networking engineering. So very curious on how you got your start in, uh, the industry.

Speaker A: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And thank you for letting me speak a little bit about that. We all, as you say, always wonder when we meet other colleagues like, hey, how did you start? Because we passionate about what we do. I started IT back in, uh, when I was in college. I started as a civil engineer major and really IT and um, math and it took a lot more interest for me so I switched to, you know, the math major. Back then it wasn't really huge that you know, coding and only. And I took coding at the time and I got interested in Fortran and RPG and stuff like that. And then again I got more involved into the coding and like my senior year in college I'm like, you know uh, I want to stay. The math and computer was the same division. I said I want to graduate that math. I'm sorry. And a computer degree. So senior year I got more involved in the computer and graduated with computer science. And then you know, when you go into the computer world at the time, you know um, really the Internet wasn't a major player. So it was more coding and operation than it. So I got into IT in debt and into the operation part of the it and from there you know, I maneuvered around and got into the management and that's when really that play comes in. You know, when you get into the management, you know, you got the team to code with you, you got the business tragedy. You got, you know, how to grow the business, how it evolved. So once you get into the management it's a whole different mindset. Understanding finances, understanding you know, where to allocate your money and how to drive the business. You know, because it is an expansion. It's not, it's just like accounting. You know we are here to help the business but never they are bringing unless we're you know, an IT company. But still we are still there helping the business. So anyway, so got into this and then went from industry to industry. My biggest interest came in when I got into the financial industry the compliance and the security box. And that would really enflab me like you know, very, very interested. I mean security was always part of IT management and compliance. But when I got in the financial industry it became a lot, a lot more emphasis. If you don't have the security compliance, you're not going to survive. You cannot be in the front chip.

Speaker C: Absolutely anything in the financial industry is heavily, heavily compliant on from a security perspective.

Speaker A: Yes. And if you recall it like security back then, you know and as I said when we started you uh, know really the, the hacking whatever was just if you recall just outlook about getting it to the uh, crown jewel of data or CR of your processing and taking money from you and stuff like that. I mean if you remember the, the target POS hacking, you know and how they filtrated and then later on viciate. I mean it's just the whole sophisticated how things got in when the Internet completely became open and everything was fast processing or everything. So that compliance that would get me m Into security and going from there where we have to be where I was in the director for a company where we manage all the ATMs for major financial company, you know, banks. I had a colleague of mine for many years, he started working for Accenture with security and we talked about Securus NPD and then he said look, you're really great in security. You talk about how much you drive. Why don't you leave that management whatever and come at Accenture. And that's when I joined Accenture and I specifically joined the zero trust division of Accenture and the zero day and the zero thing. So that's how really where I am now. And um, being with Accenture it was really the best opportunity I took in the post career. You know always on the cutting edge of learning and being the best as we are. And that comes from the leadership. You're all the way from the CEO to the people report to they challenge. They want you to challenge yourself, learn and be at your best. And then when we get into like you know when you're a director you have that domain you protect. When you move on for Accenture there is challenges there you go from client to client. They desperately need you to jump in one and drive them out to the you know where they need to be at within a very fast move target. So it's a challenging and fast and very passionate about it and truly found my niche with Accenture, you know right from the, from the colleagues and the other things too is really I want to emphasize mentionly about the you know Accenture and the work the team because in it you only can be succeed when you have the right team with you.

Speaker C: Yeah that's, that's a great point. Uh, the ability to uh lean on a team or a team member something that you don't know something that is um. You know maybe you're stuck on.

Speaker A: We all have those things and, and

Speaker C: have those conversations with other. With other technical leaders within your organization or even outside of your organization. Even if you're. Even if you're talking to enterprises because everybody does things a little bit different.

Speaker A: Everybody does a little different and we all help each other you and even something network it. The other day you know I, I came from experience of the mini M M mainframe or something mid range and somebody pinged hey anybody knows why we got this as 400 and something knows and I'm sak whatever you know they, we. We have a way if somebody just reach out to something or trying to get help everybody jump in and this is really worth. We all feel like family, like really. And, and with the leadership behind us, you know, and they know if I want to my leadership and said look, I'm struggling here. And here somebody's like oh, as so, and so we know me as expert in this actually that, that benefit the quantity 100%.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Let's circle back into the security conversation for just a second. You said something very interesting and, and you know, a, as we've grown through uh, the different developments throughout IT and the IT industry, the perimeter of security has changed. The landscape of security has changed tremendously over the years. You know, you brought, you brought up the whole fact of um, hey, you know, back in the original days where the Internet wasn't really a focus point, that you know, people were just starting to use the Internet, the only infiltration point really was email. At that point you, you got an email that was not right, you opened it up and some kind of bot decided to, you know, started to infiltrate your, your infrastructure. So the perimeter was very isolated. You know, they're typically at a data center with a firewall. Most of the wans in those days were all uh, point to point connections, right?

Speaker A: Frame relay.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly, frame relay. ISDN still uh, doesn't work, uh, still doesn't network. Actually my old ISDN uh, days were fun. How do you see security in the cloud and the change in that from a perimeter perspective? And how are customers dealing with that security in the cloud today?

Speaker A: So okay, so when we talk about the cloud largest, I think I like to divide the cloud into two. We're talking about the Fortune 500. Okay. Because you have two flavors in the cloud. You got the small business which is mostly application already in the SaaS and that's protected. And then they have the certain production and then you got, you know, most of them either on Microsoft or whatever and they got the office 365 and limited. There's no complexity. When you come to the Fortune 500. You have the multi cloud management. You know, when they go to the cloud, you got the Azure, give them something, you got aws, give them another folder.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And then you also get the private cloud and then connecting that with their own um, pattern. So that's really where the complex comes in. You know, in the cloud they know they cannot survive without beaming the cloud. That's the app. The quick deployment of the app, the management of the app and everything. The cloud we're then going to get into. But security wise and how it is, it's really provided it Opened the door, you know. And how do you secure that with a cloud? And then specifically I want to jump in because we have here for Aviatrix where Aviatrix comes in how simplify the cloud management. You know, I'll give you management and interference like where you can just simply see what the M defina module. Where would you need to port Aviatrix and allow you to connect with a flat alert seamlessly. Where if you don't have that, you are just limited to connecting through the firewall and you do the connectivity and you willingly be limited to seeing the visibility of what Aviatrix provide. And um, I want to bring them because that's what we have here.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We are doing, we are doing an Aviatrix podcast and I appreciate you bringing up Aviatrix. You know, a couple of the things you touched upon there, uh, from a feature perspective. Right. We've changed that perimeter in the secure in the cloud itself from a security perspective of being a centralized, uh, manner of security where you're bringing everything back to a centralized firewall, AWS firewall, a Palo Alto, a checkpoint, whatever that might be, whatever that. Yes, with AVH is one of our features with distributed cloud firewalling you're now able to take the, you know, based on tags or any type of cloud attribute, put that against the policy and then place that into the VPCs or VNETs themselves as well as, you know, full end to end encryption.

Speaker A: And also if I may add to that the NAT gateway, whether the you guys come in, you know, what do you got hybrid, you know, uh, connectivity and the limitation of that and where you guys come in and help them. Not a limitation where you can do, you know, it's a secure encrypted connections where you know, limitation on that and you can go way above behind what the connectivity offered, you know, without AV agents, you know, and we know the normal connectivity is 1.25 limited there. It comes in AV agents and you know the option is Alhamdulillah. It goes up to 10 to 25 gigabytes and within the connected on the VNet the performance can go up to 20 to 40 gigabytes. So there was a tremendous advantage there that we learned and we continue to learn that what AB8 Kritz brings to the table into the cloud for the Fortune 500. It's really, really amazing.

Speaker C: Yeah. Again, one of the features from a distributed cloud firewalling perspective, and you touched upon it a little bit from a NAT gateway perspective, is being able to so natively Customers don't have the visibility, uh, today with a NAT gateway, the NAT gateway just takes a private IP address, creates a network, uh, address translation to a public IP address. Your traffic goes out, you have no visibility on where it's going, who it's talking to. Yes, there are possibilities of developers having that access out and downloading a binary that they might need for something, but that might have some type of threat as it's downloaded into that particular workload. Now you can be infiltrated across your entire platform.

Speaker A: The way Aviation is designed, when you place out your controllers and the transition NAT gateway and how you see the future of uh, flow, uh iq, where do you see how your data floating? And let me bring one often because people say, okay, I'm adding another call to the cloud. Actually that's one thing I want to talk about when you move to the cloud for a minute if I can. Because I personally before I went to Accenture, I had to move a lot of our applications that they running on SQL 2008 or Server 2008 that we weren't able to migrate on time, that we can only have them in compliance and get the update if we shift them up to the cloud and do that. Yes, Azure does give you the tools, you put them in your environment and you say this is my server, I want to move up to the cloud. And then you do the calculation on that and you do the calculation on egress costs and all that and you add another 20% to it on the cost and you take it up to the cloud and when you go in and you know the first month, third month, you get them to six months and then the traffic of that egress increase and then the cost email comes into you in a bill, no matter how much you tag and you try to see the cost, the cost optimization Aviatrons provide. It's phenomenal, phenomenal. And that's why I think where you can broadly instill the benefit of how you satisfy the cost. Look, if you bring any interest, you put the gateways in there and just let it, just check it. And then from there you can also check on the cost and so forth and see how we can optimize that cost efficiently, where we can do the cost survey and then whatever Aviatrix boom rolls on, it's like tapping on ice cream, you know.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So you mentioned a couple of uh, interesting points there. From a feature perspective in Aviatrix with the ability to. One, because the packets flow across our data plane.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: We get full visibility into the flows and you can actually see source and destination of the IPs. You can do things like packet capture. Um, we can do things like our uh, App IQ where we're able to do end to end analysis from regardless of what clouds the workloads are in. We can do end to end analysis to make sure everything is connected. Things that take multiple multiple tabs and flow logs to be able to capture, we're able to capture almost immediately. Where we might be able to capture a security group that is failing uh, or a route that isn't been inputted properly. We can do that in a matter of seconds.

Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. And you just point out uh, the security group and stuff like that and I want to touch on that again. You put the firewall there. Firewall doesn't leave behind, you know, we have the happenspoke and stuff like that. Cannot leave behind that firewall what's going on. And you know, you could be somebody at it, you know, you know, security group in there or NSG in there that it is blocking the traffic coming to the firewall and you don't have visibility or to honestly what most uh, cases we've seen they'll have an application running in aws. They're running the multi factor authentication on Azure. So you get the Azure authentication stuff. All right. When the traffic there goes in, as he said, you don't see it. If you have the gateway from Aviatriots packet capture there you can see okay, it went through you know AWS and AWS did the authentication. The pack came back another true visibility where it will take hours to troubleshoot. We fire our logs, the logs off the body dump it for the cloud and AWS and try to see where else after authentication where the application is failing, you know and where the traffic is not going. And it will take hours.

Speaker C: And I think one of our conversations, you know leading up to our, to our podcast here, we talked about the fact that even though you have that firewall there and it might be passing the traffic, it's a good possibility that a security group is blocking that. How do you find that?

Speaker A: Absolutely. And one thing that'd be interesting that the firewalls Palo Alto sensor doesn't have if you bring so far your firewall it cannot leave those where any hr. When you look into the app IQ or you look into the copilot in there and there was a features were in there it tells you everything that it managed by Avatrix and even it's not managed by Aviatrix it says yes or no in there. When you want this security group, it's not managed by it. I don't think there is a firewall out there from third party that really have a connectivity like Aviatris. Whereas can we already drill down where what do you have in the security boot and work and it doesn't manage bias on that.

Speaker C: Exactly. So you're working with a lot of Fortune 500 customers, uh, with Accenture. Where are you seeing hybrid connectivity issues today with regards to getting data center traffic up into the cloud and you know the challenges that your customers are facing.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I think the most challenging right now it's really the increased adoption of edge computing, you know, is the demand for real time data processing that's growing like massively. It is not just going to the cloud. How can I provide that data in the real time as possible? You know where edge computer comes in is bringing, you know, bringing the request of that whatever it is. You know you got the app and then the client requests and you've seen it just in everyday things and people on social media for just very bunch of media. See Instagram will have never worked if you load it and then we'll take a little bit to load and you'd be frustrated and he's like I'm done. I mean then just the nature how we became, we became. We move that data now we need it fast and we need it forward. And to have that in the cloud you need to bring the, you know, need to work on that computer in the stem it and bring the data closer to that and deliver it. And that's where it comes in. Where we talk about where ADHs can help latency, the deliver offer is the data where you're having that latency. When you can see the traffic flow, you know the multi dynamic topology mapping in Adhreads where it shows you as soon as you connect what you want to and how do you mix it. You know there's tools in there where we got multi cloud. I didn't see it before in Ephesia stock and firewall to firewall you won't see that pen view that equip is like imagine the real lot, you know, right in connecting to what adhesions provide. And that's I think is a key to a successful cloud. You cannot survive in the cloud if you do not control the demand of the app and the access of that and how fast the assets will have.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And just so our listeners understand what we're talking about from a hybrid connectivity, one of the large Use cases that we see is our secure data center connectivity. Right. With our edge product which brings the same functionality that we offer into the cloud all the way down to the data center, you deploy an edge product, it can be in a colo. We partner both with megaport and Equinix as well as being able to deploy a uh, virtual appliance or a physical appliance in your data center and making that connection into those clouds. And the benefit to that is you now have the same capability of packet capture and high performance encryption across either a direct connect, it can be over the Internet uh, for doctor purposes and creating some kind of a backbone between the individual clouds. So now you have resiliency as well. So, so if you're connected to uh, uh, multiple clouds, whether it be aws, Azure, gcp, the backbone there is always going to be connected. You can bring your traffic back on prem if you'd like and send it to those clouds or traverse that across the public Internet across into each individual cloud so you truly get a good doctor solution uh, right out of the box.

Speaker A: I want to mention something like collide on the Fortune 500 and specifically the financial and some of the governments in South Florida if they want to go from on premise they say okay we want to go to cloud but we don't trust the public cloud. You know, no matter how secure it is, no matter what Azure give you, they have restriction, they still want to have a domain control. They don't care if they have to do their own redundancy and stuff like that. They want it to be private and having private cloud and then you still have to have Azure for belonging or united whatever and connecting those. That's also where Aviatrix can help you tremendously. Seeing the traffic, seeing the pan flu, seeing the cost either you know, transaction costs and stuff like that, all that really it is really tools. I don't see how really the Fortune 500 can be without having you know, the absolute help from adh. That's what brings it a table besides the cost saving which of almost makes it free.

Speaker C: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Depending on what you're doing in the cloud and how you're, you're making those connections, we can absolutely help you know, reduce those costs based on NAT gateway egress costs, direct connect costs directly having your traffic not have to flow back to your data center and go to

Speaker A: another cloud and adding encryption to it where the, you know, Azure, if you look at this thing, we don't provide it to serve it, go to the party provided when You m take on the hyper connection. So there are several features in the um, you know, encrypted if you're doing backup already. But if you don't give any other you need to rely on third party.

Speaker C: Absolutely, absolutely. I'd be remiss to not ask this question about Accenture and the partnership with Aviatrix. How is Accenture your team? What. What is your team's function as to helping your customers today and the security?

Speaker A: Well not only in safety we usually come in and see in most of the demand these days fully it's mostly in the security side is defending a zero day. I mean we, we, we all have you know the zero trust, you know and you know everybody wanted the zero trust. Some people were the zero trust them. But right now it is really you know how we not have a downtime whether is from we all know the last two or three years, you know from Sol or uh Crowdstril. Your down can be from your trusted client.

Speaker C: You know, y.

Speaker A: So how can we hold that? How can we be secure and how can we manage the business and be challenging and be profitable while we be on the cloud? So they want to be in the cloud, they want to rely on a partner but they want to protect themselves from the partner they are serving them and they want to protect it from the zero day that everybody have those applications that they have to have and they have to secure but they are sitting on the side you have to protect it because they cannot deal with the latest technology of security. So we see a lot of in my view when I come in we see a lot of companies saying help us be secure, help us have a zealanding or things we have no control on all of a sudden or third party find out they have an issue with one of the application they pushed or uh. One of the renew versioning and we want to be secure where we don't have any defense. How do we defend them? How so that's not will you do the segmentation, you do the network, you protect the client unless security comes in, you know and then we look at everything is what they have and that's what pretty much we do our evaluation and we make recommendation and the timeline sometimeline comes in very short or we have to bring more people on the table to deploy and some timeline will be older. But mostly it's wholly protecting myself not just from the outside hacking. It's protecting themselves from the trusted client. You know, not that trust line going to be a danger but give them limited to disrupt operation. You know. Yes so or what happened recently with the cloud where you know, everybody was one, you know, everyone was halted for nothing. So that's the mainly now the most demand is even if I have the client, where do, how do I, how do I protect myself?

Speaker C: Yes, how do you protect that client and yourself and exactly.

Speaker A: While you're still running the business. So this is where it really comes in.

Speaker C: This topic is top of mind for a lot of our customers. I think a lot of the enterprises out there, regardless of whether they're Fortune 500, I think the Fortune 500s are more uh, apt to act on this currently. But where do you see the advantages of having AI and security mold together today? And the second part to the question will be where do you see AI helping just in the, in the industry overall.

Speaker A: AI is having a lot of bad, you know, reputation these days. And I think AI, you know, gen AI, AI it's one of the biggest technological evolution that ever happened. You know, I mean we, if we go back and think on um, you know, the Internet when first started and people start creating website and they have their business going. A lot of businesses didn't really see benefit of the, you know, having my own website. I already have my business, my business growing. Why do I need a website? And um, they later realize even the client right here is not working. He can find or find exactly what your specific niche in the market just having that website. So if you really go back and think not everybody should on you know, on NK and start building website and the same thing with AI right Wheel Accenture we started that ah, way way ahead when AI and became mandatory for all Accenture employees to know AI to learn about AI. And we have two, three mandatory courses we have to take to be in AI and in fact we know that human will survive the next five years if you're not participating part of it. And one thing uh, I think Julie Sweet just mentioned our CEO a lot of our client, uh, not client competitors. I really you know upset seeing how we quickly changed our dynamic of this and we switched AI. In fact Accenture AI just reported that you know, grew from 300 million to 3 billion from 2023 to 2024. You know so AI is going at fast speed now going back to how people see AI and how a lot of people shutting it down just launch the Internet. As I go back with every technology there is a safe use and there's a multi put in it and that's when security comes in. I'm bringing the security data. AI makes security a lot More complex, more challenging because beside the fact that AI help business and AI help security detect the bad actor security get you know the bad actor getting a lot more intelligent of how they mimic things and monk AI part of their business. So that's when we come in and AI comes on helping the security when it comes to sdr, edr, you know, no matter how good those tool is, it's still give you a lot of false alarm, give you a lot of garbage and stuff like that. AI these days, it's minimizing a lot of that. So what I want to say is in conclusion. Well the security non security people need to realize that AI here to help us not to take you know, human job away, whatever. Yeah, some job didn't be eliminated but it's open the door to a lot more like Internet is something in AI this will still accommodate and don't be part of the AI. They will not be able to compete the next five years because AI speeds up and help you to do everything faster.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: You know I truly, truly see AI it's going to be. It's already now but it all businesses need to adapt to AI whether security, whether making their business, whether medicine in the next five to 10 years because otherwise everyone driving through that and then you sit behind it will be on the Internet with the website incense. I'm just giving small example.

Speaker C: You'll. You'll be left behind.

Speaker A: Yes, yes.

Speaker C: You'll want to get a forefront of it.

Speaker A: Absolutely. You just don't see the benefit in the beginning when you later on just like we are with our competitors where you know our CEO mentioned like our competitors only have said because how Accenture adopted and new from the beginning gen AI and AI is playing major, major role in the computing. It's the podcast revolution in computing just on the Internet.

Speaker C: Well I think there's an, there's an opinion out there that you know AI could take away jobs. Right. It's going to reduce jobs, it's going to eliminate some, some aspects of the industry and I think of it a little bit differently similar to the way you think about the Internet and how the Internet exploded. And I think it's going to create an industry, it's going to create an industry of regulations. Um I mean there'll be regulations that'll need to be put around what can and can be done with with AI. There'll be larger fields of interest from a data scientist perspective and understanding how the neural networks work and how AI ah actually pulls that data from everything. So our CEO Doug Merritt said at one point about AI and, uh, it's like the Industrial revolution, where people were going to be out of work because all of a sudden now you have all of these machines doing the jobs. But it creates other jobs, right? It creates our opportunity.

Speaker A: Absolutely. While we work more efficiently, you produce better data, you do better accurate product, better accurate data. You detect viruses a lot better. And when you do things better, you'll be able to enhance and be more secure and work faster and produce better and be more profitable. That's really the key.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Where do you see yourself in five years? Uh, with. With the growth of AI and. And the security aspects and, um, what else. What else interests you from an IT perspective? Because we. Well, I think everybody in IT has a little bit of an ADHD mentality. There's always something new. There's always a new object that you want to learn about and go after. What do you see from a cloud perspective? What's the next big thing that SARMAT sees?

Speaker A: Number one, I want to say warfare, company life, et cetera. It's really where I see my next five or to 10 years, hopefully where I can drive and be. Because when I tell people, you know, I used to tell people I work as a director, whatever they tell. Oh, so what do you do? When I talk to them, I say, um, I'm essential. They know I. Oh, yeah, okay, sure. What are you guys working on? These things, you know, because thing now is the top edge of technology. We always on. We always do so we always challenge each other for, hey, you know, this and. And makes you get better. M. It drives you to be better. And when you go to the client, the client, Bassett, Fauna, you know, I'm always going to be in it, but security, specifically the next five years, and hopefully I learn more about whatever you guys have to enhance in your tools and Aviatros or any other new vendor comes in that I partner with and learn more. It's truly, truly exciting, and I'm truly blessed to be where I am in my career. Great.

Speaker C: Uh, fantastic. And I really appreciate you coming on the podcast today. I love how you just brought it all back to the team effort. I think, you know, having a team around you and having the ability to go and ask the questions that you. You may not necessarily be the expert in a particular topic to be able to go out and get there. I love how you. You brought that back into the. Into the conversation. We could talk about this all day. Uh, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast the best to your success, and I look forward to seeing what you do a couple years down the road. We'll be. We'll. We'll definitely be in touch.

Speaker A: The pleasure is all mine, and I truly appreciate it. It's been a pleasure, uh, to be here and a pleasure about Aviatrix and to partner with you guys.

Speaker C: Outstanding. Thank you so much.