 We're back at navigating the road to cyber resiliency. The summit made possible by Dell Technologies. I'm Dave Vellante with John Furrier and we're here with Rob Emsley who heads marketing for Dell's data protection group and is the visionary behind this entire navigating series. Rob, thanks for coming out. Good to see you in studio, man. Great to be here. Great to finally see this come to fruition. Yeah, it's been a long time. We've been developing this content program over the years. Well, why the summit? Explain your vision behind that. Yeah, well, we got together, I think it was probably the beginning of the year. And, you know, my goal was to tell a story, you know, to tell the community, to tell customers that we either have today, that we don't have today, to give them information about cyber resiliency. You know, I think, and certainly from the interviews we've already done today, is that it's clear that people are still struggling with cybersecurity, they're still struggling with how do they make themselves more resilient. So from our perspective, we've been doing this a long time. We've seen a lot of customer situations. So we really wanted to curate a set of content, working with yourselves that really spoke directly to the challenges that customers have and the steps that they can take to go on this journey. That's how we really came up with the whole topic. Certainly, you know, we got together in May, did a short format three-segment event. We did it again in August. You know, with certainly people from Dell, our customers, you know, you mentioned Keith Bradley from Nature Fresh Farms. Certainly global services that you know is always a big part of a cyber resiliency process. And now, you know, I think we really wanted to culminate with a lot of content, with not only the Dell voice, but the voice of our partner ecosystem. We wanted to bring analysts to bear. We wanted to have some fun. You know, you brought up my old friend Mark Sorensen and, you know, the book that you wrote, which just happened to be about the topic of cyber security and cyber resiliency. And that's really what we really wanted to achieve with this particular program. We didn't want it to be a product launch. You know, there's time for that. We really wanted it to be very educational. And that was something that we really set out to achieve. And I think we've made, we've achieved it. I mean, I think we were commenting, too, on that point at their opening about the road, navigating the road to cyber resilience. Navigation requires discovery. And, you know, if you're a car, you have navigation systems, you got GPS, ways, whatever. This has been the focus. You mentioned learning. You had the analyst panel just on. I just was listening to the analysts. It's a holistic company mandate now. And people are struggling to navigate and discover, especially under the new architectures emerging with what's around the corner. You're seeing Genevieve. You see the cloud hype. You see that reality matching with that. So again, this is a great concept of the road. So, you know, in the spirit of traveling down the road, what's the road look like? As you guys look around the corner, I know you got a roadmap. You really can't tell us about what's on the roadmap. But, you know, this road is going to be an ongoing thing for customers and partners. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've been doing for probably about the last decade is going out to a fairly decent sample size of customers, asking them questions around data protection, around their challenges. In fact, come January, we'll be releasing a new set of insights. So the 2024 Global Data Protection Research. And it's a special edition focused on cyber resiliency and multi-cloud. You know, one of the things that the survey keeps telling us is that customers just haven't arrived at their destination yet. They're still staying awake at night, worried about can they bring the business back, you know, after a ransomware attack, after a cyber attack. The encouraging thing is that what we've been finding with this latest research that will come out in January is that they are taking steps. They're learning that immutability of their backups becomes very, very important. You know, as I think Gil Hex said earlier is that bad actors are going after the backup data, knowing full well that if that's gone, once they then affect production, then it's game over. So certainly immutability is now front and center. Customers are learning that they can't go on this journey alone. They need help. So whether or not it's with global alliances or global system integrators, whether or not that be people that work with Dell or just system integrators that can help customers, they're going to those sources. And so the good thing is is that we've seen a year over year set of changes that customers are starting to realize and that's really what brought us to kind of get the message out a lot more. Yeah, and the complexity within organizations and the challenges that they have with cybersecurity have to be matched by, you said, it's not a big product launch series, et cetera, but there's, we've talked a little bit about products, Silicon Root at Trust with guys like Intel and Broadcom, but through the software, but it's really about that ecosystem that's so important because it's sort of a bromide, but it's the security is a team sport. It involves everybody. We say that, but it's really, it's true. No one company can really solve this problem alone. You really have to have a company like yours that has the global scope to actually bring in the hardware, the software, the services, the ecosystem and the expertise to actually apply it to this complicated situation. Yeah, one of the interesting things is that people often forget that Dell's been doing this a long time. I mean, one of the things that came up in other interviews and you've brought up about the infamous Sony attack, that was almost a decade ago. In fact, next year it will be a decade since that attack took place, but that was a trigger event for us to really start our own journey, to really think about how do you help customers recover? You know, we started with a very custom built solution in the isolated recovery solution and we now market that and provide that to customers under the name of Parapetech Cyber Recovery. So certainly, you know, that's a decade long journey that we've been on. And now if you think about the data protection market in the backup and recovery space, there's not a single vendor out there that hasn't pivoted to lead with cyber recovery and cyber resiliency. You know, I was thinking of an Oscar world quote that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. You know, so it's good to see- We know that well. Exactly. So it's good to see that the community of backup and recovery professionals now really perceives that backup and recovery is such a close adjacency to the whole world of cyber security. I think having that expertise too, as it gives you a conscious scale, anyone who copies and imitates quickly has a conscious scale. That's kind of well-known concepts. But the MGM hack just recently we pointed out on our opening, to me, that's like that in the Caesar thing, get to pay the crypto or try to recover. If you look at MGM's recovery, Dave, that was brutal, right? They did get back, but it was hard road. And then on the last panel- Caesars was a lot. Well, they paid up. I mean, as they paid up. They paid up. So that doesn't always work to pay. You're not necessarily saying to pay and everything will be fine. That's not always the case. Well, sometimes you can't get it back. Even when you pay, you don't get it back. So like sometimes it's a whole, I mean, it's a whole ball game there. But I mean, I think that piece, the MGM was a highlight, that last panel you guys talked about, I just made a note here, 25% of mission critical apps are at risk. That's to me, the notable point, because now you have the recovery piece has to be center stage. If you're not thinking about recovery, you're going to assume you're going to get hacked. Wait, unpack that stat, because I think the ESG stat was only 25% of organizations say they can recover 80% of their workloads in a critical situation. That's, and you heard Zia Scarabala say, yeah, and that's overstated. It's probably less than 25% have that level of resilience. So. Yeah, I think that was the exposure. 81 to 91% is 10. And then the more than 90% mission critical apps are exposed as 25%. Maybe I got that wrong, but you were on the panel. Yeah, yeah. What was the data? It's again, again, essentially only 25% of the companies feel like they can recover 80% of their critical apps. If they get hacked, I mean, that is, it feels like it's getting more complicated and it's going to just, again, that's why it requires. You mentioned that earlier on the thing, the TAM for the bad guys. It's like, three trillion plus 80% of the apps are potentially available. Again, this is the targets. So it's not just data protection. But you know, that's interesting. I love the thoughts on this, Rob, because somebody once said to me, you know, it's a lot cheaper to stop the attack or put in better cyber resilience than it is to get hacked. And you think about it. Security probably, you know, IDC garden numbers, probably $80 billion a year industry, maybe even a hundred. But we're talking about three trillion in economic impact. So that's the delta. Spend a little bit of money and you're going to lower that expected loss. And that's the key. Yeah, I think you definitely start to see customers realizing they need to get the balance right. I think you're absolutely correct. Because for many, many years, customers have been investing a lot of their IT dollars on cyber prevention technologies, keeping the bad guys out. The reality is that you've got to also invest in how do you recover when those defenses aren't good enough? And I think that the research that we'll bring out in January, we are seeing customers are acknowledging that they are spending almost an equal amount now on prevention as well as recovery. And I think that's also very encouraging. You know, back to the discussion about mission critical, you know, one of the things that, you know, you certainly see in the industry now is that there's a lot more discussion about things like cyber recovery vaults. You know, quite often you see many vendors promoting, hey, build a cyber recovery vault in the cloud and it will be isolated from your on-premises environment and it will be available for you to recover from. But then the challenge is, is that when you have a devastating cyber attack, what's almost the first thing that you lose access to? The vault. The internet. You know, so one of the things that we continue to see in the majority of customers that work with Dell is they realize that cyber recovery, unlike disaster recovery, has nothing to do with the location. You don't need your data to be somewhere else because your primary data center has been obliterated. In a cyber recovery attack, your cyber recovery, in a cyber attack, your cyber recovery data can be in the same location but just isolated. And that, when you think about mission critical data, if your recovery data is right there and you have the ability to bring back your production systems in an isolated way, then that's the best way to get back up and running as quickly as you possibly can. And that is definitely the name of the game. And you've probably already got your DR strategy in place. So in case there's a fire or a flood, you've got that covered. It's really the other scenario that's become much more front and center that we saw in some of the earlier data that you have to worry about. For sure, for sure. Let's see, we've been talking about the data protection, the evolution in the intersection between cybersecurity and data protection. You said something earlier that was always sort of my procession that's sort of an adjacency. One of the things I'm taking away in these last nine months of working with you guys is I'm hearing that it has to be a fundamental component of a cyber resiliency strategy, i.e. backup and recovery. It's got to be really central to that. Do you agree with that? And how should organizations think about making that a reality? Yes, I mean, we absolutely believe that. I mean, I think that the work that we've been doing in providing customers with backup and recovery infrastructure is, is yes, it's for the day-to-day task of recovering from human error, recovering from operational failures. But really, the last five or 10 years, it's really changed to be that storage of last resort. I mean, I think that the development of cyber attacks, the way that people have discussed how bad actors are not only going after production data environments, but are now realizing that the backup corpus is where customers are going to go to. It has to be something which you build security into the solution. We've spoken about zero trust frameworks. We've talked about the pillars that are important to zero trust, things like multi-factor authentication, things like role-based access controls. Are all things that you need to build into the storage architecture. One of the nice things for us is that we've always controlled the end-to-end process. Certainly, we often get criticized for still being so heavily into the Dell backup appliance business. But one of the advantages that that gives customers is that it's an end-to-end solution all the way down to the storage device that you're actually relying upon to bring back your data. So that's always been a real positive benefit to us. The interesting thing is that our backup appliances have always been an open ecosystem. So, we've started leveraging that more with vendors that many times people would class as competitors to us, but from a backup appliance perspective, they're partners to us. Whether it be other enterprise backup and recovery leaders in the industry that have integrated tightly with the APIs that we provide to allow the Dell backup appliances to be an integral part, even if it's just an integral part for cyber resiliency and cyber recovery. I mean, we heard that from Dhruva, CEO founder, talking about what he's doing. We heard about the cloud with the analysts piece of it. We heard the edge is emerging. Again, the road is here. The question that I want to ask you is, how is the road these days? So the road to navigating the road to cyber resilience and recovery, is it bumpy? Is it smooth? Was there a corner? Is there a corner? You don't want to be doing 100 miles an hour and then take that corner and then you're off the cliff. So, people are going to want to need to know markers. What's going on? How does it look? What's the current environment? How do you see that? You guys, someone else was coming up next week, next year you got to tease the research you're going to release in January. What does that road look like right now for customers? As they're driving down that road and trying to figure it out? Yeah, I mean, certainly when a company invests in a data protection solution, it has to have some basics that have to be covered. I mean, you have to have a secure infrastructure straight out of the gate. You have to have a mutability of backups as they get created. But one of the things that we continue to believe is that the concept of isolation is still a huge differentiator for us. That is certainly something which, as I mentioned, has matured over the last decade of us working on that. And what we tend to find, and one of the advantages that we have as a company and we've had the number of guests on during the series, is the availability of global services from Dell and then our partner ecosystem. I think it was Rob Shretche on the last segment, talks about it's not a product solution, it's a product, people and process. And that is so true when it comes to cyber resiliency. My perspective is that you see a lot of people that will introduce cyber into their product messaging, they'll introduce zero trust into their product messaging. And that is, to me, messaging. Messaging. And also maybe a little bit disingenuous. We certainly learn over the course of this content that cyber resiliency is a multifaceted discipline. And the belief system that you see in the industry that by this and you will inherently become more secure is, I think, a disingenuous message. Well, I mean, after the MGM and these other texts we've been monitoring, I think the customers are smarter now. They have to squint through the messaging and get to the reality because they are next. I mean, this legit ransomware is on fire in terms of TAM, there's more TAM. I think the market's getting smarter from what I was seeing, because again, we heard from the analysts, it's fight, fire, with fire. I think Zia said, I thought that was a good comment. You guys can see more aggressive knowledge. That's why I like this discovery angle on this road to cyber resilience because there are new techniques emerging, but you guys have differentiation that adds to that. So whether you're integrating into Cloud with Druva or have some edge, you got partners. So I think this is a unique time for that whole space because the old way doesn't work anymore. For sure. Yeah, you got a wrap, Rob, but you maybe give us your last take. I'm really excited about, thank you for bringing in Mark E. Sorenson and his book, Restaurant and Jaffa because this all gets more complicated when you have critical infrastructure, which historically used to be air gap, now it's connected. So the world is getting more complicated and we have to take different approaches, but I'll give you the last word here, please. Yeah, I mean, I think you'll see more from us, both from this type of content programming. We're big believers in educating the community. Certainly as we move into next year, we'll bring out our latest research from a global data protection perspective, but certainly expect to see a little bit more Dell practical information from kind of our roadmap as we continue to focus on this as many companies are, as the kind of the tip of the spear for what we do from a data protection perspective. Rob, thank you, really appreciate you coming on. Great to be here. Okay, up next, we have an amazing guest, Liz Green. She's the EMEA advisory and cybersecurity lead at Dell Technologies. We sat down last week and talked about notable differences between today's environment and the past, how regulation has evolved, how EU is leading, is some of the complexities of cross-border policies. We talked about data sovereignty, data privacy, data protection, check it out.