(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)