Rob Emsley, Dell Technologies | Is Your IT Infrastructure Ready for the Age of AI?
>> Everybody, welcome back to the Experience Center. We're here at Dell Round Rock 2 in Round Rock, Texas, right outside of Austin. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Rob Strechay. And we're here with Rob Emsley, who's the director of marketing for data protection, the entire portfolio here at Dell Technologies. Rob, good to see you again. Good to be in Austin with you.
>> Absolutely. Great to be back on the show once again. >> Yeah, we kicked off this year with the Cyber Resiliency Summit. You guys were a big sponsor of that, Christophe Bertrand, who's digging through the research now.
That was really a great way to kick off the year. A couple of years ago, we ended the year with the cyber resiliency theme. It remains pretty hot. What are you seeing out there? >> Cyber resiliency and cybersecurity continues to be at the top of IT spending, whether or not you're looking at various analyst reports.
It's still a boardroom discussion. For sure, we all know that there's a lot of discussion about AI also taking place in the boardroom as companies move forward with their digital transformation initiatives. But the requirement to be secure, and especially to secure the data that you're inevitably going to be relying upon to train your large language models, is so vitally important. >> Yeah. And, to your point, as we start moving into things like agents, that's going to be just more seams, more holes in the portfolio for people to go after from the stack.
And it's going to be really interesting to see how organizations address that, Rob, because the more we advance technology, the higher the risk becomes. >> Yeah. And I think one of the things, and it was one of the themes that you even brought up as part of the Cyber Resiliency Summit, was that there's so many things that people need to take in, but yet they're looking for simplicity. You guys have some stuff going on that you're really aiming for around simplicity and helping customers get that leg up in the first. >> Yeah, we've really thought about what's needed to become more cyber resilient and we've broken it down into three distinct pillars. The first one is you need to reduce the attack surface.
You need to make it harder for the bad actors to get into your network and move around and cause havoc. That's a scenario that is vitally important. The second pillar is you have to realize that, even with all of the good preventative measures that you can put in place, there's no such thing as absolute security. At some point, people are going to get into your network and start to compromise your data.
The second pillar is you have to be able to detect and respond to any threats that occur within the environment as quickly as possible. And then the last pillar is, when everything else fails, in order to be a resilient organization, you have to be able to recover and you have to be able to recover with data that you can guarantee is good data. Reduce the attack surface, detect and respond to threats and then, finally, recover from a cyber attack, is the way that we simplify the three main things that you as a customer need to think about. >> Let's unpack that a little bit.
Reducing the attack surface. The saying you often hear is there is no perimeter anymore. You can try to reduce the attack surface as much as you can, but the perimeter keeps shifting around. Let's take them individually. What do you guys do
to reduce the attack surface? Either you, your partners, or things that customers can do that you advise? >> Yeah. If you think about backup data, and certainly backup data is so relevant nowadays, with regards to it's the first line of defense when it comes to recovery. Therefore, bad actors, when they think about going after your infrastructure, they start with your backup infrastructure. All of the elements of simplifying cyber security, if you just take it from the context of backup, is you need to make your backup data as secure as you possibly can. Over the years we've introduced such things as multifactor authentication, we've introduced things like multi-user authentication, so that some things within the background infrastructure you just can't do without two people actually authorizing the change. Certainly around things like changes to the configuration, the ability to delete certain things within your backup infrastructure.
A lot of this is all underpinned by Zero Trust principles of how do you reduce the opportunity for people to get into your backup infrastructure. And then you take that across all of the Dell portfolio of infrastructure and every team within Dell is building intrinsic security into the platform. One thing that also keeps data secure is the immutability word.
Immutability of backups becomes a critical element to reduce that attack surface. >> Okay. And you're not just saying this because you run the backup portfolio or the data protection portfolio, you're saying this because the bad guys always go after the backup corpus. >> For sure. - Because if you can get that,
then you can stop a company from recovering and then you've got them in a situation where you can collect their ransom, right? >> Correct. - Okay. All right. Let's talk about... Did you have a follow-up on that? >> Yeah. No, I think I was going to say that one of the things that really has been, I think, a highlight, and it's exactly where you were going, is really it's the detection and respond. Because I think what we see, and we've seen this for years, that attackers aren't in for a day and then things happen. They're in for six months or things like that. And so, how are you helping customers really get faster at that detection and response? Because a lot of times you want to get to it before, hey, they go and encrypt everything or do something like that.
>> Yeah. That's one of the things that we specifically talked about in the Cyber Resiliency Summit is the work that we do with our ecosystem partners to deliver managed detection and response with incident response and recovery services. From a managed detection and response perspective in the summit, we talked about new integrations with CrowdStrike, with the CrowdStrike Falcon XDR platform, and that was specifically to add indicators of compromise detectors for our PowerProtect portfolio into the Falcon platform. And then, by using our managed service to give people more ability to more quickly identify anything that's going on within the infrastructure. That's a huge part.
And then the second part of our managed detection response piece is, when you do detect that something bad has happened, how do you respond to that incident? And we have, over the years, had hundreds of engagements with customers that have either got all of our technology or little bits of our technology to help them in their time of need. And that's where the ability to bring resources and boots on the ground with Dell services becomes so important, is that nobody wants to point fingers on who was to blame. They just want to start the recovery and responding to the incidents that have occurred as soon as possible.
That's how we address the detection and response piece. >> As you were saying before, part of the problem is that the adversaries are going to get in and there's a lot of insiders as well. People can get bribed and, hey, put this stick into a server. And your partner, CrowdStrike, would tell you that not only will they hang around for six months, but now they can get in and out in 20 minutes and they'll exfiltrate your data and then they'll hold you hostage and say, we're going to release this to the public unless you pay us ransom. And then if you don't pay us ransom, then we'll encrypt your data.
That brings me to the recovery piece >> For sure. >> What's the state of the state with recovery and the impact on RPO and all that great stuff? >> Yeah. Recovery is really where the rubber meets the road. Being able to have a plan to bring good data back online as fast as you possibly can. We have two things that we really use as a foundation to becoming cyber resilient. One is our PowerProtect Data Domain systems that we have been delivering to customers for literally a couple of decades. We have customers that have gone through generation of data main systems and that, itself, is where you land backups, first of all, from copying from production.
You write to Data Domain and, because that system has always been purpose built for the job of backup and recovery, it's still, to this day, it's really the storage of last resort. But you also know that over the last six to seven years, we've also been implementing what we call cyber recovery vaults, using that same fundamental foundation of data domain, which is to provide an isolated recovery environment that the bad guys just can't get access to. In that cyber recovery vault, we bring data into that cyber recovery vault, and then we analyze it for any anomalies with incredible precision. We use a technology called CyberSense from our partner, Index Engines, and CyberSense has 99.
9% certainty of identifying anomalies within your data. When you analyze the data, you mark it clean, you then basically have it available to recover when and where you need it. >> How does a customer consume these products? Can you just double click on the portfolio a little bit and help us understand what I get when, where? What's that lineup look like? >> As we go through this year, the lineup is PowerProtect is our portfolio brand for everything we do to help customers deliver cyber resilience. It's made up of software assets and hardware assets working in harmony together to form an incredibly secure solution. PowerProtect Data Manager is the software application that actually performs the backup and recovery process and Data Domain is the storage platform that stores all that data and keeps it secure and pristine.
>> Yeah. I think the landscape's always changing and I think that it's a lot of hurry up and wait and catch up and trying to play catch up. And there's a lot of regulations going on, like DORA in the EU and others. How do you see this changing the landscape as these new regulations put more about, hey, you need to... Like DORA, where you have to notify within 72 hours and you have to detect and all of this.
How do you get that detection even further into that playing field? >> Yeah. One of the things that is part of our news today is Data Manager is adding a new innovation called Anomaly Detection. Up until now, all of our anomaly detection has been delivered with CyberSense, which certainly provides, as I mentioned, a high degree of analysis of all of your backup data running within the cyber recovery vault. Often, what goes into cyber recovery vault is the most critical data that allows you to rebuild your company as fast as possible.
It may not be all the data, but it's the critical data that you need. But over the years, a lot of our customers have said, if I don't have a cyber recovery vault, how can you give me insights into the backup data that I'm doing on a daily basis and storing within Data Domain? So with the latest release of Data Manager, we've introduced Anomaly Detection, for free, for all of your, initially, virtual machine and file system backups to provide you with insights by analyzing the metadata that is associated with all of the backups that you perform to alert you against any anomalies that are taking place. Anomaly Detection uses things like pattern matching, uses things like behavior analysis.
It even looks at configuration drift within your backup infrastructure, specifically around Data Manager, to indicate, hey, there's something here that you need to pay attention to. Anomaly Detection really gives us now two elements of intelligence that our customers can take advantage of. One of them is for free within Data Manager and the other one is for a fee within the cyber recovery vault with CyberSense. >> How does this all fit into a Zero Trust architecture? Customers will tell us, often, Zero Trust is good, but it's sometimes hard to operationalize.
Does this plug right in? Obviously, to the extent that you can execute on something like this, with partnership with Dell, you're operationalizing it, but has what you're talking about become a fundamental component of a Zero Trust architecture? >> Yeah, I think Zero Trust is really trying to change the way you implement security. As you mentioned earlier, it used to be very perimeter-based. Now, it's a lot more about segmenting your infrastructure, not trusting everybody the first time that they're challenged and, once they're in, they can navigate across your infrastructure, across your different networks. A lot of things there, from a Zero Trust principles perspective, are really around that reducing the attack surface element of our strategy. I think what I just described, it's really more in that having good data to recover from. It's definitely very well-connected, but we talk a lot about defense in depth, and that's the way that you have a number of elements of security capabilities that just makes you more cyber resilient as an outcome.
>> Yeah, just hitting on that, I think you hit on two different things in both those answers. And I think one of the things that I'm curious about is that the hypervisor landscape is massively changing. I think there's a lot of things happening.
We see the rise of Kubernetes and containers, in particular, and people looking at what should be a VM, what should be a container? How do you see that changing the efforts that you have to do to protect that underlying infrastructure? >> If you go back to PowerProtect Data Manager, for the last five years, we've been very, very focused at protecting VMware, vSphere virtual machines. We also were very early to add, into Data Manager, support of Kubernetes with all of the various distributions of Kubernetes that are out there, whether or not that be on premises deployments or public cloud deployments. But also with the new release of Data Manager, we're really realizing that we need to expand our native hypervisor support.
With the new release of Data Manager, we're expanding with Microsoft Hyper-V support and OpenShift virtualization support. You will see us, over the subsequent releases of Data Manager, of using the architecture that we've built for hypervisor backup and recovery. We've built it in a way that it can be a standard building block for any of the different hypervisor environments. You'll see us, over time, add more native hypervisor support into the data manager platform. At the moment, for the last number of years, we've partnered for additional hypervisor support, which is okay, but it then bifurcates your single management control plane.
By adding additional hypervisors into Data Manager, you will actually allow customers to support the choices that they're more than likely thinking about with regards to their VMware real estate, potentially their Microsoft Hyper-V, in the future, thinking about things like Nutanix. That's another part of the infrastructure. Certainly we've spoken a lot about Data Manager, but also, on the flip side, Data Domain also has news. >> Tell us. - What's it?
>> Okay. The first piece is, last year, we sat down with yourself, Dave, myself and Travis Vigil. We talked about the refresh of the Data Domain portfolio with new enterprise arrays that take advantage of new Intel fourth generation Xeon processors, which has a incredible effect on the performance from a backup perspective and a restore performance. What we're doing today is we're introducing the entry- level Data Domain system.
>> That was your high-end system. >> Those are our high-end systems. The entry-level system, the DD6410, joins the 9410 and the 9910. Effectively, we have three hard disk- based Data Domain models that are now what we lead with for our existing customers and net new customers. That's one element. But then, also, we're really happy to start our journey of bringing all- flash into the Data Domain portfolio.
Initially, today, we're introducing what's known as a Data Domain all-flash ready node, which will allow customers to build a solution with a PowerProtect system as a building block, VMware as a hypervisor layer, and then Data Domain Virtual Edition on top of it to give them a 220 terabyte all-flash system that performs at 60% faster than a comparable hard disk system. This is the beginning of introducing all- flash into the backup storage space for us and you'll see us continue with this as we go through the year. >> They get the performance. They also get better energy efficiency because it's flash versus spinning disk.
They pay a premium for that because hard disk is still less expensive, but they can make that trade-off. >> Yeah. As well as power and efficiency, you also get space efficiency.
The ability to use a 2U rack-mounted system, and have 220 terabytes of SSD storage within it, gives them the ability to save on rack space. You've got some companies around the globe, especially in Europe, that have basically told us we are moving to an all-flash data center, we don't care what the workload is, whether it be production or backup or archive. We don't want spinning disks in the data center any longer and one of the biggest reasons for that is power and cooling and space. >> I want to ask you, are there any patterns that you're seeing in the organizational constructs with customers? The backup admin, I don't know if that role is evolving. The VM admin.
Are you selling to security organizations now? Are there any patterns that are emerging? Help us connect the dots there. >> Yeah. Certainly, I think the backup infrastructure is well understood now as being a major component from a cyber security perspective. Certainly a lot of the conversations that we have now are with the CISO office. We always used to joke that, when you went to sell to a customer, you would take the stairs to the basement to talk to the backup administrators, but now you take the elevator to the boardroom to talk to the CISO.
And I think that's become much more of the norm as customers realize that they have to balance preventative measures to keep the bad guys out, but also resilience measures to allow them to recover from any eventuality that takes place. >> I always have this conversation with Christophe Bertrand, is your space an adjacency to cybersecurity or is it now a fundamental component of a security strategy? How would you answer that question? >> I think it's a fundamental component. I think you see the way that we go to market, we lead with Dell data protection can help you achieve cyber resilience. The outcome is cyber resilience and the functions that we have, and that I'm responsible for, is the data protection portfolio.
But one of the big differences that Dell is able to deliver is we're not just a data protection provider. We have the power of the Dell infrastructure portfolio working in concert with each other. That provides a real benefit in how you protect data and how you align to all of those different pillars, those three pillars that I described earlier. >> And it would seem that, again, playing off of that, because with the personas shifting and moving around within there and platform engineering becoming a more big thing, do you see that that's why people are looking to Dell for services around this, that can help them in that time of need that they need to recover really quickly? Because it's regulations, it's customer experience, it's even competition. Is that a big play at this as well? >> Yeah. As I mentioned earlier, the combination of Dell services with our product portfolio is so key, and the consultative services to help customers navigate how they get from A to B, how they truly become an organization that understands cyber resilience, is a big part of everything that we do.
And certainly that's one of those advantages is that services is a people-led activity. And having the ability to pair expertise and skill sets together with the Dell portfolio makes it a really winning combination for us. >> Rob, thank you so much. Any final thoughts that you can leave with our audience? >> No, I think it's great to be back. It's great to be sharing PowerProtect news with you and we look forward to sitting down again with you at Dell Technologies World. >> Yeah, looking forward to that as well. Critical area.
This data protection has continued to evolve as the threats escalate. This is Dave Vellante, for Rob Strechay and Rob Emsley. Keep it right there for more great content. From Round Rock 2, you're watching theCUBE.
2025-04-13 02:35
