>>The cybersecurity landscape continues to be one characterized by a series of point tools designed to do a very specific job, often pretty well, but the mosaic of tooling is grown over the years causing complexity in driving up costs and increasing exposures. So the game of Whackamole continues. Moreover, the way organizations approach security is changing quite dramatically. The cloud, while offering so many advantages, has also created new complexities. The shared responsibility model redefines what the cloud provider secures, for example, the S three bucket and what the customer is responsible for, eg properly configuring the bucket. You know, this is all well and good, but because virtually no organization of any size can go all in on a single cloud, that shared responsibility model now spans multiple clouds and with different protocols. Now, that of course includes on-prem and edge deployments, making things even more complex. Moreover, the DevOps team is being asked to be the point of execution to implement many aspects of an organization's security strategy. >>This extends to securing the runtime, the platform, and even now containers, which can end up anywhere. There's a real need for consolidation in the security industry, and that's part of the answer. We've seen this both in terms of mergers and acquisitions as well as platform plays that cover more and more ground. But the diversity of alternatives and infrastructure implementations continues to boggle the mind with more and more entry points for the attackers. This includes sophisticated supply chain attacks that make it even more difficult to understand how to secure components of a system and how secure those components actually are. The number one challenge CISOs face in today's complex world is lack of talent to address these challenges, and I'm not saying that SecOps pros are now talented. They are. There just aren't enough of them to go around, and the adversary is also talented and very creative, and there are more and more of them every day. >>Now, one of the very important roles that a technology vendor can play is to take mundane infrastructure security tasks off the plates of SEC off teams. Specifically, we're talking about shifting much of the heavy lifting around securing servers, storage, networking, and other infrastructure and their components onto the technology vendor via r and d and other best practices like supply chain management. And that's what we're here to talk about. Welcome to the second part in our series, A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure Made Possible by Dell Technologies and produced by the Cube. My name is Dave Ante, and I'm your host now. Previously, we looked at what trusted infrastructure means >>And the role that storage and data protection play in the equation. In this part two of the series, we explore the changing nature of technology infrastructure, how the industry generally in Dell specifically, are adapting to these changes and what is being done to proactively address threats that are increasingly stressing security teams. Now today, we continue the discussion and look more deeply into servers networking and hyper-converged infrastructure to better understand the critical aspects of how one company Dell is securing these elements so that devs SEC op teams can focus on the myriad new attack vectors and challenges that they faced. First up is Deepak rang Garage Power Edge security product manager at Dell Technologies, and after that we're gonna bring on Mahesh Naar oim, who was a consultant in the networking product management area at Dell. And finally, we're closed with Jerome West, who is the product management security lead for HCI hyperconverged infrastructure and converged infrastructure at Dell. Thanks for joining us today. We're thrilled to have you here and hope you enjoy the program.

>>The cybersecurity landscape continues to be one characterized by a series of point tools designed to do a very specific job, often pretty well, but the mosaic of tooling is grown over the years causing complexity in driving up costs and increasing exposures. So the game of Whackamole continues. Moreover, the way organizations approach security is changing quite dramatically. The cloud, while offering so many advantages, has also created new complexities. The shared responsibility model redefines what the cloud provider secures, for example, the S three bucket and what the customer is responsible for eg properly configuring the bucket. You know, this is all well and good, but because virtually no organization of any size can go all in on a single cloud, that shared responsibility model now spans multiple clouds and with different protocols. Now that of course includes on-prem and edge deployments, making things even more complex. Moreover, the DevOps team is being asked to be the point of execution to implement many aspects of an organization's security strategy. >>This extends to securing the runtime, the platform, and even now containers which can end up anywhere. There's a real need for consolidation in the security industry, and that's part of the answer. We've seen this both in terms of mergers and acquisitions as well as platform plays that cover more and more ground. But the diversity of alternatives and infrastructure implementations continues to boggle the mind with more and more entry points for the attackers. This includes sophisticated supply chain attacks that make it even more difficult to understand how to secure components of a system and how secure those components actually are. The number one challenge CISOs face in today's complex world is lack of talent to address these challenges. And I'm not saying that SecOps pros are not talented. They are. There just aren't enough of them to go around and the adversary is also talented and very creative and there are more and more of them every day. >>Now, one of the very important roles that a technology vendor can play is to take mundane infrastructure security tasks off the plates of SEC off teams. Specifically we're talking about shifting much of the heavy lifting around securing servers, storage, networking, and other infrastructure and their components onto the technology vendor via r and d and other best practices like supply chain management. And that's what we're here to talk about. Welcome to the second part in our series, A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure Made Possible by Dell Technologies and produced by the Cube. My name is Dave Ante and I'm your host now. Previously we looked at what trusted infrastructure means and the role that storage and data protection play in the equation. In this part two of the series, we explore the changing nature of technology infrastructure, how the industry generally in Dell specifically, are adapting to these changes and what is being done to proactively address threats that are increasingly stressing security teams. >>Now today, we continue the discussion and look more deeply into servers networking and hyper-converged infrastructure to better understand the critical aspects of how one company Dell is securing these elements so that dev sec op teams can focus on the myriad new attack vectors and challenges that they faced. First up is Deepak rang Garage Power Edge security product manager at Dell Technologies. And after that we're gonna bring on Mahesh Nagar oim, who was consultant in the networking product management area at Dell. And finally, we're close with Jerome West, who is the product management security lead for HCI hyperconverged infrastructure and converged infrastructure at Dell. Thanks for joining us today. We're thrilled to have you here and hope you enjoy the program. Deepak Arage shoes powered security product manager at Dell Technologies. Deepak, great to have you on the program. Thank you. >>Thank you for having me. >>So we're going through the infrastructure stack and in part one of this series we looked at the landscape overall and how cyber has changed and specifically how Dell thinks about data protection in, in security in a manner that both secures infrastructure and minimizes organizational friction. We also hit on the storage part of the portfolio. So now we want to dig into servers. So my first question is, what are the critical aspects of securing server infrastructure that our audience should be aware of? >>Sure. So if you look at compute in general, right, it has rapidly evolved over the past couple of years, especially with trends toward software defined data centers and with also organizations having to deal with hybrid environments where they have private clouds, public cloud locations, remote offices, and also remote workers. So on top of this, there's also an increase in the complexity of the supply chain itself, right? There are companies who are dealing with hundreds of suppliers as part of their supply chain. So all of this complexity provides a lot of opportunity for attackers because it's expanding the threat surface of what can be attacked, and attacks are becoming more frequent, more severe and more sophisticated. And this has also triggered around in the regulatory and mandates around the security needs. >>And these regulations are not just in the government sector, right? So it extends to critical infrastructure and eventually it also get into the private sector. In addition to this, organizations are also looking at their own internal compliance mandates. And this could be based on the industry in which they're operating in, or it could be their own security postures. And this is the landscape in which servers they're operating today. And given that servers are the foundational blocks of the data center, it becomes extremely important to protect them. And given how complex the modern server platforms are, it's also extremely difficult and it takes a lot of effort. And this means protecting everything from the supply chain to the manufacturing and then eventually the assuring the hardware and software integrity of the platforms and also the operations. And there are very few companies that go to the lens that Dell does in order to secure the server. We truly believe in the notion and the security mentality that, you know, security should enable our customers to go focus on their business and proactively innovate on their business and it should not be a burden to them. And we heavily invest to make that possible for our customers. >>So this is really important because the premise that I set up at the beginning of this was really that I, as of security pro, I'm not a security pro, but if I were, I wouldn't want to be doing all this infrastructure stuff because I now have all these new things I gotta deal with. I want a company like Dell who has the resources to build that security in to deal with the supply chain to ensure the providence, et cetera. So I'm glad you you, you hit on that, but so given what you just said, what does cybersecurity resilience mean from a server perspective? For example, are there specific principles that Dell adheres to that are non-negotiable? Let's say, how does Dell ensure that its customers can trust your server infrastructure? >>Yeah, like when, when it comes to security at Dell, right? It's ingrained in our product, so that's the best way to put it. And security is nonnegotiable, right? It's never an afterthought where we come up with a design and then later on figure out how to go make it secure, right? Our security development life cycle, the products are being designed to counter these threats right from the big. And in addition to that, we are also testing and evaluating these products continuously to identify vulnerabilities. We also have external third party audits which supplement this process. And in addition to this, Dell makes the commitment that we will rapidly respond to any mitigations and vulnerability, any vulnerabilities and exposures found out in the field and provide mitigations and patches for in attacking manner. So this security principle is also built into our server life cycle, right? Every phase of it. >>So we want our products to provide cutting edge capabilities when it comes to security. So as part of that, we are constantly evaluating what our security model is done. We are building on it and continuously improving it. So till a few years ago, our model was primarily based on the N framework of protect, detect and rigor. And it's still aligns really well to that framework, but over the past couple of years we have seen how computers evolved, how the threads have evolved, and we have also seen the regulatory trends and we recognize the fact that the best security strategy for the modern world is a zero trust approach. And so now when we are building our infrastructure and tools and offerings for customers, first and foremost, they're cyber resilient, right? What we mean by that is they're capable of anticipating threats, withstanding attacks and rapidly recurring from attacks and also adapting to the adverse conditions in which they're deployed. The process of designing these capabilities and identifying these capabilities however, is done through the zero press framework. And that's very important because now we are also anticipating how our customers will end up using these capabilities at there and to enable their own zero trust IT environments and IT zero trusts deployments. We have completely adapted our security approach to make it easier for customers to work with us no matter where they are in their journey towards zero trust option. >>So thank you for that. You mentioned the, this framework, you talked about zero trust. When I think about n I think as well about layered approaches. And when I think about zero trust, I think about if you, if you don't have access to it, you're not getting access, you've gotta earn that, that access and you've got layers and then you still assume that bad guys are gonna get in. So you've gotta detect that and you've gotta response. So server infrastructure security is so fundamental. So my question is, what is Dell providing specifically to, for example, detect anomalies and breaches from unauthorized activity? How do you enable fast and easy or facile recovery from malicious incidents? >>Right? What is that is exactly right, right? Breachers are bound to happen. And given how complex our current environment is, it's extremely distributed and extremely connected, right? Data and users are no longer contained with an offices where we can set up a perimeter firewall and say, Yeah, everything within that is good. We can trust everything within it. That's no longer true. The best approach to protect data and infrastructure in the current world is to use a zero trust approach, which uses the principles. Nothing is ever trusted, right? Nothing is trusted implicitly. You're constantly verifying every single user, every single device, and every single access in your system at every single level of your ID environment. And this is the principles that we use on power Edge, right? But with an increased focus on providing granular controls and checks based on the principles of these privileged access. >>So the idea is that service first and foremost need to make sure that the threats never enter and they're rejected at the point of entry. But we recognize breaches are going to occur and if they do, they need to be minimized such that the sphere of damage cost by attacker is minimized. So they're not able to move from one part of the network to something else laterally or escalate their privileges and cause more damage, right? So the impact radius for instance, has to be radius. And this is done through features like automated detection capabilities and automation, automated remediation capabilities. So some examples are as part of our end to end boot resilience process, we have what they call a system lockdown, right? We can lock down the configuration of the system and lock on the form versions and all changes to the system. And we have capabilities which automatically detect any drift from that lockdown configuration and we can figure out if the drift was caused to authorized changes or unauthorized changes. >>And if it is an unauthorize change can log it, generate security alerts, and we even have capabilities to automatically roll the firm where, and always versions back to a known good version and also the configurations, right? And this becomes extremely important because as part of zero trust, we need to respond to these things at machine speed and we cannot do it at a human speed. And having these automated capabilities is a big deal when achieving that zero trust strategy. And in addition to this, we also have chassis inclusion detection where if the chassis, the box, the several box is opened up, it logs alerts, and you can figure out even later if there's an AC power cycle, you can go look at the logs to see that the box is opened up and figure out if there was a, like a known authorized access or some malicious actor opening and chain something in your system. >>Great, thank you for that lot. Lot of detail and and appreciate that. I want to go somewhere else now cuz Dell has a renowned supply chain reputation. So what about securing the, the supply chain and the server bill of materials? What does Dell specifically do to track the providence of components it uses in its systems so that when the systems arrive, a customer can be a hundred percent certain that that system hasn't been compromised, >>Right? And we've talked about how complex the modern supply chain is, right? And that's no different for service. We have hundreds of confidence on the server and a lot of these form where in order to be configured and run and this former competence could be coming from third parties suppliers. So now the complexity that we are dealing with like was the end to end approach. And that's where Dell pays a lot of attention into assuring the security approach approaching. And it starts all the way from sourcing competence, right? And then through the design and then even the manufacturing process where we are wetting the personnel leather factories and wetting the factories itself. And the factories also have physical controls, physical security controls built into them and even shipping, right? We have GPS tagging of packages. So all of this is built to ensure supply chain security. >>But a critical aspect of this is also making sure that the systems which are built in the factories are delivered to the customers without any changes or any tapper. And we have a feature called the secure component verification, which is capable of doing this. What the feature does this, when the system gets built in a factory, it generates an inventory of all the competence in the system and it creates a cryptographic certificate based on the signatures presented to this by the competence. And this certificate is stored separately and sent to the customers separately from the system itself. So once the customers receive the system at their end, they can run out to, it generates an inventory of the competence on the system at their end and then compare it to the golden certificate to make sure nothing was changed. And if any changes are detected, we can figure out if there's an authorized change or unauthorize change. >>Again, authorized changes could be like, you know, upgrades to the drives or memory and ized changes could be any sort of temper. So that's the supply chain aspect of it. And bill of metal use is also an important aspect to galing security, right? And we provide a software bill of materials, which is basically a list of ingredients of all the software pieces in the platform. So what it allows our customers to do is quickly take a look at all the different pieces and compare it to the vulnerability database and see if any of the vulner, which have been discovered out in the wild affected platform. So that's a quick way of figuring out if the platform has any known vulnerabilities and it has not been patched. >>Excellent. That's really good. My last question is, I wonder if you, you know, give us the sort of summary from your perspective, what are the key strengths of Dell server portfolio from a security standpoint? I'm really interested in, you know, the uniqueness and the strong suit that Dell brings to the table, >>Right? Yeah. We have talked enough about the complexity of the environment and how zero risk is necessary for the modern ID environment, right? And this is integral to Dell powered service. And as part of that like you know, security starts with the supply chain. We already talked about the second component verification, which is a beneath feature that Dell platforms have. And on top of it we also have a silicon place platform mode of trust. So this is a key which is programmed into the silicon on the black service during manufacturing and can never be changed after. And this immutable key is what forms the anchor for creating the chain of trust that is used to verify everything in the platform from the hardware and software integrity to the boot, all pieces of it, right? In addition to that, we also have a host of data protection features. >>Whether it is protecting data at risk in news or inflight, we have self encrypting drives, which provides scalable and flexible encryption options. And this couple with external key management provides really good protection for your data address. External key management is important because you know, somebody could physically steam the server, walk away, but then the keys are not stored on the server, it stood separately. So that provides your action layer of security. And we also have dual layer encryption where you can compliment the hardware encryption on the secure encrypted drives with software level encryption. Inion to this we have identity and access management features like multifactor authentication, single sign on roles, scope and time based access controls, all of which are critical to enable that granular control and checks for zero trust approach. So I would say like, you know, if you look at the Dell feature set, it's pretty comprehensive and we also have the flexibility built in to meet the needs of all customers no matter where they fall in the spectrum of, you know, risk tolerance and security sensitivity. And we also have the capabilities to meet all the regulatory requirements and compliance requirements. So in a nutshell, I would say that, you know, Dell Power Service cyber resident infrastructure helps accelerate zero tested option for customers. >>Got it. So you've really thought this through all the various things that that you would do to sort of make sure that your server infrastructure is secure, not compromised, that your supply chain is secure so that your customers can focus on some of the other things that they have to worry about, which are numerous. Thanks Deepak, appreciate you coming on the cube and participating in the program. >>Thank you for having >>You're welcome. In a moment I'll be back to dig into the networking portion of the infrastructure. Stay with us for more coverage of a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and collaboration with Dell Technologies on the cube. Your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>The cybersecurity landscape continues to be one characterized by a series of point tools designed to do a very specific job, often pretty well, but the mosaic of tooling is grown over the years causing complexity in driving up costs and increasing exposures. So the game of Whackamole continues. Moreover, the way organizations approach security is changing quite dramatically. The cloud, while offering so many advantages, has also created new complexities. The shared responsibility model redefines what the cloud provider secures, for example, the S three bucket and what the customer is responsible for eg properly configuring the bucket. You know, this is all well and good, but because virtually no organization of any size can go all in on a single cloud, that shared responsibility model now spans multiple clouds and with different protocols. Now that of course includes on-prem and edge deployments, making things even more complex. Moreover, the DevOps team is being asked to be the point of execution to implement many aspects of an organization's security strategy. >>This extends to securing the runtime, the platform, and even now containers which can end up anywhere. There's a real need for consolidation in the security industry, and that's part of the answer. We've seen this both in terms of mergers and acquisitions as well as platform plays that cover more and more ground. But the diversity of alternatives and infrastructure implementations continues to boggle the mind with more and more entry points for the attackers. This includes sophisticated supply chain attacks that make it even more difficult to understand how to secure components of a system and how secure those components actually are. The number one challenge CISOs face in today's complex world is lack of talent to address these challenges. And I'm not saying that SecOps pros are not talented, They are. There just aren't enough of them to go around and the adversary is also talented and very creative, and there are more and more of them every day. >>Now, one of the very important roles that a technology vendor can play is to take mundane infrastructure security tasks off the plates of SEC off teams. Specifically we're talking about shifting much of the heavy lifting around securing servers, storage, networking, and other infrastructure and their components onto the technology vendor via r and d and other best practices like supply chain management. And that's what we're here to talk about. Welcome to the second part in our series, A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure Made Possible by Dell Technologies and produced by the Cube. My name is Dave Ante and I'm your host now. Previously we looked at what trusted infrastructure means and the role that storage and data protection play in the equation. In this part two of the series, we explore the changing nature of technology infrastructure, how the industry generally in Dell specifically, are adapting to these changes and what is being done to proactively address threats that are increasingly stressing security teams. >>Now today, we continue the discussion and look more deeply into servers networking and hyper-converged infrastructure to better understand the critical aspects of how one company Dell is securing these elements so that dev sec op teams can focus on the myriad new attack vectors and challenges that they faced. First up is Deepak rang Garage Power Edge security product manager at Dell Technologies. And after that we're gonna bring on Mahesh Nagar oim, who was consultant in the networking product management area at Dell. And finally, we're close with Jerome West, who is the product management security lead for HCI hyperconverged infrastructure and converged infrastructure at Dell. Thanks for joining us today. We're thrilled to have you here and hope you enjoy the program. Deepak Arage shoes powered security product manager at Dell Technologies. Deepak, great to have you on the program. Thank you. >>Thank you for having me. >>So we're going through the infrastructure stack and in part one of this series we looked at the landscape overall and how cyber has changed and specifically how Dell thinks about data protection in, in security in a manner that both secures infrastructure and minimizes organizational friction. We also hit on the storage part of the portfolio. So now we want to dig into servers. So my first question is, what are the critical aspects of securing server infrastructure that our audience should be aware of? >>Sure. So if you look at compute in general, right, it has rapidly evolved over the past couple of years, especially with trends toward software defined data centers and with also organizations having to deal with hybrid environments where they have private clouds, public cloud locations, remote offices, and also remote workers. So on top of this, there's also an increase in the complexity of the supply chain itself, right? There are companies who are dealing with hundreds of suppliers as part of their supply chain. So all of this complexity provides a lot of opportunity for attackers because it's expanding the threat surface of what can be attacked, and attacks are becoming more frequent, more severe and more sophisticated. And this has also triggered around in the regulatory and mandates around the security needs. >>And these regulations are not just in the government sector, right? So it extends to critical infrastructure and eventually it also get into the private sector. In addition to this, organizations are also looking at their own internal compliance mandates. And this could be based on the industry in which they're operating in, or it could be their own security postures. And this is the landscape in which servers they're operating today. And given that servers are the foundational blocks of the data center, it becomes extremely important to protect them. And given how complex the modern server platforms are, it's also extremely difficult and it takes a lot of effort. And this means protecting everything from the supply chain to the manufacturing and then eventually the assuring the hardware and software integrity of the platforms and also the operations. And there are very few companies that go to the lens that Dell does in order to secure the server. We truly believe in the notion and the security mentality that, you know, security should enable our customers to go focus on their business and proactively innovate on their business and it should not be a burden to them. And we heavily invest to make that possible for our customers. >>So this is really important because the premise that I set up at the beginning of this was really that I, as of security pro, I'm not a security pro, but if I were, I wouldn't want to be doing all this infrastructure stuff because I now have all these new things I gotta deal with. I want a company like Dell who has the resources to build that security in to deal with the supply chain to ensure the providence, et cetera. So I'm glad you you, you hit on that, but so given what you just said, what does cybersecurity resilience mean from a server perspective? For example, are there specific principles that Dell adheres to that are non-negotiable? Let's say, how does Dell ensure that its customers can trust your server infrastructure? >>Yeah, like when, when it comes to security at Dell, right? It's ingrained in our product, so that's the best way to put it. And security is nonnegotiable, right? It's never an afterthought where we come up with a design and then later on figure out how to go make it secure, right? Our security development life cycle, the products are being designed to counter these threats right from the big. And in addition to that, we are also testing and evaluating these products continuously to identify vulnerabilities. We also have external third party audits which supplement this process. And in addition to this, Dell makes the commitment that we will rapidly respond to any mitigations and vulnerability, any vulnerabilities and exposures found out in the field and provide mitigations and patches for in attacking manner. So this security principle is also built into our server life cycle, right? Every phase of it. >>So we want our products to provide cutting edge capabilities when it comes to security. So as part of that, we are constantly evaluating what our security model is done. We are building on it and continuously improving it. So till a few years ago, our model was primarily based on the N framework of protect, detect and rigor. And it's still aligns really well to that framework, but over the past couple of years, we have seen how computers evolved, how the threads have evolved, and we have also seen the regulatory trends and we recognize the fact that the best security strategy for the modern world is a zero trust approach. And so now when we are building our infrastructure and tools and offerings for customers, first and foremost, they're cyber resilient, right? What we mean by that is they're capable of anticipating threats, withstanding attacks and rapidly recurring from attacks and also adapting to the adverse conditions in which they're deployed. The process of designing these capabilities and identifying these capabilities however, is done through the zero press framework. And that's very important because now we are also anticipating how our customers will end up using these capabilities at there and to enable their own zero trust IT environments and IT zero trusts deployments. We have completely adapted our security approach to make it easier for customers to work with us no matter where they are in their journey towards zero trust option. >>So thank you for that. You mentioned the, this framework, you talked about zero trust. When I think about n I think as well about layered approaches. And when I think about zero trust, I think about if you, if you don't have access to it, you're not getting access, you've gotta earn that, that access and you've got layers and then you still assume that bad guys are gonna get in. So you've gotta detect that and you've gotta response. So server infrastructure security is so fundamental. So my question is, what is Dell providing specifically to, for example, detect anomalies and breaches from unauthorized activity? How do you enable fast and easy or facile recovery from malicious incidents, >>Right? What is that is exactly right, right? Breachers are bound to happen and given how complex our current environment is, it's extremely distributed and extremely connected, right? Data and users are no longer contained with an offices where we can set up a perimeter firewall and say, Yeah, everything within that is good. We can trust everything within it. That's no longer true. The best approach to protect data and infrastructure in the current world is to use a zero trust approach, which uses the principles. Nothing is ever trusted, right? Nothing is trusted implicitly. You're constantly verifying every single user, every single device, and every single access in your system at every single level of your ID environment. And this is the principles that we use on power Edge, right? But with an increased focus on providing granular controls and checks based on the principles of these privileged access. >>So the idea is that service first and foremost need to make sure that the threats never enter and they're rejected at the point of entry, but we recognize breaches are going to occur and if they do, they need to be minimized such that the sphere of damage cost by attacker is minimized so they're not able to move from one part of the network to something else laterally or escalate their privileges and cause more damage, right? So the impact radius for instance, has to be radius. And this is done through features like automated detection capabilities and automation, automated remediation capabilities. So some examples are as part of our end to end boot resilience process, we have what they call a system lockdown, right? We can lock down the configuration of the system and lock on the form versions and all changes to the system. And we have capabilities which automatically detect any drift from that lockdown configuration and we can figure out if the drift was caused to authorized changes or unauthorized changes. >>And if it is an unauthorize change can log it, generate security alerts, and we even have capabilities to automatically roll the firm where, and always versions back to a known good version and also the configurations, right? And this becomes extremely important because as part of zero trust, we need to respond to these things at machine speed and we cannot do it at a human speed. And having these automated capabilities is a big deal when achieving that zero trust strategy. And in addition to this, we also have chassis inclusion detection where if the chassis, the box, the several box is opened up, it logs alerts, and you can figure out even later if there's an AC power cycle, you can go look at the logs to see that the box is opened up and figure out if there was a, like a known authorized access or some malicious actor opening and chain something in your system. >>Great, thank you for that lot. Lot of detail and and appreciate that. I want to go somewhere else now cuz Dell has a renowned supply chain reputation. So what about securing the, the supply chain and the server bill of materials? What does Dell specifically do to track the providence of components it uses in its systems so that when the systems arrive, a customer can be a hundred percent certain that that system hasn't been compromised, >>Right? And we've talked about how complex the modern supply chain is, right? And that's no different for service. We have hundreds of confidence on the server and a lot of these form where in order to be configured and run and this former competence could be coming from third parties suppliers. So now the complexity that we are dealing with like was the end to end approach and that's where Dell pays a lot of attention into assuring the security approach approaching and it starts all the way from sourcing competence, right? And then through the design and then even the manufacturing process where we are wetting the personnel leather factories and wetting the factories itself. And the factories also have physical controls, physical security controls built into them and even shipping, right? We have GPS tagging of packages. So all of this is built to ensure supply chain security. >>But a critical aspect of this is also making sure that the systems which are built in the factories are delivered to the customers without any changes or any tapper. And we have a feature called the secure component verification, which is capable of doing this. What the feature does this, when the system gets built in a factory, it generates an inventory of all the competence in the system and it creates a cryptographic certificate based on the signatures presented to this by the competence. And this certificate is stored separately and sent to the customers separately from the system itself. So once the customers receive the system at their end, they can run out to, it generates an inventory of the competence on the system at their end and then compare it to the golden certificate to make sure nothing was changed. And if any changes are detected, we can figure out if there's an authorized change or unauthorize change. >>Again, authorized changes could be like, you know, upgrades to the drives or memory and ized changes could be any sort of temper. So that's the supply chain aspect of it and bill of metal use is also an important aspect to galing security, right? And we provide a software bill of materials, which is basically a list of ingredients of all the software pieces in the platform. So what it allows our customers to do is quickly take a look at all the different pieces and compare it to the vulnerability database and see if any of the vulner which have been discovered out in the wild affected platform. So that's a quick way of figuring out if the platform has any known vulnerabilities and it has not been patched. >>Excellent. That's really good. My last question is, I wonder if you, you know, give us the sort of summary from your perspective, what are the key strengths of Dell server portfolio from a security standpoint? I'm really interested in, you know, the uniqueness and the strong suit that Dell brings to the table, >>Right? Yeah. We have talked enough about the complexity of the environment and how zero risk is necessary for the modern ID environment, right? And this is integral to Dell powered service. And as part of that like you know, security starts with the supply chain. We already talked about the second component verification, which is a beneath feature that Dell platforms have. And on top of it we also have a silicon place platform mode of trust. So this is a key which is programmed into the silicon on the black service during manufacturing and can never be changed after. And this immutable key is what forms the anchor for creating the chain of trust that is used to verify everything in the platform from the hardware and software integrity to the boot, all pieces of it, right? In addition to that, we also have a host of data protection features. >>Whether it is protecting data at risk in news or inflight, we have self encrypting drives which provides scalable and flexible encryption options. And this couple with external key management provides really good protection for your data address. External key management is important because you know, somebody could physically steam the server walk away, but then the keys are not stored on the server, it stood separately. So that provides your action layer of security. And we also have dual layer encryption where you can compliment the hardware encryption on the secure encrypted drives with software level encryption. Inion to this we have identity and access management features like multifactor authentication, single sign on roles, scope and time based access controls, all of which are critical to enable that granular control and checks for zero trust approach. So I would say like, you know, if you look at the Dell feature set, it's pretty comprehensive and we also have the flexibility built in to meet the needs of all customers no matter where they fall in the spectrum of, you know, risk tolerance and security sensitivity. And we also have the capabilities to meet all the regulatory requirements and compliance requirements. So in a nutshell, I would say that you know, Dell Power Service cyber resident infrastructure helps accelerate zero tested option for customers. >>Got it. So you've really thought this through all the various things that that you would do to sort of make sure that your server infrastructure is secure, not compromised, that your supply chain is secure so that your customers can focus on some of the other things that they have to worry about, which are numerous. Thanks Deepak, appreciate you coming on the cube and participating in the program. >>Thank you for having >>You're welcome. In a moment I'll be back to dig into the networking portion of the infrastructure. Stay with us for more coverage of a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and collaboration with Dell Technologies on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We're back with a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and partnership with Dell Technologies in the cube. And we're here with Mahesh Nager, who is a consultant in the area of networking product management at Dell Technologies. Mahesh, welcome, good to see you. >>Hey, good morning Dell's, nice to meet, meet to you as well. >>Hey, so we've been digging into all the parts of the infrastructure stack and now we're gonna look at the all important networking components. Mahesh, when we think about networking in today's environment, we think about the core data center and we're connecting out to various locations including the cloud and both the near and the far edge. So the question is from Dell's perspective, what's unique and challenging about securing network infrastructure that we should know about? >>Yeah, so few years ago IT security and an enterprise was primarily putting a wrapper around data center out because it was constrained to an infrastructure owned and operated by the enterprise for the most part. So putting a rapid around it like a parameter or a firewall was a sufficient response because you could basically control the environment and data small enough control today with the distributed data, intelligent software, different systems, multi-cloud environment and asset service delivery, you know, the infrastructure for the modern era changes the way to secure the network infrastructure In today's, you know, data driven world, it operates everywhere and data has created and accessed everywhere so far from, you know, the centralized monolithic data centers of the past. The biggest challenge is how do we build the network infrastructure of the modern era that are intelligent with automation enabling maximum flexibility and business agility without any compromise on the security. We believe that in this data era, the security transformation must accompany digital transformation. >>Yeah, that's very good. You talked about a couple of things there. Data by its very nature is distributed. There is no perimeter anymore, so you can't just, as you say, put a rapper around it. I like the way you phrase that. So when you think about cyber security resilience from a networking perspective, how do you define that? In other words, what are the basic principles that you adhere to when thinking about securing network infrastructure for your customers? >>So our belief is that cybersecurity and cybersecurity resilience, they need to be holistic, they need to be integrated, scalable, one that span the entire enterprise and with a co and objective and policy implementation. So cybersecurity needs to span across all the devices and running across any application, whether the application resets on the cloud or anywhere else in the infrastructure. From a networking standpoint, what does it mean? It's again, the same principles, right? You know, in order to prevent the threat actors from accessing changing best destroy or stealing sensitive data, this definition holds good for networking as well. So if you look at it from a networking perspective, it's the ability to protect from and withstand attacks on the networking systems as we continue to evolve. This will also include the ability to adapt and recover from these attacks, which is what cyber resilience aspect is all about. So cybersecurity best practices, as you know, is continuously changing the landscape primarily because the cyber threats also continue to evolve. >>Yeah, got it. So I like that. So it's gotta be integrated, it's gotta be scalable, it's gotta be comprehensive, comprehensive and adaptable. You're saying it can't be static, >>Right? Right. So I think, you know, you had a second part of a question, you know, that says what do we, you know, what are the basic principles? You know, when you think about securing network infrastructure, when you're looking at securing the network infrastructure, it revolves around core security capability of the devices that form the network. And what are these security capabilities? These are access control, software integrity and vulnerability response. When you look at access control, it's to ensure that only the authenticated users are able to access the platform and they're able to access only the kind of the assets that they're authorized to based on their user level. Now accessing a network platform like a switch or a rotor for example, is typically used for say, configuration and management of the networking switch. So user access is based on say roles for that matter in a role based access control, whether you are a security admin or a network admin or a storage admin. >>And it's imperative that logging is enable because any of the change to the configuration is actually logged and monitored as that. Talking about software's integrity, it's the ability to ensure that the software that's running on the system has not been compromised. And, and you know, this is important because it could actually, you know, get hold of the system and you know, you could get UND desire results in terms of say validation of the images. It's, it needs to be done through say digital signature. So, so it's important that when you're talking about say, software integrity, a, you are ensuring that the platform is not compromised, you know, is not compromised and be that any upgrades, you know, that happens to the platform is happening through say validated signature. >>Okay. And now, now you've now, so there's access control, software integrity, and I think you, you've got a third element which is i I think response, but please continue. >>Yeah, so you know, the third one is about civil notability. So we follow the same process that's been followed by the rest of the products within the Dell product family. That's to report or identify, you know, any kind of a vulnerability that's being addressed by the Dell product security incident response team. So the networking portfolio is no different, you know, it follows the same process for identification for tri and for resolution of these vulnerabilities. And these are addressed either through patches or through new reasons via networking software. >>Yeah, got it. Okay. So I mean, you didn't say zero trust, but when you were talking about access control, you're really talking about access to only those assets that people are authorized to access. I know zero trust sometimes is a buzzword, but, but you I think gave it, you know, some clarity there. Software integrity, it's about assurance validation, your digital signature you mentioned and, and that there's been no compromise. And then how you respond to incidents in a standard way that can fit into a security framework. So outstanding description, thank you for that. But then the next question is, how does Dell networking fit into the construct of what we've been talking about Dell trusted infrastructure? >>Okay, so networking is the key element in the Dell trusted infrastructure. It provides the interconnect between the service and the storage world. And you know, it's part of any data center configuration for a trusted infrastructure. The network needs to have access control in place where only the authorized nels are able to make change to the network configuration and logging off any of those changes is also done through the logging capabilities. Additionally, we should also ensure that the configuration should provide network isolation between say the management network and the data traffic network because they need to be separate and distinct from each other. And furthermore, even if you look at the data traffic network and now you have things like segmentation isolated segments and via VRF or, or some micro segmentation via partners, this allows various level of security for each of those segments. So it's important you know, that, that the network infrastructure has the ability, you know, to provide all this, this services from a Dell networking security perspective, right? >>You know, there are multiple layer of defense, you know, both at the edge and in the network in this hardware and in the software and essentially, you know, a set of rules and a configuration that's designed to sort of protect the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of the network assets. So each network security layer, it implements policies and controls as I said, you know, including send network segmentation. We do have capabilities sources, centralized management automation and capability and scalability for that matter. Now you add all of these things, you know, with the open networking standards or software, different principles and you essentially, you know, reach to the point where you know, you're looking at zero trust network access, which is essentially sort of a building block for increased cloud adoption. If you look at say that you know the different pillars of a zero trust architecture, you know, if you look at the device aspect, you know, we do have support for security for example, we do have say trust platform in a trusted platform models tpms on certain offer products and you know, the physical security know plain, simple old one love port enable from a user trust perspective, we know it's all done via access control days via role based access control and say capability in order to provide say remote authentication or things like say sticky Mac or Mac learning limit and so on. >>If you look at say a transport and decision trust layer, these are essentially, you know, how do you access, you know, this switch, you know, is it by plain hotel net or is it like secure ssh, right? And you know, when a host communicates, you know, to the switch, we do have things like self-signed or is certificate authority based certification. And one of the important aspect is, you know, in terms of, you know, the routing protocol, the routing protocol, say for example BGP for example, we do have the capability to support MD five authentication between the b g peers so that there is no, you know, manages attack, you know, to the network where the routing table is compromised. And the other aspect is about second control plane is here, you know, you know, it's, it's typical that if you don't have a control plane here, you know, it could be flooded and you know, you know, the switch could be compromised by city denial service attacks. >>From an application test perspective, as I mentioned, you know, we do have, you know, the application specific security rules where you could actually define, you know, the specific security rules based on the specific applications, you know, that are running within the system. And I did talk about, say the digital signature and the cryptographic check that we do for authentication and for, I mean rather for the authenticity and the validation of, you know, of the image and the BS and so on and so forth. Finally, you know, the data trust, we are looking at, you know, the network separation, you know, the network separation could happen or VRF plain old wheel Ls, you know, which can bring about sales multi 10 aspects. We talk about some microsegmentation as it applies to nsx for example. The other aspect is, you know, we do have, with our own smart fabric services that's enabled in a fabric, we have a concept of c cluster security. So all of this, you know, the different pillars, they sort of make up for the zero trust infrastructure for the networking assets of an infrastructure. >>Yeah. So thank you for that. There's a, there's a lot to unpack there. You know, one of the premise, the premise really of this, this, this, this segment that we're setting up in this series is really that everything you just mentioned, or a lot of things you just mentioned used to be the responsibility of the security team. And, and the premise that we're putting forth is that because security teams are so stretched thin, you, you gotta shift the vendor community. Dell specifically is shifting a lot of those tasks to their own r and d and taking care of a lot of that. So, cuz scop teams got a lot of other stuff to, to worry about. So my question relates to things like automation, which can help and scalability, what about those topics as it relates to networking infrastructure? >>Okay, our >>Portfolio, it enables state of the automation software, you know, that enables simplifying of the design. So for example, we do have, you know, you know the fabric design center, you know, a tool that automates the design of the fabric and you know, from a deployment and you know, the management of the network infrastructure that are simplicities, you know, using like Ansible s for Sonic for example are, you know, for a better sit and tell story. You know, we do have smart fabric services that can automate the entire fabric, you know, for a storage solution or for, you know, for one of the workloads for example. Now we do help reduce the complexity by closely integrating the management of the physical and the virtual networking infrastructure. And again, you know, we have those capabilities using Sonic or Smart Traffic services. If you look at Sonic for example, right? >>It delivers automated intent based secure containerized network and it has the ability to provide some network visibility and Avan has and, and all of these things are actually valid, you know, for a modern networking infrastructure. So now if you look at Sonic, you know, it's, you know, the usage of those tools, you know, that are available, you know, within the Sonic no is not restricted, you know, just to the data center infrastructure is, it's a unified no, you know, that's well applicable beyond the data center, you know, right up to the edge. Now if you look at our north from a smart traffic OS 10 perspective, you know, as I mentioned, we do have smart traffic services which essentially, you know, simplifies the deployment day zero, I mean rather day one, day two deployment expansion plans and the lifecycle management of our conversion infrastructure and hyper and hyper conversion infrastructure solutions. And finally, in order to enable say, zero touch deployment, we do have, you know, a VP solution with our SD van capability. So these are, you know, ways by which we bring down the complexity by, you know, enhancing the automation capability using, you know, a singular loss that can expand from a data center now right to the edge. >>Great, thank you for that. Last question real quick, just pitch me, what can you summarize from your point of view, what's the strength of the Dell networking portfolio? >>Okay, so from a Dell networking portfolio, we support capabilities at multiple layers. As I mentioned, we're talking about the physical security for examples, say disabling of the unused interface. Sticky Mac and trusted platform modules are the things that to go after. And when you're talking about say secure boot for example, it delivers the authenticity and the integrity of the OS 10 images at the startup. And Secure Boot also protects the startup configuration so that, you know, the startup configuration file is not compromised. And Secure port also enables the workload of prediction, for example, that is at another aspect of software image integrity validation, you know, wherein the image is data for the digital signature, you know, prior to any upgrade process. And if you are looking at secure access control, we do have things like role based access control, SSH to the switches, control plane access control that pre do tags and say access control from multifactor authentication. >>We do have various tech ads for entry control to the network and things like CSE and PRV support, you know, from a federal perspective we do have say logging wherein, you know, any event, any auditing capabilities can be possible by say looking at the clog service, you know, which are pretty much in our transmitter from the devices overts for example, and last we talked about say network segment, you know, say network separation and you know, these, you know, separation, you know, ensures that are, that is, you know, a contained say segment, you know, for a specific purpose or for the specific zone and, you know, just can be implemented by a, a micro segmentation, you know, just a plain old wheel or using virtual route of framework VR for example. >>A lot there. I mean I think frankly, you know, my takeaway is you guys do the heavy lifting in a very complicated topic. So thank you so much for, for coming on the cube and explaining that in in quite some depth. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you indeed. >>Oh, you're very welcome. Okay, in a moment I'll be back to dig into the hyper-converged infrastructure part of the portfolio and look at how when you enter the world of software defined where you're controlling servers and storage and networks via software led system, you could be sure that your infrastructure is trusted and secure. You're watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure made possible by Dell Technologies and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, your own west product management security lead at for HCI at Dell Technologies hyper-converged infrastructure. Jerome, welcome. >>Thank you Dave. >>Hey Jerome, in this series of blueprint for trusted infrastructure, we've been digging into the different parts of the infrastructure stack, including storage servers and networking, and now we want to cover hyperconverged infrastructure. So my first question is, what's unique about HCI that presents specific security challenges? What do we need to know? >>So what's unique about hyper-converge infrastructure is the breadth of the security challenge. We can't simply focus on a single type of IT system. So like a server or storage system or a virtualization piece of software, software. I mean HCI is all of those things. So luckily we have excellent partners like VMware, Microsoft, and internal partners like the Dell Power Edge team, the Dell storage team, the Dell networking team, and on and on. These partnerships in these collaborations are what make us successful from a security standpoint. So let me give you an example to illustrate. In the recent past we're seeing growing scope and sophistication in supply chain attacks. This mean an attacker is going to attack your software supply chain upstream so that hopefully a piece of code, malicious code that wasn't identified early in the software supply chain is distributed like a large player, like a VMware or Microsoft or a Dell. So to confront this kind of sophisticated hard to defeat problem, we need short term solutions and we need long term solutions as well. >>So for the short term solution, the obvious thing to do is to patch the vulnerability. The complexity is for our HCI portfolio. We build our software on VMware, so we would have to consume a patch that VMware would produce and provide it to our customers in a timely manner. Luckily VX rail's engineering team has co engineered a release process with VMware that significantly shortens our development life cycle so that VMware would produce a patch and within 14 days we will integrate our own code with the VMware release we will have tested and validated the update and we will give an update to our customers within 14 days of that VMware release. That as a result of this kind of rapid development process, VHA had over 40 releases of software updates last year for a longer term solution. We're partnering with VMware and others to develop a software bill of materials. We work with VMware to consume their software manifest, including their upstream vendors and their open source providers to have a comprehensive list of software components. Then we aren't caught off guard by an unforeseen vulnerability and we're more able to easily detect where the software problem lies so that we can quickly address it. So these are the kind of relationships and solutions that we can co engineer with effective collaborations with our, with our partners. >>Great, thank you for that. That description. So if I had to define what cybersecurity resilience means to HCI or converged infrastructure, and to me my takeaway was you gotta have a short term instant patch solution and then you gotta do an integration in a very short time, you know, two weeks to then have that integration done. And then longer term you have to have a software bill of materials so that you can ensure the providence of all the components help us. Is that a right way to think about cybersecurity resilience? Do you have, you know, a additives to that definition? >>I do. I really think that's site cybersecurity and resilience for hci because like I said, it has sort of unprecedented breadth across our portfolio. It's not a single thing, it's a bit of everything. So really the strength or the secret sauce is to combine all the solutions that our partner develops while integrating them with our own layer. So let me, let me give you an example. So hci, it's a, basically taking a software abstraction of hardware functionality and implementing it into something called the virtualized layer. It's basically the virtual virtualizing hardware functionality, like say a storage controller, you could implement it in hardware, but for hci, for example, in our VX rail portfolio, we, our Vxl product, we integrated it into a product called vsan, which is provided by our partner VMware. So that portfolio of strength is still, you know, through our, through our partnerships. >>So what we do, we integrate these, these security functionality and features in into our product. So our partnership grows to our ecosystem through products like VMware, products like nsx, Horizon, Carbon Black and vSphere. All of them integrate seamlessly with VMware and we also leverage VMware's software, part software partnerships on top of that. So for example, VX supports multifactor authentication through vSphere integration with something called Active Directory Federation services for adfs. So there's a lot of providers that support adfs including Microsoft Azure. So now we can support a wide array of identity providers such as Off Zero or I mentioned Azure or Active Directory through that partnership. So we can leverage all of our partners partnerships as well. So there's sort of a second layer. So being able to secure all of that, that provides a lot of options and flexibility for our customers. So basically to summarize my my answer, we consume all of the security advantages of our partners, but we also expand on them to make a product that is comprehensively secured at multiple layers from the hardware layer that's provided by Dell through Power Edge to the hyper-converged software that we build ourselves to the virtualization layer that we get through our partnerships with Microsoft and VMware. >>Great, I mean that's super helpful. You've mentioned nsx, Horizon, Carbon Black, all the, you know, the VMware component OTH zero, which the developers are gonna love. You got Azure identity, so it's really an ecosystem. So you may have actually answered my next question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway cuz you've got this software defined environment and you're managing servers and networking and storage with this software led approach, how do you ensure that the entire system is secure end to end? >>That's a really great question. So the, the answer is we do testing and validation as part of the engineering process. It's not just bolted on at the end. So when we do, for example, VxRail is the market's only co engineered solution with VMware, other vendors sell VMware as a hyper converged solution, but we actually include security as part of the co-engineering process with VMware. So it's considered when VMware builds their code and their process dovetails with ours because we have a secure development life cycle, which other products might talk about in their discussions with you that we integrate into our engineering life cycle. So because we follow the same framework, all of the, all of the codes should interoperate from a security standpoint. And so when we do our final validation testing when we do a software release, we're already halfway there in ensuring that all these features will give the customers what we promised. >>That's great. All right, let's, let's close pitch me, what would you say is the strong suit summarize the, the strengths of the Dell hyper-converged infrastructure and converged infrastructure portfolio specifically from a security perspective? Jerome? >>So I talked about how hyper hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies security management because basically you're gonna take all of these features that are abstracted in in hardware, they're now abstracted in the virtualization layer. Now you can manage them from a single point of view, whether it would be, say, you know, in for VX rail would be b be center, for example. So by abstracting all this, you make it very easy to manage security and highly flexible because now you don't have limitations around a single vendor. You have a multiple array of choices and partnerships to select. So I would say that is the, the key to making it to hci. Now, what makes Dell the market leader in HCI is not only do we have that functionality, but we also make it exceptionally useful to you because it's co engineered, it's not bolted on. So I gave the example of spo, I gave the example of how we, we modify our software release process with VMware to make it very responsive. >>A couple of other features that we have specific just to HCI are digitally signed LCM updates. This is an example of a feature that we have that's only exclusive to Dell that's not done through a partnership. So we digitally signed our software updates so the user can be sure that the, the update that they're installing into their system is an authentic and unmodified product. So we give it a Dell signature that's invalidated prior to installation. So not only do we consume the features that others develop in a seamless and fully validated way, but we also bolt on our own a specific HCI security features that work with all the other partnerships and give the user an exceptional security experience. So for, for example, the benefit to the customer is you don't have to create a complicated security framework that's hard for your users to use and it's hard for your system administrators to manage it all comes in a package. So it, it can be all managed through vCenter, for example, or, and then the specific hyper, hyper-converged functions can be managed through VxRail manager or through STDC manager. So there's very few pains of glass that the, the administrator or user ever has to worry about. It's all self contained and manageable. >>That makes a lot of sense. So you've got your own infrastructure, you're applying your best practices to that, like the digital signatures, you've got your ecosystem, you're doing co-engineering with the ecosystems, delivering security in a package, minimizing the complexity at the infrastructure level. The reason Jerome, this is so important is because SecOps teams, you know, they gotta deal with cloud security, they gotta deal with multiple clouds. Now they have their shared responsibility model going across multiple cl. They got all this other stuff that they have to worry, they gotta secure the containers and the run time and and, and, and, and the platform and so forth. So they're being asked to do other things. If they have to worry about all the things that you just mentioned, they'll never get, you know, the, the securities is gonna get worse. So what my takeaway is, you're removing that infrastructure piece and saying, Okay guys, you now can focus on those other things that is not necessarily Dell's, you know, domain, but you, you know, you can work with other partners to and your own teams to really nail that. Is that a fair summary? >>I think that is a fair summary because absolutely the worst thing you can do from a security perspective is provide a feature that's so unusable that the administrator disables it or other key security features. So when I work with my partners to define, to define and develop a new security feature, the thing I keep foremost in mind is, will this be something our users want to use and our administrators want to administer? Because if it's not, if it's something that's too difficult or onerous or complex, then I try to find ways to make it more user friendly and practical. And this is a challenge sometimes because we are, our products operate in highly regulated environments and sometimes they have to have certain rules and certain configurations that aren't the most user friendly or management friendly. So I, I put a lot of effort into thinking about how can we make this feature useful while still complying with all the regulations that we have to comply with. And by the way, we're very successful in a highly regulated space. We sell a lot of VxRail, for example, into the Department of Defense and banks and, and other highly regulated environments and we're very successful there. >>Excellent. Okay, Jerome, thanks. We're gonna leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back to talk about the progress that you're making down the road. Things always, you know, advance in the tech industry and so would appreciate that. >>I would look forward to it. Thank you very much, Dave. >>You're really welcome. In a moment I'll be back to summarize the program and offer some resources that can help you on your journey to secure your enterprise infrastructure. I wanna thank our guests for their contributions in helping us understand how investments by a company like Dell can both reduce the need for dev sec up teams to worry about some of the more fundamental security issues around infrastructure and have greater confidence in the quality providence and data protection designed in to core infrastructure like servers, storage, networking, and hyper-converged systems. You know, at the end of the day, whether your workloads are in the cloud, on prem or at the edge, you are responsible for your own security. But vendor r and d and vendor process must play an important role in easing the burden faced by security devs and operation teams. And on behalf of the cube production content and social teams as well as Dell Technologies, we want to thank you for watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure. Remember part one of this series as well as all the videos associated with this program and of course today's program are available on demand@thecube.net with additional coverage@siliconangle.com. And you can go to dell.com/security solutions dell.com/security solutions to learn more about Dell's approach to securing infrastructure. And there's tons of additional resources that can help you on your journey. This is Dave Valante for the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll see you next time.

>> Whenever you're ready. >> Okay, I'm Dave, in five, four, three. I want to thank our guests for their contributions in helping us understand how investments by a company like Dell can both reduce the need for DevSecOp teams to worry about some of the more fundamental security issues around infrastructure, and have greater confidence in the quality, provenance and data protection designed in to core infrastructure like servers, storage, networking, and hyperconverged systems. At the end of the day, whether your workloads are in the cloud, on prem or at the edge, you are responsible for your own security but vendor R&D and vendor process must play an important role in easing the burden faced by security, devs and operation teams. And on behalf of theCUBE production, content and social teams, as well as Dell Technologies, we want to thank you for watching A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure. Remember, part one of this series, as well as all the videos associated with this program and of course, today's program are available on demand at thecube.net with additional coverage at siliconangle.com. And you can go to dell.com/securitysolutions, dell.com/dell.com/securitysolutions to learn more about Dell's approach to securing infrastructure and there's tons of additional resources that can help you on your journey. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> We're back with Jerome West, the Product Management Security Lead for HCI at Dell Technologies Hyper-Converged Infrastructure. Jerome, welcome. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Hey, Jerome, in this series "A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure," we've been digging into the different parts of the infrastructure stack, including storage servers and networking, and now we want to cover hyper-converged infrastructure. So my first question is what's unique about HCI that presents specific security challenges? What do we need to know? >> So what's unique about hyper-converged infrastructure is the breadth of the security challenge. We can't simply focus on a single type of IT system, so like a server or a storage system or a virtualization piece of software. I mean, HCI is all of those things. So luckily we have excellent partners like VMware, Microsoft and internal partners, like the Dell Power Edge Team, the Dell Storage Team, the Dell Networking Team, and on and on. These partnerships and these collaborations are what make us successful from a security standpoint. So let me give you an example to illustrate. In the recent past, we're seeing growing scope and sophistication in supply chain attacks. This means an attacker is going to attack your software supply chain upstream, so that hopefully a piece of code, malicious code that wasn't identified early in the software supply chain is distributed like a large player, like a VMware or a Microsoft or a Dell. So to confront this kind of sophisticated hard to defeat problem, we need short-term solutions and we need long-term solutions as well. So for the short-term solution, the obvious thing to do is to patch the vulnerability. The complexity is for our HCI portfolio, we build our software on VMware. So we would have to consume a patch that VMware would produce and provide it to our customers in a timely manner. Luckily, VxRail's engineering team has co engineered a release process with VMware that significantly shortens our development life cycle, so that VMware will produce a patch, and within 14 days we will integrate our own code with the VMware release. We will have tested and validated the update, and we will give an update to our customers within 14 days of that VMware release. That as a result of this kind of rapid development process, VxRail had over 40 releases of software updates last year. For a longer term solution, we're partnering with VMware and others to develop a software bill of materials. We work with VMware to consume their software manifest including their upstream vendors and their open source providers to have a comprehensive list of software components. Then we aren't caught off guard by an unforeseen vulnerability, and we're more able to easily detect where the software problem lies so that we can quickly address it. So these are the kind of relationships and solutions that we can co-engineer with effective collaborations with our partners. >> Great, thank you for that description. So if I had to define what cybersecurity resilience means to HCI or converged infrastructure, to me, my takeaway was you got to have a short-term instant patch solution and then you got to do an integration in a very short time, you know, two weeks to then have that integration done. And then longer-term, you have to have a software bill of materials so that you can ensure the provenance of all the components. Help us, is that a right way to think about cybersecurity resilience? Do you have, you know, additives to that definition? >> I do. I really think that cybersecurity and resilience for HCI, because like I said it has sort of unprecedented breadth across our portfolio. It's not a single thing. It's a bit of everything. So really the strength or the secret sauce is to combine all the solutions that our partner develops while integrating them with our own layer. So let me give you an example. So HCI, it's a basically taking a software abstraction of hardware functionality and implementing it into something called the virtualized layer. It's basically the virtualizing hardware functionality, like say a storage controller. You could implement it in the hardware, but for HCI, for example, in our VxRail portfolio, our VxRail product, we integrated it into a product called vSan which is provided by our partner VMware. So that portfolio strength is still, you know, through our partnerships. So what we do, we integrate these security functionality and features into our product. So our partnership grows through our ecosystem through products like VMware products, like NSX, Horizon, Carbon Black and vSphere. All of them integrate seamlessly with VMware. And we also leverage VMware's software partnerships on top of that. So for example, VxRail supports multifactor authentication through vSphere's integration with something called Active Directory Federation Services or ADFS. So there is a lot of providers that support ADFS, including Microsoft Azure. So now we can support a wide array of identity providers such as Auth0, or I mentioned Azure or Active Directory through that partnership. So we can leverage all of our partners' partnerships as well. So there's sort of a second layer. So being able to secure all of that, that provides a lot of options and flexibility for our customers. So basically to summarize my answer, we consume all of the security advantages of our partners, but we also expand on them to make a product that is comprehensively secured at multiple layers from the hardware layer that's provided by Dell through Power Edge to the hyper-converged software that we build ourselves to the virtualization layer that we get through our partnerships with Microsoft and VMware. >> Great, I mean, that's super helpful. You've mentioned NSX, Horizon, Carbon Black, all the you know, the VMware component, Auth0, which the developers are going to love. You got Azure Identity. So it's really an ecosystem. So you may have actually answered my next question, but I'm going to ask it anyway cause you've got this software-defined environment, and you're managing servers and networking and storage with this software-led approach. How do you ensure that the entire system is secure end to end? >> That's a really great question. So the answer is we do testing and validation as part of the engineering process. It's not just bolted on at the end. So when we do, for example VxRail is the market's only co-engineered solution with VMware. Other vendors sell VMware as a hyper-converged solution, but we actually include security as part of the co-engineering process with VMware. So it's considered when VMware builds their code, and their process dovetails with ours because we have a secure development lifecycle which other products might talk about in their discussions with you, that we integrate into our engineering lifecycle. So because we follow the same framework, all of the code should inter-operate from a security standpoint. And so when we do our final validation testing, when we do a software release, we're already halfway there in ensuring that all these features will give the customers what we promised. >> That's great. All right, let's close. Pitch me. What would you say is the strong suit, summarize the the strengths of the Dell hyper-converged infrastructure and converged infrastructure portfolio, specifically from a security perspective, Jerome? >> So I talked about how hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies security management because basically you're going to take all of these features that are abstracted in hardware. They're not abstracted in the virtualization layer. Now you can manage them from a single point of view, whether it would be say, you know, for VxRail it would be vCenter, for example. So by abstracting all this, you make it very easy to manage security and highly flexible because now you don't have limitations around a single vendor. You have a multiple array of choices and partnerships to select. So I would say that is the key to making, to HCI. Now what makes Dell the market leader in HCI is not only do we have that functionality, but we also make it exceptionally useful to you because it's co-engineered. It's not bolted on. So I gave the example of SBOM. I gave the example of how we modify our software release process with VMware to make it very responsive. A couple of other features that we have specific just to HCI are digitally signed LCM updates. This is an example of a feature that we have that's only exclusive to Dell. It's not done through a partnership. So we digitally sign our software updates. So the user can be sure that the update that they're installing into their system is an authentic and unmodified product. So we give it a Dell signature that's invalidated prior to installation. So not only do we consume the features that others develop in a seamless and fully validated way, but we also bolt on our own specific HCI security features that work with all the other partnerships and give the user an exceptional security experience. So for example, the benefit to the customer is you don't have to create a complicated security framework. That's hard for your users to use, and it's hard for your system administrators to manage. It all comes in a package, so it can be all managed through vCenter, for example. And then the specific hyper-converged functions can be managed through VxRail manager or through STDC manager. So there's very few panes of glass that the administrator or user ever has to worry about. It's all self-contained and manageable. >> That makes a lot of sense. So you've got your own infrastructure. You're applying your best practices to that like the digital signatures. You've got your ecosystem. You're doing co-engineering with the ecosystems, delivering security in a package, minimizing the complexity at the infrastructure level. The reason, Jerome, this is so important is because SecOps teams, you know, they got to deal with Cloud security. They got to deal with multiple Clouds. Now they have their shared responsibility model going across multiple. They got all this other stuff that they have to worry. They got to secure the containers and the run time and the platform and so forth. So they're being asked to do other things. If they have to worry about all the things that you just mentioned, they'll never get, you know, the security is just going to get worse. So my takeaway is you're removing that infrastructure piece and saying, okay, guys, you now can focus on those other things that is not necessarily Dell's, you know, domain, but you, you know, you can work with other partners and your own teams to really nail that. Is that a fair summary? >> I think that is a fair summary because absolutely the worst thing you can do from a security perspective is provide a feature that's so unusable that the administrator disables it or other key security features. So when I work with my partners to define and develop a new security feature, the thing I keep foremost in mind is will this be something our users want to use and our administrators want to administer? Because if it's not, if it's something that's too difficult or onerous or complex, then I try to find ways to make it more user-friendly and practical. And this is a challenge sometimes because our products operate in highly regulated environments, and sometimes they have to have certain rules and certain configurations that aren't the most user friendly or management friendly. So I put a lot of effort into thinking about how can we make this feature useful while still complying with all the regulations that we have to comply with. And by the way, we're very successful in a highly regulated space. We sell a lot of VxRail, for example, into the Department of Defense and banks and other highly regulated environments. And we're very successful there. >> Excellent, okay, Jerome, thanks. We're going to leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back to talk about the progress that you're making down the road. Things always, you know, advance in the tech industry, and so would appreciate that >> I would look forward to it. Thank you very much, Dave. >> You're really welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to summarize the program and offer some resources that can help you on your journey to secure your enterprise infrastructure. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to a Blueprint For Trusted Infrastructure. We're here with Rob Emsley. Who's the director of product marketing for data protection and cyber security. Rob, good to see you. A new role. >> Yeah. Good to be back, Dave. Good to see you. Yeah, it's been a while since we chatted last and, you know, one of the changes in my world is that I've expanded my responsibilities beyond data protection marketing to also focus on cybersecurity marketing specifically for our infrastructure solutions group. So certainly that's, you know, something that really has driven us, you know, to come and have this conversation with you today. >> So data protection obviously has become an increasingly important component of the cyber security space. I don't think necessarily of, you know, traditional backup and recovery as security, to me, it's an adjacency. I know some companies have said, oh, yeah. Now we're a security company. They're kind of chasing the valuation bubble. >> For sure. >> Dell's interesting because you have, you know, data protection in the form of backup and recovery and data management, but you also have security, you know, direct security capabilities. So you're sort of bringing those two worlds together and it sounds like your responsibility is to connect those dots. Is that right? >> Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that the reality is is that security is a multi-layer discipline. I think the days of thinking that it's one or another technology that you can use or process that you can use to make your organization secure are long gone. I mean, certainly you actually correct. If you think about the backup and recovery space, I mean, people have been doing that for years, you know, certainly backup and recovery, it's all about the recovery. It's all about getting yourself backup and running when bad things happen. And one of the realities, unfortunately today is that one of the worst things that can happen is cyber attacks. You know, ransomware, malware are all things that are top of mind for all organizations today. And that's why you see a lot of technology and a lot of innovation going into the backup and recovery space because if you have a copy, a good copy of your data, then that is really the first place you go to recover from a cyber attack. And that's why it's so important. The reality is is that unfortunately the cyber criminals keep on getting smarter. I don't know how it happens, but one of the things that is happening is that the days of them just going after your production data are no longer the only challenge that you have, they go after your backup data as well. So over the last half a decade, Dell Technologies with its backup and recovery portfolio has introduced the concept of isolated cyber recovery vaults. We've had many conversations about that over the years and that's really a big tenant of what we do in the data protection portfolio. >> So this idea of cybersecurity resilience that definition is evolving. What does it mean to you? >> Yeah, I think the analyst team over at Gartner, they wrote a very insightful paper called you will be hacked embrace the breach. And the whole basis of this analysis is so much money's been spent on prevention is that what's out of balance is the amount of budget that companies have spent on cyber resilience and cyber resilience is based upon the premise that you will be hacked. You have to embrace that fact and be ready and prepared to bring yourself back into business. You know, and that's really where cyber resiliency is very, very different than cyber security and prevention, you know, and I think that balance of get your security disciplines well funded, get your defenses as good as you can get them but make sure that if the inevitable happens and you find yourself compromised that you have a great recovery plan and certainly a great recovery plan, it's really the basis of any good, solid data protection backup from recovery philosophy. >> So if I had to do a SWOT analysis, we don't have to do the WOT, but let's focus on the S. What would you say are Dell's strengths in this, you know, cyber security space as it relates to data protection? >> One is we've been doing it a long time. You know, we talk a lot about Dell's data protection being proven and modern. You know, certainly the experience that we've had over literally three decades of providing enterprise scale data protection solutions to our customers has really allowed us to have a lot of insight into what works and what doesn't. As I mentioned to you, one of the unique differentiators of our solution is the cyber recovery vaulting solution that we introduce a little over five years ago, five, six years. Power protect cyber recovery is something which has become a unique capability for customers to adopt on top of their investment in Dell Technologies data protection, you know, the unique elements of our solution already threefold, and we call them the three Is. It's isolation, it's a immutability and it's intelligence. And the, the isolation part is really so important because you need to reduce the attack surface of your good known copies of data. You know, you need to put it in a location that the bad actors can't get to it. And that really is the essence of a cyber recovery vault. Interestingly enough, you're starting to see the market throw out that word, you know, from many other places, but really it comes down to having a real discipline that you don't allow the security of your cyber recovery vault to be compromised insofar as allowing it to be controlled from outside of the vault, you know, allowing it to be controlled by your backup application. Our cyber recovery vaulting technology is independent of the backup infrastructure. It uses it, but it controls its own security. And that is so, so important. It's like having a vault that the only way to open it is from the inside, you know, and think about that. If you think about, you know, vaults in banks or vaults in your home, normally you have a key pad on the outside. Think of our cyber recovery vault as having its security controlled from inside of the vault. >> So nobody can get in, nothing can get in unless it's already in. And if it's already in, then it's trusted. >> Exactly, exactly. >> Yeah. So isolation's the key. And then you mentioned immutability is the second piece. >> Yeah, so immutability is also something which has been around for a long time. People talk about backup mutability or immutable backup copies. So I mutability is just the additional technology that allows the data that's inside of the vault to be unchangeable, you know, but again that immutability, you know, your mileage varies, you know, when you look across the different offers that are out there in the market especially in the backup industry. You made a very valid point earlier that the backup vendors in the market seem to be security washing their marketing messages. I mean, everybody is leaning into the ever present danger of cybersecurity, not a bad thing, but the reality is is that you have to have the technology to back it up, you know, quite literally >> Yeah, no pun intended. Right. Actually pun intended. Now what about the intelligence piece of it? That's that's AI, ML, where does that fit? >> For sure. So the intelligence piece is delivered by a solution called CyberSense. And CyberSense for us is what really gives you the confidence that what you have in your cyber recovery vault is a good clean copy of data. So it's looking at the backup copies that get driven into the cyber vault, and it's looking for anomalies. So it's not looking for signatures of malware. You know, that's what your antivirus software does. That's what your endpoint protection software does. That's on the prevention side of the equation. But what we're looking for is we're looking to ensure that the data that you need when all hell breaks loose is good and that when you get a request to restore and recover your business, you go, right, let's go and do it. And you don't have any concern that what you have in the vault has been compromised. So cyber sense is really a unique analytic solution in the market based upon the fact that it isn't looking at at cursory indicators of malware infection or ransomware introduction, it's doing full content analytics, you know, looking at, you know, has the data in any way changed, has it suddenly become encrypted? Has it suddenly become different to how it was in the previous scan? So that anomaly detection is very, very different. It's looking for, you know, like different characteristics that really are an indicator that something is going on. And, of course, if it sees it, you immediately get flagged. But the good news is is that you always have in the vault the previous copy of good known data which now becomes your restore point. >> So we're talking to Rob Emsley about how data protection fits into what Dell calls DTI, Dell Trusted Infrastructure. And I want to come back, Rob, to this notion of, and not or cause I think a lot of people are skeptical. Like how can I have great security and not introduce friction into my organization? Is that an automation play? How does Dell tackle that problem? >> I mean, I think a lot of it is across our infrastructure is is security has to be built in, I mean, intrinsic security within our servers, within our storage devices, within our elements of our backup infrastructure. I mean, security, multifactor authentication, you know, elements that make the overall infrastructure secure. You know, we have capabilities that, you know, allow us to identify whether or not configurations have changed. You know, we'll probably be talking about that a little bit more to you later in the segment, but the essence is security is not a Bolton. It has to be part of the overall infrastructure. And that's so true, certainly in the data protection space >> Give us the bottom line on how you see Dell's key differentiators. Maybe you could talk about Dell, of course, always talks about its portfolio, but why should customers, you know, lead in to Dell in this whole cyber resilience space? >> You know, staying on the data protection space as I mentioned, the work we've been doing to introduce this cyber resiliency solution for data protection is in our opinion, as good as it gets. You know, you've spoken to a number of our best customers whether it be Bob Bender from Founders Federal or more recently at (indistinct) you spoke to Tony Bryson from the Town of Gilbert. And these are customers that we've had for many years that have implemented cyber recovery vaults. And at the end of the day, they can now sleep at night. You know, that's really the peace of mind that they have is that the insurance that a data protection from Dell cyber recovery vault, a power protect cyber recovery solution gives them, you know, really allows them to, you know, just have the assurance that they don't have to pay a ransom. If they have an insider threat issue and, you know, all the way down to data deletion is they know that what's in the cyber recovery vault is good and ready for them to recover from. >> Great. Well, Rob, congratulations on the new scope of responsibility. I like how, you know, your organization is expanding as the threat surface is expanding. As we said, data protection becoming an adjacency to security, not security in and of itself. A key component of a comprehensive security strategy. Rob Emsley, thank you for coming back in theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> You too, Dave. Thanks. >> All right, in a moment, I'll be back to wrap up a blueprint for trusted infrastructure. You are watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> The cybersecurity landscape has changed dramatically over the past 24 to 36 months. Rapid cloud migration has created a new layer of security defense, sure, but that doesn't mean CISOs can relax. In many respects, it further complicates, or at least changes, the CISO's scope of responsibilities. In particular, the threat surface has expanded. And that creates more seams, and CISOs have to make sure their teams pick up where the hyperscaler clouds leave off. Application developers have become a critical execution point for cyber assurance. "Shift left" is the kind of new buzz phrase for devs, but organizations still have to "shield right," meaning the operational teams must continue to partner with SecOps to make sure infrastructure is resilient. So it's no wonder that in ETR's latest survey of nearly 1500 CIOs and IT buyers, that business technology executives cite security as their number one priority, well ahead of other critical technology initiatives including collaboration software, cloud computing, and analytics rounding out the top four. But budgets are under pressure and CISOs have to prioritize. It's not like they have an open checkbook. They have to contend with other key initiatives like those just mentioned, to secure the funding. And what about zero trust? Can you go out and buy zero trust or is it a framework, a mindset in a series of best practices applied to create a security consciousness throughout the organization? Can you implement zero trust? In other words, if a machine or human is not explicitly allowed access, then access is denied. Can you implement that policy without constricting organizational agility? The question is, what's the most practical way to apply that premise? And what role does infrastructure play as the enforcer? How does automation play in the equation? The fact is, that today's approach to cyber resilience can't be an "either/or," it has to be an "and" conversation. Meaning, you have to ensure data protection while at the same time advancing the mission of the organization with as little friction as possible. And don't even talk to me about the edge. That's really going to keep you up at night. Hello and welcome to this special CUBE presentation, "A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure," made possible by Dell Technologies. In this program, we explore the critical role that trusted infrastructure plays in cybersecurity strategies, how organizations should think about the infrastructure side of the cybersecurity equation, and how Dell specifically approaches securing infrastructure for your business. We'll dig into what it means to transform and evolve toward a modern security infrastructure that's both trusted and agile. First up are Pete Gerr and Steve Kenniston, they're both senior cyber security consultants at Dell Technologies. And they're going to talk about the company's philosophy and approach to trusted infrastructure. And then we're going to speak to Parasar Kodati, who's a senior consultant for storage at Dell Technologies to understand where and how storage plays in this trusted infrastructure world. And then finally, Rob Emsley who heads product marketing for data protection and cyber security. We're going to going to take a deeper dive with Rob into data protection and explain how it has become a critical component of a comprehensive cyber security strategy. Okay, let's get started. Pete Gerr, Steve Kenniston, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming into the Marlborough studios today. >> Great to be here, Dave. Thanks. >> Thanks, Dave. Good to see you. >> Great to see you guys. Pete, start by talking about the security landscape. You heard my little wrap up front. What are you seeing? >> I thought you wrapped it up really well. And you touched on all the key points, right? Technology is ubiquitous today. It's everywhere. It's no longer confined to a monolithic data center. It lives at the edge. It lives in front of us. It lives in our pockets and smartphones. Along with that is data. And as you said, organizations are managing sometimes 10 to 20 times the amount of data that they were just five years ago. And along with that, cyber crime has become a very profitable enterprise. In fact, it's been more than 10 years since the NSA chief actually called cyber crime the biggest transfer of wealth in history. That was 10 years ago. And we've seen nothing but accelerating cyber crime and really sophistication of how those attacks are perpetrated. And so the new security landscape is really more of an evolution. We're finally seeing security catch up with all of the technology adoption, all the build out, the work from home and work from anywhere that we've seen over the last couple of years. We're finally seeing organizations, and really it goes beyond the IT directors, it's a board level discussion today. Security's become a board level discussion. >> Yeah, I think that's true as well. It's like it used to be that security was, "Okay, the SecOps team. You're responsible for security." Now you've got, the developers are involved, the business lines are involved, it's part of onboarding for most companies. You know, Steve, this concept of zero trust. It was kind of a buzzword before the pandemic. And I feel like I've often said it's now become a mandate. But it's still fuzzy to a lot of people. How do you guys think about zero trust? What does it mean to you? How does it fit? >> Yeah. Again, I thought your opening was fantastic. And this whole lead in to, what is zero trust? It had been a buzzword for a long time. And now, ever since the federal government came out with their implementation or desire to drive zero trust, a lot more people are taking it a lot more seriously, 'cause I don't think they've seen the government do this. But ultimately, it's just like you said, right? If you don't have trust to those particular devices, applications, or data, you can't get at it. The question is, and you phrase it perfectly, can you implement that as well as allow the business to be as agile as it needs to be in order to be competitive? 'Cause we're seeing, with your whole notion around DevOps and the ability to kind of build, make, deploy, build, make, deploy, right? They still need that functionality but it also needs to be trusted. It needs to be secure and things can't get away from you. >> Yeah. So it's interesting. I've attended every Reinforce since 2019, and the narrative there is, "Hey, everything in the cloud is great. And this narrative around, 'Oh, security is a big problem.' doesn't help the industry." The fact is that the big hyperscalers, they're not strapped for talent, but CISOs are. They don't have the capabilities to really apply all these best practices. They're playing Whac-A-Mole. So they look to companies like yours, to take your R&D and bake it into security products and solutions. So what are the critical aspects of the so-called Dell Trusted Infrastructure that we should be thinking about? >> Yeah, well, Dell Trusted Infrastructure, for us, is a way for us to describe the the work that we do through design, development, and even delivery of our IT system. So Dell Trusted Infrastructure includes our storage, it includes our servers, our networking, our data protection, our hyper-converged, everything that infrastructure always has been. It's just that today customers consume that infrastructure at the edge, as a service, in a multi-cloud environment. I mean, I view the cloud as really a way for organizations to become more agile and to become more flexible, and also to control costs. I don't think organizations move to the cloud, or move to a multi-cloud environment, to enhance security. So I don't see cloud computing as a panacea for security, I see it as another attack surface. And another aspect in front that organizations and security organizations and departments have to manage. It's part of their infrastructure today, whether it's in their data center, in a cloud, or at the edge. >> I mean, I think that's a huge point. Because a lot of people think, "Oh, my data's in the cloud. I'm good." It's like Steve, we've talked about, "Oh, why do I have to back up my data? It's in the cloud?" Well, you might have to recover it someday. So I don't know if you have anything to add to that or any additional thoughts on it? >> No, I mean, I think like what Pete was saying, when it comes to all these new vectors for attack surfaces, you know, people did choose the cloud in order to be more agile, more flexible. And all that did was open up to the CISOs who need to pay attention to now, okay, "Where can I possibly be attacked? I need to be thinking about is that secure?" And part of that is Dell now also understands and thinks about, as we're building solutions, is it a trusted development life cycle? So we have our own trusted development life cycle. How many times in the past did you used to hear about vendors saying you got to patch your software because of this? We think about what changes to our software and what implementations and what enhancements we deliver can actually cause from a security perspective, and make sure we don't give up or have security become a hole just in order to implement a feature. We got to think about those things. And as Pete alluded to, our secure supply chain. So all the way through, knowing what you're going to get when you actually receive it is going to be secure and not be tampered with, becomes vitally important. And then Pete and I were talking earlier, when you have tens of thousands of devices that need to be delivered, whether it be storage or laptops or PCs, or whatever it is, you want to be know that those devices can be trusted. >> Okay, guys, maybe Pete, you could talk about how Dell thinks about its framework and its philosophy of cyber security, and then specifically what Dell's advantages are relative to the competition. >> Yeah, definitely, Dave. Thank you. So we've talked a lot about Dell as a technology provider. But one thing Dell also is is a partner in this larger ecosystem. We realize that security, whether it's a zero trust paradigm or any other kind of security environment, is an ecosystem with a lot of different vendors. So we look at three areas. One is protecting data in systems. We know that it starts with and ends with data. That helps organizations combat threats across their entire infrastructure. And what it means is Dell's embedding security features consistently across our portfolios of storage, servers, networking. The second is enhancing cyber resiliency. Over the last decade, a lot of the funding and spending has been in protecting or trying to prevent cyber threats, not necessarily in responding to and recovering from threats. We call that resiliency. Organizations need to build resiliency across their organization, so not only can they withstand a threat, but they can respond, recover, and continue with their operations. And the third is overcoming security complexity. Security is hard. It's more difficult because of the things we've talked about, about distributed data, distributed technology, and attack surfaces everywhere. And so we're enabling organizations to scale confidently, to continue their business, but know that all the IT decisions that they're making have these intrinsic security features and are built and delivered in a consistent, secure way. >> So those are kind of the three pillars. Maybe we could end on what you guys see as the key differentiators that people should know about that Dell brings to the table. Maybe each of you could take a shot at that. >> Yeah, I think, first of all, from a holistic portfolio perspective, right? The secure supply chain and the secure development life cycle permeate through everything Dell does when building things. So we build things with security in mind, all the way from, as Pete mentioned, from creation to delivery, we want to make sure you have that secure device or asset. That permeates everything from servers, networking, storage, data protection, through hyperconverged, through everything. That to me is really a key asset. Because that means you understand when you receive something it's a trusted piece of your infrastructure. I think the other core component to think about, and Pete mentioned, as Dell being a partner for making sure you can deliver these things, is that even though that's part of our framework, these pillars are our framework of how we want to deliver security, it's also important to understand that we are partners and that you don't need to rip and replace. But as you start to put in new components, you can be assured that the components that you're replacing as you're evolving, as you're growing, as you're moving to the cloud, as you're moving to more on-prem type services or whatever, that your environment is secure. I think those are two key things. >> Got it. Okay. Pete, bring us home. >> Yeah, I think one of the big advantages of Dell is our scope and our scale, right? We're a large technology vendor that's been around for decades, and we develop and sell almost every piece of technology. We also know that organizations might make different decisions. And so we have a large services organization with a lot of experienced services people that can help customers along their security journey, depending on whatever type of infrastructure or solutions that they're looking at. The other thing we do is make it very easy to consume our technology, whether that's traditional on premise, in a multi-cloud environment, or as a service. And so the best-of-breed technology can be consumed in any variety of fashion, and know that you're getting that consistent, secure infrastructure that Dell provides. >> Well, and Dell's got probably the top supply chain, not only in the tech business, but probably any business. And so you can actually take your dog food, or your champagne, sorry, (laughter) allow other people to share best practices with your customers. All right, guys, thanks so much for coming up. I appreciate it. >> Great. Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Okay, keep it right there. After this short break, we'll be back to drill into the storage domain. You're watching "A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure" on theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Be right back. (upbeat music)