okay we're back digging into trusted infrastructure with paris are good at he's a senior consultant for product marketing and storage at dell technologies pastor welcome to the cube good to see you great to be with you dave yeah coming from hyderabad awesome so i really appreciate you uh coming on the program let's start with talking about your point of view on what cyber security resilience means to to dell generally but storage specifically yeah so for something like storage you know we are talking about the data layer name and if you look at cyber security it's all about securing your data applications and infrastructure it has been a very mature field at the network and application layers and there are a lot of great technologies right from you know enabling zero trust uh advanced authentications uh identity management systems and so on and and in fact you know with the advent of you know the the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning really these detection tools for cyber securities have really evolved in the network and application spaces so for storage what it means is how can you bring them to the data layer right how can you bring you know the principles of zero trust to the data layer uh how can you leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at you know access patterns and make intelligent decisions about maybe an indicator of a compromise and identify them ahead of time just like you know how it's happening and other of of applications and when it comes to cyber resilience it's it's basically a strategy which assumes that a threat is imminent and it's a good assumption with the severity and the frequency of the attacks that are happening and the question is how do we fortify the infrastructure in this rich infrastructure to withstand those attacks and have a plan a response plan where we can recover the data and make sure the business continuity is not affected so that's uh really cyber security and cyber resiliency at storage layer and of course there are technologies like you know network isolation um immutability and all these principles need to be applied at the storage level as well let me have a follow up on that if i may the intelligence that you talked about that ai and machine learning is that do you do you build that into the infrastructure or is that sort of a separate software module that that points at various you know infrastructure components how does that work both dave right at the data storage level we have come up with various data characteristics depending on the nature of data we developed a lot of signals to see what could be a good indicator of a compromise um and there are also additional applications like cloud iq is the best example which is like an infrastructure wide health monitoring system for dell infrastructure and now we have elevated that to include cyber security as well so these signals are being gathered at cloud iq level and other applications as well so that we can make those decisions about compromise and we can either cascade that intelligence and alert stream upstream for uh security teams um so that they can take actions in platforms like sign systems xtr systems and so on but when it comes to which layer the intelligence is it has to be at every layer where it makes sense where we have the information to make a decision and being closest to the data we have we are basically monitoring you know the various parallels data access who is accessing um are they crossing across any geo fencing is there any mass deletion that is happening or a mass encryption that is happening and we are able to uh detect uh those uh patterns and flag them as indicators of compromise and in allowing automated response manual control and so on for i.t teams yeah thank you for that explanation so at dell technologies world we were there in may it was one of the first you know live shows that that we did in the spring certainly one of the largest and i interviewed shannon champion and my huge takeaway from the storage side was the degree to which you guys uh emphasized security uh within the operating systems i mean really i mean power max more than half i think of the features were security related but also the rest of the portfolio so can you talk about the the security aspects of the dell storage portfolio specifically yeah yeah so when it comes to data security and broadly data availability right in the context of cyber resiliency um dell storage uh this you know these elements have been at the core of our um a core strength for the portfolio and a source of differentiation for the storage portfolio you know with almost decades of collective experience of building highly resilient architectures for mission critical data something like power max system which is the most secure storage platform for high-end enterprises um and now with the increased focus on cyber security we are extending those core technologies of high availability and adding modern detection systems modern data isolation techniques to offer a comprehensive solution to the customer so that they don't have to piece together multiple things to ensure data security or data resiliency but a well-designed and well-architected solution by design is uh delivered to them to ensure cyber protection at the data layer got it um you know we were talking earlier to steve kenniston and pete gear about this notion of dell trusted infrastructure how does storage fit into that as a component of that sort of overall you know theme yeah and you know and let me say this if you could adjust because a lot of people might be skeptical that i can actually have security and at the same time not constrict my organizational agility that's old you know not an or it's an and how do you actually do that if you could address both of those that would be great definitely so for dell trusted infrastructure cyber resiliency is a key component of that and just as i mentioned you know uh air gap isolation it really started with you know power protect cyber recovery you know that was the solution more than three years ago we launched and that was first in the industry which paved way to you know kind of data isolation being a core element of data management and you know for data infrastructure and since then we have implemented these technologies within different storage platforms as well so the customers have the flexibility depending on their data landscape they can approach they can do the right data isolation architecture right either natively from the storage platform or consolidate things into the backup platform and isolate from there and and the other key thing we focus in trusted infrastructure delta dell trusted infrastructure is you know the goal of simplifying security for the customers so one good example here is uh you know risk being able to respond to these cyber threats or indicators of compromise is one thing but an i.t security team may not be looking at the dashboard of the storage systems constantly right storage administration admins may be looking at it so how can we build this intelligence and provide this upstream platforms so that they have a single pane of glass to understand security landscape across applications across networks firewalls as well as storage infrastructure and and compute infrastructure so that's one of the key ways where how we are helping simplify the um kind of the ability to uh respond ability to detect and respond these threads uh in real time for security teams and you mentioned you know about zero trust and how it's a balance of you know not uh kind of restricting users or put heavy burden on you know multi-factor authentication and so on and this really starts with you know what we are doing is provide all the tools you know when it comes to advanced authentication uh supporting external identity management systems multi-factor authentication encryption all these things are intrinsically built into these platforms now the question is the customers are actually one of the key steps is to identify uh what are the most critical parts of their business or what are the applications uh that the most critical business operations depend on and similarly identify uh mission critical data where part of your response plan where it cannot be compromised where you need to have a way to recover once you do this identification then the level of security can be really determined uh by uh by the security teams by the infrastructure teams and you know another you know intelligence that gives a lot of flexibility for for even developers to do this is today we have apis um that so you can not only track these alerts at the data infrastructure level but you can use our apis to take concrete actions like blocking a certain user or increasing the level of authentication based on the threat level that has been perceived at the application layer or at the network layer so there is a lot of flexibility that is built into this by design so that depending on the criticality of the data criticality of the application number of users affected these decisions have to be made from time to time and it's as you mentioned it's it's a balance right and sometimes you know if if an organization had a recent attack you know the level of awareness is very high uh against cyber attacks so for a time you know these these settings may be a bit difficult to deal with but then it's a decision that has to be made by security teams as well got it so you're surfacing what may be hidden kpis that are being buried inside for instance the storage system through apis upstream into a dashboard so that somebody you know dig into the storage tunnel extract that data and then somehow you know populate that dashboard you're saying you're automating that that that workflow that's a great example and you may have others but is that the correct understanding absolutely and it's a two-way integration let's say a detector an attack has been detected at a completely different layer right in the application layer or at a firewall we can respond to those as well so it's a two-way integration we can cascade things up as well as uh respond to threats that have been detected elsewhere uh through the api that's great all right api for power skill is the best example for that uh excellent so thank you appreciate that give us the last word put a bow on this and and bring this segment home please absolutely so a dell uh storage portfolio um using advanced data isolation um with air gap having machine learning based algorithms to detect uh indicators of compromise and having ripple mechanisms um with granular snapshots being able to recover data and restore applications to maintain business continuity is what we deliver to customers uh and these are areas where a lot of innovation is happening a lot of product focus as well as you know if you look at the professional services all the way from engineering to professional services the way we build these systems the very we configure and architect these systems cyber security and protection is a key focus uh for all these activities and dell.com securities is where you can learn a lot about these initiatives that's great thank you you know at the recent uh reinforce uh event in in boston we heard a lot uh from aws about you know detent and response and devops and machine learning and some really cool stuff we heard a little bit about ransomware but i'm glad you brought up air gaps because we heard virtually nothing in the keynotes about air gaps that's an example of where you know this the cso has to pick up from where the cloud leaves off but as i was in front and so number one and number two we didn't hear a ton about how the cloud is making the life of the cso simpler and that's really my takeaway is is in part anyway your job and companies like dell so paris i really appreciate the insights thank you for coming on thecube thank you very much dave it's always great to be in these uh conversations all right keep it right there we'll be right back with rob emsley to talk about data protection strategies and what's in the dell portfolio you're watching the cube [Music] you

[Music] okay we're back digging into trusted infrastructure with paris our godaddy he's a senior consultant for product marketing and storage at dell technologies parasite welcome to the cube good to see you great to be with you dave yeah coming from hyderabad awesome so i really appreciate you uh coming on the program let's start with talking about your point of view on what cyber security resilience means to to dell generally but storage specifically yeah so for something like storage you know we are talking about the data layer name and if you look at cyber security it's all about securing your data applications and infrastructure it has been a very mature field at the network and application layers and there are a lot of great technologies right from you know enabling zero trust uh advanced authentications uh identity management systems and so on and and in fact you know with the advent of you know the the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning really these detection tools for cyber securities have really evolved in the network and the application spaces so for storage what it means is how can you bring them to the data layer right how can you bring you know the principles of zero trust to the data layer how can you leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at you know access patterns and make intelligent decisions about maybe an indicator of a compromise and identify them ahead of time just like you know how it's happening in other words of of applications and when it comes to cyber resilience it's it's basically a strategy which assumes that a threat is imminent and it's a good assumption with the severity and the frequency of the attacks that are happening and the question is how do we fortify the infrastructure in the switch infrastructure to withstand those attacks and have a plan a response plan where we can recover the data and make sure the business continuity is not affected so that's uh really cyber security and cyber resiliency and storage layer and of course there are technologies like you know um in network isolation um immutability and all these principles need to be applied at the storage level as well let me have a follow up on that if i may the intelligence that you talked about that ai and machine learning is that do you do you build that into the infrastructure or is that sort of a separate software module that that points at various you know infrastructure components how does that work both dave um right at the data storage level um we have come with various data characteristics depending on the nature of data we developed a lot of signals to see what could be a good indicator of a compromise um and there are also additional applications like cloud iq is the best example which is like an infrastructure-wide health monitoring system for dell infrastructure and now we have elevated that to include cyber security as well so these signals are being gathered at cloud iq level and other applications as well so that we can make those decisions about compromise and we can either cascade that intelligence and alert stream upstream for uh security teams um so that they can take actions in platforms like sign systems xtr systems and so on but when it comes to which layer the intelligence is it has to be at every layer where it makes sense where we have the information to make a decision and being closest to the data we have we are basically monitoring you know the various parallels data access who is accessing um are they crossing across any geo fencing is there any mass deletion that is happening or mass encryption that is happening and we are able to uh detect uh those uh patterns and flag them as indicators of compromise and in allowing automated response manual control and so on for iot teams yeah thank you for that explanation so at dell technologies world we were there in may it was one of the first you know live shows that that we did in the spring certainly one of the largest and i interviewed shannon champion and my huge takeaway from the storage side was the degree to which you guys uh emphasized security uh within the operating systems i mean really i mean powermax more than half i think of the features were security related but also the rest of the portfolio so can you talk about the the security aspects of the dell storage portfolio specifically yeah yeah so when it comes to data security and broadly data availability right in the context of cyber resiliency um dell storage uh this you know these elements have been at the core of our um a core strength for the portfolio and a source of differentiation for the storage portfolio you know with almost decades of collective experience of building highly resilient architectures for mission critical data something like power max system which is the most secure storage platform for high-end enterprises um and now with the increased focus on cyber security we are extending those core technologies of high availability and adding modern detection systems modern data isolation techniques to offer a comprehensive solution to the customer so that they don't have to piece together multiple things to ensure data security or data resiliency but a well-designed and well-architected solution by design is delivered to them to ensure cyber protection at the data layer got it um you know we were talking earlier to steve kenniston and pete gear about this notion of dell trusted infrastructure how does storage fit into that as a component of that sort of overall you know theme yeah and you know and let me say this if you could address because a lot of people might be skeptical that i can actually have security and at the same time not constrict my organizational agility that's old you know not an ore it's an end how do you actually do that if you could address both of those that would be great definitely so for dell trusted infrastructure cyber resiliency is a key component of that and just as i mentioned you know uh air gap isolation it really started with you know power protect cyber recovery you know that was the solution more than three years ago we launched and that was first in the industry which paved way to you know kind of data isolation being a core element of data management and uh for data infrastructure and since then we have implemented these technologies within different storage platforms as well so that customers have the flexibility depending on their data landscape they can approach they can do the right data isolation architecture right either natively from the storage platform or consolidate things into the backup platform and isolate from there and and the other key thing we focus in trusted infrastructure dell infra dell trusted infrastructure is you know the goal of simplifying security for the customers so one good example here is uh you know being able to respond to these cyber threats or indicators of compromise is one thing but an i.t security team may not be looking at the dashboard of the storage systems constantly right storage administration admins may be looking at it so how can we build this intelligence and provide this upstream platforms so that they have a single pane of glass to understand security landscape across applications across networks firewalls as well as storage infrastructure and and compute infrastructure so that's one of the key ways where how we are helping simplify the um kind of the ability to uh respond ability to detect and respond these threads uh in real time for security teams and you mentioned you know about zero trust and how it's a balance of you know not uh kind of restricting users or put heavy burden on you know multi-factor authentication and so on and this really starts with you know what we are doing is provide all the tools you know when it comes to advanced authentication uh supporting external identity management systems multi-factor authentication encryption all these things are intrinsically built into these platforms now the question is the customers are actually one of the key steps is to identify uh what are the most critical parts of their business or what are the applications uh that the most critical uh business operations depend on and similarly identify uh mission critical data where part of your response plan where it cannot be compromised where you need to have a way to recover once you do this identification then the level of security can be really determined uh by uh by the security teams by the infrastructure teams and you know another you know intelligence that gives a lot of flexibility uh for for even developers to do this is today we have apis um that so you can not only track these alerts at the data infrastructure level but you can use our apis to take concrete actions like blocking a certain user or increasing the level of authentication based on the threat level that has been perceived at the application layer or at the network layer so there is a lot of flexibility that is built into this by design so that depending on the criticality of the data criticality of the application number of users affected these decisions have to be made from time to time and it's as you mentioned it's it's a balance right and sometimes you know if if an organization had a recent attack you know the level of awareness is very high uh against cyber attacks so for a time you know these these settings may be a bit difficult to deal with but then it's a decision that has to be made by security teams as well got it so you're surfacing what may be hidden kpis that are buried inside for instance the storage system through apis upstream into a dashboard so that somebody could you know dig into the storage tunnel extract that data and then somehow you know populate that dashboard you're saying you're automating that that that workflow that's a great example and you may have others but is that the correct understanding absolutely and it's a two-way integration let's say a detector an attack has been detected at a completely different layer right in the application layer or at a firewall we can respond to those as well so it's a two-way integration we can cascade things up as well as uh respond to uh threats that have been detected elsewhere um through the api that's great all right api for power scale is the best example for that uh excellent so thank you appreciate that give us the last word put a bow on this and and bring this segment home please absolutely so a dell storage portfolio um using advanced data isolation with air gap having machine learning based algorithms to detect uh indicators of compromise and having rigor mechanisms with granular snapshots being able to recover data and restore applications to maintain business continuity is what we deliver to customers uh and these are areas where a lot of innovation is happening a lot of product focus as well as you know if you look at the professional services all the way from engineering to professional services the way we build these systems the way we we configure and architect these systems uh cyber security and protection uh is a key focus uh for all these activities and dell.com securities is where you can learn a lot about these initiatives that's great thank you you know at the recent uh reinforce uh event in in boston we heard a lot uh from aws about you know detent and response and devops and machine learning and some really cool stuff we heard a little bit about ransomware but i'm glad you brought up air gaps because we heard virtually nothing in the keynotes about air gaps that's an example of where you know this the cso has to pick up from where the cloud leaves off that was in front and so number one and number two we didn't hear a ton about how the cloud is making the life of the cso simpler and that's really my takeaway is is in part anyway your job and companies like dell so paris i really appreciate the insights thank you for coming on thecube thank you very much dave it's always great to be in these uh conversations all right keep it right there we'll be right back with rob emsley to talk about data protection strategies and what's in the dell portfolio you're watching the cube [Music] you

>>mhm mhm >>Hey guys, welcome back to Los Angeles lisa martin. Coming to you live from cuba con and cloud native Con north America 2021. Very excited to be here. This is our third day of back to back coverage on the cube and we've got a couple of guests cube alumni joining me remotely. Please welcome parse our karate senior consultant, product marketing, Dell Technologies and David Noi VP product management at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen welcome back to the program. >>Thanks johnny >>so far so let's go ahead and start with you. Let's talk about what Dell EMC is offering to developers today in terms of unstructured data. >>Absolutely, it's great to be here. So let me start with the container storage interface. This is Q khan and a couple of years ago the container storage interface was still in beta and the storage vendors, we're very enthusiastically kind of building the plug in city of the different storage portfolio to offer enterprise grade features to developers are building applications of the Cuban this platform. And today if you look at the deli in storage portfolio, big block volumes. Nash shares s three object A P I S beyond their virtual volumes. However you're consuming storage, you have the plug ins that are required to run your applications with these enterprise Great feature speech right about snap sharks data replication, all available in the Cuban this layer and just this week at coupon we announced the container storage modules which is kind of the next step of productivity for developers beat you know uh in terms of observe ability of the storage metrics using tools like Prometheus visualizing it ravana authorization capabilities so that you know too bad moments can have better resource management of the storage that is being consumed um that so there are these multiple models were released. And if you look at unstructured data, this term may be a bit new for our kind of not very family for developers but basically the storage. Well there is a distinction that is being made you know, between primary storage and unstructured storage or unstructured data solutions And by unstructured we mean file and object storage. If you look at the cube contact nickel sessions, I was very glad to see that there is an entire stream for um machine learning and data so that speaks to how popular communities deployment models are getting when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Um even applications like genomics and media and entertainment and with the container storage interface uh and the container storage modules with the object storage portfolio that bill has, we offer the comprehensive unstructured data solutions for developers beat object or file. And the advantage the developers are getting is these you know, if you look at platforms like power scale and these areas, these are like the industry workhorses with the highest performance. And if you think of scale, you know, think of 250 nasnotes, you know with a single name space with NVIDIA gpu direct capabilities. All these capabilities developers can use um for you know, applications like machine learning or any competition intensive for data intensive applications that requires these nass uh scale of mass platforms. So so um that's that's what is new in terms of uh what we are offering, you have the storage heaters >>got a parcel. Thank you. David, let's bring you into the conversation now you've launched objects scale at VM World. Talk to us about that, what some of the key features and capabilities are and some of those big business benefits that customers are going to be able to achieve. >>Sure thing. So I really want to focus on three of the biggest benefits. This would be the fact that the product is actually based on kubernetes country, the scale of the product and then its ability to do global replication. So let me just touch on those in order. Mhm You said that the product is based on kubernetes and here we are cube concept. The perfect time to be talking about that. This product really caters to those who are looking for a flexible way to deploy object storage in containerized fashion, appeals to the devops folks and folks who like to automate things and call the communities a P I. S to make uh the actual deployment of the product. Very simple in turnkey and that's really what people turn to kubernetes for is the ability to spin things up when they need them and spend them down as they don't and make that all on commodity hardware and commodity, you know, the quantity pricing and the idea there is that I'm making it as simple and easy as possible. You're not going to get as much shadow I. T. You won't have people going off and putting things off into a public cloud. And so where security of an organization or control of the data that flows with an organization is important. Having something that's easy for developers to use in the same paradigm that they're used to is critical. Now I talked about scale and you know, if you have come to me two years ago I would have told you, you know, kubernetes, yeah, containers people are kicking it around and they're doing some interesting science experiments, I would say in the last year I started to see a lot of requests from customers um in the dozens, even 200 petabyte range as it relates to capacity for committees and specifically looking for C. S. I and cozy with this. This this is the the object storage implementation of the container storage interfaces. Uh So skin was definitely there and the idea of this product is to provide easy scalability from the terabytes range into the multi petabyte range and again it's that ease of use, ease of deployment because it is kubernetes basically because it's a KPI driven that makes that possible. So we're talking about going from a three night minimum to thousands of nodes. and this allows people to deploy the product either at the edge or in the data center um in the edge because you can get very small deployments in the data center to massive scale. So we want to provide something that covers the gamut. The last thing I talked about was replication. So let me just touch upon what I mean by that uh when people go and build these deployments, if you're building a deployment at the edge of an object scale product, you're probably taking in sensor data or some kind of information that you want to then send back to a data center for processing. So you make it simple to do bucket based replication. An object, sorry object storage based replication to move things to another location. And uh that can be used either for bringing data back for analytics from the edge, it can be used for availability. So making sure that you have data available across multiple data centers in the case that you have an outage. It could be even used for sharing data between developers in one site and another site. So we provide that level of flexibility overall. Um this is the next generation object store leveraging. Dell technologies number one position in object storage. So I'm pretty excited about >>and how David is object scale integrated with VM ware software. Stop give us that slice and dice. >>Yeah, and that's a good question. And so, you know, we're talking about this being a Kubernetes based product, you can deploy it on open shift or we integrate directly with VM ware cloud foundation and with Tansy, which is VM ware's container orchestration and management platform. I've seen the demo of the product myself from my team and they've showed it to be did all of the management of the product was actually done within the V sphere Ui, which is great. So easy to go and just enter the V sphere. You I installed the product very simply have it up and running and then go and do all of your management through that user interface or to automate it using the same api is that you used to through VM ware and the 10 Zoo uh platform. >>Thank you, paris are back to you. Security is a big theme here in kubernetes. It's also been a big theme here. We've been talking about it the last three days here at cop con. How does Dell EMC's unstructured portfolio offer that necessary cyber protection that developers need to have and bake that into what they're doing. So >>surely, you know, they talk about cybersecurity, you know, there are different layers of security right from, you know, smarter firewalls to you know how to manage privileged account access and so on. And what we are trying to do is to provide a layer of cyber defense, right at the asset that you're trying to protect, which is the data and this is where the ransom their defender solution is basically detecting any patterns of the compromise that might have happened and alerting the I. T. Um administration about this um possible um intrusions into their into the data by looking at the data access parents in real time. So that's a pretty big deal. Then we're actually putting all this, you know, observance on the primary data and that's what the power scale platform cybersecurity protection features offers. Now we've also extended this kind of detection mechanism for the object data framework on pcs platforms as well. So this is like an additional layer of security at the um layer of uh you know where the data is actually being read and written. Do that's the area, you know, in case of object here we're looking at the S. Three traffic and trying to find his parents in case of a file data atmosphere, looking at the file's access parents and so on. So and in relation to this we're also providing uh data isolation mechanism that is very critical in many cyber recovery processes with the smart absolution as well. So this is something that the developers are getting for like without having to worry about it because that is something implemented at the infrastructure layer itself. So they don't have to worry about you know trying to court it or develop their application to integrate these kinds of things because it's an it's embedded in the infrastructure at the one of the FBI level at the E C. S A P I level. So that's pretty um pretty differentiating in the industry in the country storage solutions. I'll get. >>Uh huh. Yeah. I mean look if you look at what a lot of the object storage players are doing as it relates to cyber security. They're they're playing off the fact that they've implemented object lock and basically using that to lockdown data. And that's that's good. I mean I'm glad that they're doing that and if the case that you were able to lock something down and someone wasn't able to bypass that in some way, that's fantastic. Or if they didn't already encrypted before I got locked down what parts are is referring to is a little bit more than that. It's actually the ability to look at user behavior and determined that something bad is happening. So this is about actually being able to do, you know, predictive analytics being able to go and figure out that you're under attack. There's anomalous behavior um and we're able to go and actually infer from that that something bad is happening and where we think it's happening and lock it down even even more securely than for example just saying hey we provide object like capabilities which is one of the responses that I've seen out there from object storage vendors >>can you share with us. Parts are a customer example like walk us through how this is actually being used and deployed and what some of those business outcomes are. >>Yes lisa. So in terms of container realization itself, they have a media and entertainment kind of customer story here. Um Swiss TXT um they have a platform as a service where they serve their customer base with a range of uh you know, media production and broadcasting solutions and they have containers this platform and part of this computerization is part of their services is they offer infrastructure as a service to you know, media producers who need a high performance storage, high performance computing and power skill And Iceland have been their local solutions to offer this And now that they have containerized their core platform. Well you see a sign interface for power skills, they are able to continue to deliver the infrastructure, high performance infrastructure and storage services to their customers through the A. P I. And it's great to see how fast they could, you know, re factor their application but yet continue to offer the high performance and degrees enterprise grade uh features of the power scale platform. So Swiss Txt and would love to share more. Keep it on the story. Yeah. Hyperlink. >>And where can folks go to learn more about objects scale and what you guys are announcing? Yes, particular. You are a website that you want to direct folks too. >>I would say that technologies dot com. And uh that's the best place to start. >>Yeah, I would go to the Delta product pages around objects should be publicly built. >>Excellent guys, thank you for joining me on the program today. Walking through what how Dell EMC is helping developers with respect to unstructured data, Talking to us about objects skill that you launched VM world, some of those big customer benefits and of course showing us the validation, the proof in the pudding with that customer story. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Thank you lisa >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Los Angeles. We're coming to you from our coverage of coupon and cloud native on North America 21. Coming back. Stick around. Rather I should say we'll be back after a short break with our next guest.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. Today, we're going to be talking about the cyber protection and recovery solutions for unstructured data. I have two guests joining me, Andrew Mackay is here, The President of Superna, and Parasar Kodati, Senior Consultant, ISG Product Marketing at Dell technologies. Guys, great to have you on the program talking about cybersecurity, cyber resiliency. Something that we've heard a lot in the news in the last 18 months or so. Parasar, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about what you're seeing from a cybersecurity perspective, some of the challenges the last 18 months or so, and then tell us what Dell is doing specifically to really infuse its storage solutions to enable customers to have that cyber resiliency that they need. >> Sure, Lisa. So today, there's no question that cyberattacks have become a serious threat for business operations, for organizations of all sizes across all industries. And if you look at the consequences, there is a huge financial impact of course, through the, like 70% of the cyberattacks when they're financially motivated. Look at the ransom part, which is a big financial impact in itself, but look at the lost revenue from disrupted operations, legal expenses, and sometimes regulatory fines, and so on, add up to the financial impact. And if you look at the data after data loss that is involved, data being such a critical asset for organizations, think about losing customer data, losing access to customer data or critical applications that depend on customer data. Similarly, data related to your business operations data that is source of your competitive advantage data that could be very confidential information as well. And when it comes to government organization, institutions, there is also the issue of national security and the need to protect critical infrastructure that depend on these IT systems as well. So absolutely it is becoming an imperative for IT organizations to improve the cyber resiliency, to boost the cyber resiliency of their organization. At Dell technologies, for the storage products that we offer, we have integrated solutions to protect the data in terms of detecting patterns of data access, to detect the cyber attacks in advance, to kind of put IT a step ahead of these attackers and also have the tools and technologies to recover from a cyberattack rapidly so that the business can continue to run. >> That recovery is absolutely critical. It's one thing to have all this data, customer data, PII, competitive advantage data, but you have to be able to recover it because as you said, we've seen this now become a matter of national security, infrastructure being threatened. The ransomware rise we have seen in the last 18 months has been unprecedented. I want to talk now, Andrew, about Superna. Talk to us about what you guys do and how you're a partner with Dell technologies and helping customers recover and really be cyber resilient. >> Yeah, we've been working with Dell for years. In fact, our products are built in targeting the Isilon PowerScale platform. So we're at very closely tightly integrated solution that focuses on solving one problem, solving it really well. >> Talk to me a little bit about what you guys are doing specifically with the Dell technology storage solutions to help customers in any industry be able to recover. As we know now, ransomware is not, if it happens to us, it's a wand. Give us a little bit more of a dissection of those solutions. >> So when we looked at this problem, it's associated with files, right? But today, there's files and objects, objects and other types of unstructured data. So we've built a solution that addresses both file and object. But one of the areas that we think is important for customers to consider is the framework that they choose. They shouldn't just jump in and start looking for products. They should step back and take a look at what frameworks exist. For instance, the NIST framework, that guides them in how they build and tick off all the key boxes and how to build a cyber resilient solution. >> So for companies that are using traditional legacy tools, backup and restore it, how was what Superna enables, how is it different? >> So the buzzword these days is zero trust. So I'm going to use the buzzword. So we use a zero trust model, but really that comes down to being proactive. And I consider a backup/restore, a bit of a legacy approach. That's just restore the data after you've been attacked. So we think you should get in front of the problem and don't trust any of the access to the storage and try to take care of the problem at the source, which means detection patterns, locking usually out of the file system, reacting in real time to real-time IO that's being processed by a storage device. >> Got it. Parasar, let's talk now about unstructured data specifically and why does it need protection against the attacks? >> Traditionally, structured data or the enterprise databases have been the more critical data to protect, but more and more unstructured data is also becoming a source of competitive differentiation for customers. Think about artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things, a lot of edge computing. And a lot of this data is actually being stored on highly scalable NAS platforms like Dell EMC PowerScale. And this is where, given the volume of the data involved, we actually have a unique solution for unstructured data to protect it from cyberattacks and also having the recovery mechanisms in place. So most of the audience might have already heard about the PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution, but for unstructured data, we have something unique in the industry in terms of rapid recovery of large amount of data within a few hours for a business to be up and running in the event of a cyberattack. So when it comes to the data protection technologies on the PowerScale platform, we have, starting from the operating system, the OneFS, already has a great foundation in terms of access control, separate access zones that can be protected. And these things work across multiple protocols, which is a really key thing about how this technology works in terms of access control. But thanks to the great technology that Andrew and his team is building, the Ransomware Defender, real-time access auditing. These products from the core, kind of cyber resiliency framework when it comes to unstructured data on power skill platforms. >> Got it. Andrew, let's talk about the NIST framework. As we've talked about in the last few minutes, cybersecurity has really become quite a business. Unfortunately, in the last 18 months, we've seen huge x-fold increases in ransomware attacks of any type of company. Talk to me about how, where are those conversations? Are you having conversations at the board level, at the C-level, in terms of the right cyber resiliency framework that organizations need to put in place? >> Yeah, we talk with customers almost daily. That's a daily conversation we have with customers about the requirements and the frameworks offer. And then this one, especially offers all of the key requirements from detection to prevention to recovery. And if you look at all of those requirements, you may end up with multiple products. And so we've built a solution that can address all of the key requirements in a single product. So for example, I mentioned detection and mitigation and recovery. Well, that's our protect the data at the source strategy, but the number one recommendation these days is to have an offline copy of your data. And that requires a cyber vault solution where you're going to take a copy of your data, place it in an offline storage device and you're going to manage that through some sort of automation. We've married those two requirements into a single product. So we actually look at the whole framework and can comply with all aspects of that, including the offline component. And that's one of the sort of secret sauce, part of our solution is that we can both protect at the source and maintain and monitor the offline copy of the data as well at the same time. >> So, the offline copy, interesting. Talk to me about how frequently is that updated so that if a business has to go back and restore and recover, they can. What's that timeframe of how frequently that's updated? >> So generally, we recommend about 24 hours. Because in reality, it's going to take time to uncover that there's something seriously wrong with your production data. In the case of our solution, the hope and intent is that really the problem is addressed right at the source, meaning we've detected ransomware on the source data and we can protect it and stop it before it actually ends up in your cyber vault. That's really the key to our solution. But if you have that day, recovery with the Isilon PowerScale snapshotting features, you can revert petabytes of data and bring it online in a worst-case scenario. And we tell customers, you need to work backwards from what is the worst case. And if you do that, you're going to realize that what you need is petabyte scale data recovery with your offline data. And that's a very hard problem to solve that we think we've solved really well with the PowerScale. >> And just sticking with you for a second. In the last year and a half, since things have been so turbulent, have you seen any industries in particular that have come to you saying, we really need to get ahead of this challenging situation as we've seen attacks across infrastructure? I mean, you name it, we've seen it. >> Yeah, the number one vertical for sure is healthcare. Healthcare has been the target. In fact, it was last October. I think the FBI made an announcement to all healthcare organizations to improve their cybersecurity. That's probably our largest vertical, but there really isn't a vertical that doesn't feel the need to do something more than they are today. Finance of course, manufacturing, retail. Basically, there's no target that isn't the target these days. But I would say for sure, it's going to be healthcare because they have a willingness and a need to have their data online all the time. >> Right, and it's absolutely a such critical information. Parasar, back to you. I'm curious to understand maybe any joint customers that you guys are working together with and how they have, what are some of the recovery time and the recovery point objectives that you're able to help them achieve? >> Sure, Lisa. So with Ransomware Defender, for example, there are more than thousand customers, almost thousand, we are very close, I think the exact number is around 970 or something, but have adopted this set of tools to boost their cyber resiliency in terms of being able to detect these attack patterns or any indications of a compromised through the way data is being accessed or the kinds of users that are accessing the data and so on. But also when it comes to isolation of the data, that has also been a lot of interest for customers to be able to have this cyber ward, which is air gap from your primary infrastructure. And of course, which is regulated with a lot of intelligence in terms of looking for any flags to close the connection and continue to replicate data or to terminate the connection and keep the cyber ward secure. So, absolutely. >> Andrew, how do you guys help? First of all, is it possible for companies to be able to stay ahead of the attackers? The attackers are also taking advantage of the emerging technologies that businesses are, but how do you, if the answer is yes, how do you help companies stay ahead of those attackers? >> I think a prime example of that is if you look at ransomware today and there's publicized versions or variants or names of it, they all attack files. But the bad actors are looking for the weak link. They're always looking for the weak link to go after the corporate data. And so the new frontier is object storage because these types of systems are compliance data. It's frequently used to store backup data, and that is a prime target for attackers. And so the security tools and the maturity of the technology to protect object data is nowhere near what's in place for file data. So we've announced and released the ability to protect object data in real-time, the same way we've already done it for years for file data, because we understand that that's just the next target. And so we were offering that type of solution in a unified single product. >> And the last question, Parasar for you. Where can folks go to learn more about this joint solution and how can they get started with it? >> Sure, Lisa. delltechnologies.com/powerscale, that's the unstructured data platform or the scale of NAS platform from Dell technologies. And we have great content there to educate customers about the nature of this cyberattacks and what kind of data is at risk and what is the kind of steps that can take to the point that Andrew mentioned, to build a cyber resiliency strategy as well as how to use these tools effectively to protect against attacks and also be very agile when it comes to recovery. >> Right, that agility with respect to recovery is critical because as we know, the trends are that we're only going to see cybersecurity and risks and attacks increase in some businesses and every industry are vulnerable and really need to put in place the right types of strategies and solutions to be able to recover when something happens. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. This is such an interesting topic. Great to hear about the partnership with Superna and Dell Technologies. And I'm sure your joint customers are very appreciative of the work that you're doing together. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Great, thank you. >> From my guests, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching a CUBE conversation. (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)