>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell tech world 2022. My name is Dave Volante and I'm currently in our studios outside of Boston. As we prepare to gather for the first in person Dell technologies world since 20 19, 1 of the major structural change and the technology business during the pandemic was IBM's spin out of Kendra. A world class technology services provider that lived inside of IBM. Kendra is a large business with trailing 12 month revenues north of 18 billion. It's got 90,000 employees worldwide. Kendra has long term predictable cash flows. And in my view is one of the most undervalued companies in the technology sector. As a separate company, Kendra is able to turn many of its former internal IBM roadblocks into tailwinds and ecosystem. Partnerships are one of the best examples of new opportunities that are opening up for the newly separate at company. In this next segment, we're gonna dig into a new partnership between Kendra and Dell technologies and what is the most critical priority for organizations today? Cyber resiliency and with me are two really impressive and talented guests. Chris Lovejoy is global security and resiliency practice leader at Kendra. Michelle Weston is vice president of, of global offerings for security and resiliency also at kindred ladies. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on and spending some time with us. >>Thank thank you. >>Okay. Let's zoom out a little bit and start with a big picture. What would you say are, are the one or two major trends or changes even in cyber that you've seen since the pandemic, maybe Chris, you could start us off and Michelle, you can chime in. >>Sure. Happy to. And, um, you know, I think part of this actually preceded the pandemic and, um, you know, the fact is, you know, a lot of organizations have been engaging in the adoption of new technologies, you know, be it cloud AI IOT, what, what, whatever that may be. Um, and they've been introducing that technology without, um, adequate security control and during the COVID pandemic, um, when, you know, technology transformation happened for existential reasons, what we were seeing is organizations throwing at even more technology at cyclic, right, with absolutely no security control whatsoever. And in the meantime, the regulators who are, you know, watching this in, you know, horror are introducing new requirements in and around, um, what we're calling cyber resilience today. And it's all based on this concept that, you know, conventional cybersecurity assume that the adversaries could be kept out of organizations. >>Um, you could protect the organization and sort of block it, um, as rising numbers of disruptive attacks, like, you know, ransomware attacks have shown those approaches don't work. And so, um, what we're seeing is that the market is really moving toward this concept of cyber resiliency, which goes beyond cybersecurity. It assumes that the advanced a adversaries are frankly, many adversaries can overcome, um, conventional protections and that, um, they, that organization need to prepare to recover. Um, so our approach, the approach that we're taking to the market is really to help organizations in binding security plus continuity plus disaster recovery, then giving them the ability to anticipate, protect, um, with stand and recovery from any adverse condition associated with their cyber real estate. Um, and this is why we're so excited to work with Dell, uh, because they're really, uh, paving the roads for us to actually, you know, work together in solving these needs for our clients. >>Got it. That makes sense. And now Michelle, as Chris was saying, these worlds are coming together. What used to be adjacencies, oftentimes they, after thoughts, bolted on, and now you've got the work from home and, and hybrid work, not to mention, as Chris was saying, you're injecting AI and all this data, you know, this is a complicated situation for a lot of people, isn't it? >>Yeah. And it was only even more complicated during, during the pandemic as well. I think, uh, another trend that we saw was the end enterprise was outside the enterprise, right? Uh, everyone was working from home. They weren't in the data centers, their own resiliency and security protocols were already at risk because they were so manual and people intensive. And yet we know, you know, the bad actors actually took advantage of, of that right. Uh, data centers were, uh, less monitored. Um, we had all of the employees working from home. Now, the enterprise is outside of the enterprise, but you still need security and resiliency for all of those endpoints. Right. And I think that's driving a higher need, um, coming out of the PA the pandemic and even with this hybrid model, okay. We'll return to work, but not, not in the same fashion that we did prior to the pandemic. >>That's the new reality. The other thing that I would say is that those customers that had adopted cloud already and cloud enabled their business, they were able to fare, um, the best during the pandemic. They were able to sustain their businesses. Um, alternatively, and it's kind of a different lens to it. I think the pandemic actually drove new ways of working and some really creative solutions. I mean, if you look at, um, you know, food delivery services that, uh, proliferated during the pandemic, or, uh, that are now offering fitness online, um, fitness classes online, people had to think, um, intelligently and, and creatively on how they sustain their businesses. So I think all of that's coming together, but certainly this need of, as you said, not thinking of security and resiliency as an afterthought, but as a forethought planning for those things efficiently and effectively, that we find customers that do that, uh, do it the best. And, uh, I think that Kendra offers a unique value pro in here because bringing both together is a journey that we started a couple of years ago that we've only accelerated with the, uh, spin of the Kendra company. >>Yeah. Interesting. So I wanted to talk about that partnership because mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you know, Dell's got this massive channel, it's got infrastructure technology expertise, uh, but Dell, you know, Dell's a product company, Kendra is a services company, so it's a really good match in that sense. Right. Uh, maybe you could talk about how the partnership came together and, you know, what are the critical aspects that folks need to be aware of? >>Yeah. I would say Dell's an excellent partner for us and they have been for a number of years. So in a lot of ways that's not new. Okay. Uh, we've been partnering in market together for quite quite some time. In fact, the solution that we'll talk about today was first put into market in 2018. And you're absolutely right. We, we come together in the best ways. They're leveraging our strengths with regard to manage services, professional services. And we are certainly looking at them as a key technology provider, um, for our portfolio, we've worked together for years. Uh, we manage backup environments based on their data protection solutions, including data domain, but what was unique. And I think we were both ahead of the market at the time, um, was the 2018 solution that we put in to market and have only enhanced and augmented it ever since it's, it's called, um, cyber volt is, is the solution from Dell technologies. >>We certainly manage that solution in market for them today. And then we have unique differentiation in our Kindra portfolio that we've integrated with that and add to, um, their cyber incident recovery features, um, Dell initially put the solution in market coming out of, um, some of the ransomware attacks that they had cyber attacks that they had. They realized there was a need to protect the large data domain install base around the world. Um, they developed some proprietary solar solution, uh, software on top of their large data domain boxes and, and any cyber incident recovery solution. You need a, a few things you need the ability to assure imutable storage, a, a copy that you can assure has not been altered so that when you initiate the recovery, you know that you've got a clean copy and you're not propagating whatever is there. Um, so the solution has that, um, it has the other component that you need, which is the ability to scan the data for anomalies, right? >>So they're scanning the backup files continuously to look for anomalies. And then lastly, you need some form of data mover, which the data domain, um, solution offers. So they came to us in 2018 and said, look, we've got this solution. We think we're ahead of the market. Uh, we were also investing in cyber incident recovery with a key asset that we acquired in market in 2015, um, that we've continued to bake cyber incident recovery features and functions into, and they said, let's marry the two. And let's have you provide all of the managed services capabilities around this for clients. Um, that is a key piece because when it comes to cyber, uh, there's always a level of confidence that customers have, right? Yes. I can recover from any adverse condition. If you ask them, can you recover from a cyber attack with a hundred percent assurance? I don't think there's a customer today that could say given how sophisticated and how much these, these attack vectors are changing, that, that they, they have that a hundred percent confidence level. So a managed service provider, a phone, a friend in the event of is a, is a unique value proposition. Um, and that's what the two companies are bringing together, uh, for customers today. >>Got it. Thank you. So, so Chris, maybe as a services company, you, you, you have to be ignite, you know, to technology, you know, the best fit, et cetera. But, but prior to the spin, we never would've heard it, something like this. And so what, maybe you could talk about the partnership from your perspective. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I, I do wanna, um, you know, sort of double click on this a little bit, you, and you mentioned it in your opening, you know, headwinds being wins now. And I think this is important, incredibly important. You know, what people don't realize about Kendra is that, you know, we were never able to, as the services organization, um, that was really focused on strategic outsourcing and providing other kinds of services to, uh, clients while under the IBM banner are really never able to talk about the technical depth that we had across any number of platforms, including, um, the hyperscalers. And we have thousands upon thousands of people with hyperscaler certifications. Um, we have experience with pretty much every security and resilience technology out there. Um, we have broad and early with organizations like yours, that we were never able to speak about now, you know, when it comes to a client, you know, let's be realistic. >>Everybody is engaged in some sort of it modernization program. And while, and we have to realize also that those it modernization programs, you know, oftentimes they have no destination per se. You know, we talk about them as a journey, but we, if no destination, they just keep going and going and going. And the directions change every day, depending on, you know, what the strategic, uh, requirements are from whatever C-suite, you have, you know, sitting at the table, uh, what the competitive trends are, what the market is telling you, et cetera. And so what clients are saying to us is that the value we offer is that we can untangle the mess. That is their environment. We can meet them where they are, we can get them where they wanna go. And so, you know, when it comes to a relationship with Dell, you know, we believe that, you know, particularly in the area of security, in resilience, that there is a unique proposition to be had around the services and the cross platform experience and certifications and skills that our, um, our teams have married with the technology advances that Dell has made in the, in, in the world, as well as our experience in, you know, sort of the two that has have been frankly, hidden over the past few years. >>I think we have some, uh, something unique that we can offer to the market. Particularly, as I said, in this space of security and resilience, where all of our clients are, you know, looking for some sort of solution to this, you know, gee, I can't spend enough money to protect myself. I need to make sure that if the worst happens that I can bring myself back again, that's what we can do for our clients. >>Great. Thank you, Michelle. I wanna go back to the solution for a moment. You mentioned a number of things, integrations. I got like a zillion questions here. I'm interested in what kind of integrations you talked about imutability where does, where does that occur? Is that in the cloud? Is that the, you know, Dell technology is scan for anomalies again, what is that? Is that some kind of, you know, AI magic, you got a high speed data mover. Is there an air gap involved, maybe help me fill in some of those gaps. >>Yeah. And I think you, I think you've netted out the solution. Any cyber incident recovery solution in my mind would have those three things. They have some form of imutable storage. Uh, this could be cloud object storage in the case of the Dell solution, they're actually using their retention lock feature on the large data domain devices. Right? So think of this solution as having two data domains, they both have this retention lock feature. That's the imutable storage. They're able to move data and forth between the two, uh, that's another key piece. And then finally, for any incident recovery solution, you need the ability to scan and make sure that there aren't anomalies, um, in this case, in the backup files. So they're using a, a third party to scan thatno scan those files for anomalies. And when when's detected, that kind of gives the indication that something may be there and then they can go in and triage it and, and, and clean the environment if needed. >>Um, so we certainly manage that end to end, and that is one approach. It is an on-premise approach. It uses the data domain, uh, technologies. We know that clients have a lot more than that, right? So where Kendra comes in with its cyber incident recovery solution that also integrates with Dell's cyber incident recovery solution is we support cloud, um, multiple infrastructure. We have also imutable storage that we leverage. Um, and then in terms of our anomaly scanning capabilities, in this case, we're using technology that we had originally developed in IBM research that we integrated into the software product. Um, again, this is on an acquisition we did in market five years ago, called son Nobi. It's a software product. Um, it ingests and automates all of your workflows in the, in, in the event of any failover failback, any, uh, outage, including cyber and that technology underpin a lot of what we do on the incident recovery perspective, Dells use data domain. >>We've used the software, all both solutions have all three components of the cyber incident recovery, uh, solution when they're integrated, there's real power there, right? Because now you're looking at protection, not just of the backup environ, um, but all environments, including production, you're looking at being able to scale beyond OnPrem. Um, and more importantly, you're looking at the speed to recover, right? The not needing to rehydrate the data, but to be able to recover with the RTOs and RPOs that are expected, um, of our customers on the resiliency orchestration side, the Kendra solution. Um, this is, this is push of a button fail over, fail back in the event of an outage. Um, you can recover the entire hybrid estate in the matter of minutes and what we know with respect to any outage it's costly. We know know that downtime is costly, but with respect to cyber, we know that that's more costly than a typical outage, sometimes four X, um, you don't always recover from the brand damage from the loss of customers. So being down and, and coming up as quickly as you can, with the additional data verification, data validation and assurance that you're not propagating, whatever is there is the value prop, um, that both CU, both companies are really serving. >>And where does an air gap fit in into this equation? Is that yet another layer of protection what's best practice there? >>Um, so think of the air gap is just between the data movement and the immune storage, right? You need to be able to cut connection in a way, right. That is an air gap solution. And it's based on the imutable storage that both have. >>Okay. And that would be, it could be local, I guess, but it also could be, it should be maybe remote. Yes. Mm-hmm >><affirmative> okay. Exactly. And, and the ability to manage and orchestrate that air gap is a key value prop again, of the Kendra solution. >>Okay. And so I've mentioned local or remote. I mean, obviously the trade off is recovery time, you know, uh, I guess RTO, um, but, but <laugh> and RPO. So a lot of layers is, is what I'm hearing is that's always security pros in this framework. >>Let me give you another example, the reason why this is so important. Um, most of our Dr. Processes today, they all rely on people, right? We had a large client that was impacted when we were IBM. They were impacted with pet. They had a great Dr plan. They were a customer of ours. Um, we managed that service for them. Their Dr. Plan was still people intensive. And when that attack happened, it took out the badge readers to the people that you've invested in. Can't get on site to manage the incident, can't bring up the environment. And then if you look at going back to the very beginning of our conversation, COVID being sort of, uh, another way that that happened with access and the ability to continuously monitor and have the people on site that ability was impacted. So this is where you need to invest in technology, uh, P and processes to make sure that you are as robust as you can be. And as Chris said, your ability to anticipate with stand and recover from any adverse condition, that's, that's the value prop that our global practice brings. Yeah. >>To your, to your point, the adversary is well funded and motivated. Chris, we'll give you the last word, where do, where do you wanna see this partnership go? You know, kinda what what's next? What should we look for in the coming months and in, in years? >>Yeah. I'm, you know, I think, you know, very simply, and I'm going put my CISO hat on right. For a minute, because I think it's important to speak, you know, for the customer as a customer, you know, at the end of the day, I, I think most C-suite executives do don't realize the extent to which security, continuity and disaster recovery have been separate silos. And what is shocking to our clients when they get into a ransomware event in particular is the fact that they have their, um, systems, their services, their data is locked up, their backups have been sort of implemented or have, have been, you know, sort of subverted. They call in the pros, they call in the folks that help them with the incident response. The incident responders are able to identify the ransomware strain. They're able to contain the ransomware strain, but the damage is done. >>Now, what, how do you bring the environment back? How do you that the data is good? How do you, how do you find the system configurations and load them again? In what order do you load them? What they don't realize is that security and recovery, they have to be merged together. And so what I think that we can do it, it's not just, you know, build customer demand is not just sell a solution. We can really help clients. And so my hope is that we are able to bring cyber resilience into every organization, every large enterprise out there that needs to, you know, continually service their clients and their employees. They need to stay in business that we're able to bring the solution to them in such a way that they're able to, you know, bring back their environments to serve their clients when the worst does happen. >>Great. Yes. Thank you. We're definitely seeing that data protection world and the cybersecurity world. They, they adjacencies, but they really are coming together and part of a comprehensive plan. Okay. We have to leave it there. Thanks so much folks for coming on the cube really appreciate your time and your insights. >>Thanks for having us. And >>Thank you. Thank you for watching the Cube's coverage of Dell technologies world 2022. Keep it right there. We're running all week with live coverage from the show floor. We're pumping in deep dives like this one throughout the week. So don't go away.