 theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022 from the Venetian in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, this is our second day, lots of conversations. We've been talking a lot about Apex, multi-cloud, edge, resilience, cyber-resilience. Yes, the number one topic actually, I mean a lot of multi-cloud talk obviously too, but I think security is the hot topic at the end. It is a hot topic and we've got two guests joining us from Dell Technologies, we're going to unpack that and talk about some of the great new things that they are enabling. Please welcome one of our alumni, Mehir Maniar, Vice President at Dell Technologies and Aaron Krishnamurthy's Global Strategy, Resiliency and Security at Dell Technologies. All right guys, welcome to the program. Pleasure meeting you Lisa and Dave. So ransomware, it's a household term, I'm pretty sure my mom even knows what ransomware is, legitimately. But I mean if you look at the numbers, a ransomware attack is happening once every 11 seconds. The numbers, the stats say, you know, an estimated 75% of organizations are going to face an attack, 75%. By 2025 it's around the corner, so it's no longer a matter of are we going to get hit? If we get hit it's when. And that resiliency and that recovery is absolutely critical. Talk about some of the things there, Dell's comprehensive approach to helping organizations really build resiliency. That's a great point. So if you go to see organizations are going to get hit, if not already, 75% already out there. And then we find that through research, a lot of our customers need a lot of help. They need help because security is really complex. I mean they have a tough job, right? Because there's so many attacks happening. At the same time, one single ransomware incident can cost them an average $13 million. They have to integrate 50 plus different security vendors to go and build a secured defense and depth kind of a mechanism. They're liable to the board. At the same time they have lines of business that are talking about, hey, can you provide me security but make sure productivity doesn't get impacted? So it's a tough role for them. And that's where Dell services comes in. Where our Dell managed security services, we have a full comprehensive suite of offers for our customers to help them, right? To remain secure. And we have focused on the services based on a NIST framework. So I can talk more about the NIST framework as to how we're able to go about doing that. There's a lot of talk in the community about, should I pay the ransom? Should they not pay the ransom? And I suppose your advice would be, well, pay up front and avoid the ransom if you can, right? Absolutely. Dave, what we've seen is the ransomware payment has been very unreliable. We know of many, many examples where either they paid the ransom and they were not able to recover data or they got the decryption keys and the recover process was too slow. So we are all about helping customers understand the risks that they have today and giving them some pragmatic technology solutions. Talk about that conversation. Where is it, Arun, happening at the customer level as security is a board level conversation? Are you still talking with the CIOs, lines of business? Who all is involved in really understanding where all these vulnerabilities are within an organization? Yeah, so that's a great question. So we work with CIOs, we work with CISOs a lot more and the CISOs actually are facing the skills shortage problem. Yes. That's where they need actually help from vendors like Dell. And talking about ransomware, if you're going to see a NIST framework, it goes all the way from identification of threats to prevention, creating prevention measures with defense in depth, how do you detect and respond to threats in time because time is critical actually and they're recovering from threats. So in that whole process, it's better for customers to have the full suite of security services installed so that they don't end up paying the ransomware eventually to provide the whole defense mechanism. So the adversaries, they're motivated, they're well-funded, incredibly sophisticated these days. Okay, so how do you not lose if you're a customer? What's the playbook that you're helping your customers proceed with? Yeah, that's a great, so in the NIST framework, as I mentioned before, services are evolving around how do you identify the threats that exist in the customer's network? So we provide advisory services and we provide assessment of the customer's vulnerabilities that exist. So we can detect those vulnerabilities and then we can build the prevention mechanisms once you detect those vulnerabilities. So it's all about what you cannot see, you can't really defend against. So that's where the whole assessment comes in, where you can go and do a zero-trust assessment for the customer's entire infrastructure and then figure out where those issues lie so we can go and block those loopholes with the prevention mechanisms. And the prevention mechanisms, actually we have a whole zero-trust prevention mechanism so you can actually go and build out end-to-end defense-in-depth kind of security. So Arun, before the pandemic, the term zero-trust, people would roll their eyes. It was kind of a buzzword. And it's becoming sort of a mandate. What does zero-trust mean to your customers? How are you helping them achieve it? Yeah, so great question, Dave. A lot of customers think zero-trust is a product, it's not, it's a framework, it's a mindset. It helps customer think through what kind of access do I want to give? My users, my third party, my customers, where does my data sit in my environment? Have I configured the right network policies? Have I segmented my network? So it is a collection of different strategies that work across cloud, across data, across network, across applications that interact with each other and what we are helping customers with understand what that zero-trust actually means and how they can translate into actionable technology implementations. How do you help customers do that when we know that, I mean, the average customer has what seven different backup protection solutions alone if we're talking about data protection? How do you help them understand what's in their environment now if they're talking about protecting applications, users, data, network? What's that conversation and what's that process like to simplify their protection so that they really can achieve cyber resilience? That's correct, that's a great question, Lisa. One of the big issues we see with customers is they don't know what they don't know. There's data across multi-cloud, which is great. It enables productivity, but it also is not within the four walls of a data center. So one of the first things we do is identify where customer's data is, where is their application live, and then we look for blind spots. Are you protecting your SaaS workloads? Are you protecting your endpoints? And we give them a holistic strategy on data protection and you bring up a great point. A lot of customers have had accidental growth over the years. They started off with one tool and then different business needs drove them to different tools. And maybe now is a good time to evaluate what is your tool set? Can we consolidate it and reduce the risk in the environment? Yeah, I don't know if you guys are going to be probably familiar with that. I use it a lot when I write. It's an Optiv chart, and it's this eye test. And it says, here's the security landscape that taxonomy, it's got to be the most complicated of any in the business. And so my question is ecosystem, right? You've got to have partners, right? But there's so many choices. How are you helping to solve that problem of consolidating choices and tools? That's a great point. So if you look at the Zero Trust framework, which Lisa talked about, in the Zero Trust framework, we have few things we look at, and that is through Dell's technologies and partner technologies. So we can provide things like secure access, context-based, so which users can access which applications, identity-based. The second one is which applications can talk to which applications for microsegmentation. Again, identity-based. And then you have encryption everywhere. Encryption with data and motion, data and rest. Okay, encryption is super important to prevent hacks. So, and then you have cloud workloads. We have cloud workload protection. So some of those things we rely on our partners, and some of them actually we have technologies in the house, like Arun talked about the cyber resilience and the world that we have in-house. So we provide the end-to-end framework for our customers for Zero Trust, where we can go and identify, we can assess, we can go build it out for them, we can detect and respond with our excellent MDR service. Then we came out with last, just last year, so that MDR service allows you to detect attacks and respond automatically using our AI and ML platform that reduces the signal from the noise and allows to prevent these attacks, right, from happening. I mean, question for you, as we've seen the proliferation of cyber attacks during the pandemic, we've seen the sophistication increasing, the personalization is increasing, ransomware as a service is making it, there is no barrier to entry these days. How has Dell Technologies overall, cyber resilience strategy evolved in the last couple of years? I imagine that there's been some silver linings and some accelerations there. No, absolutely Lisa. One of the things we recognized very early on when big cyber attacks going on five years ago, we knew that as much as customers had great technologies to prevent a cyber attack, it was a matter of when, not if. So we created the first purpose-built solution to help customers respond and recover from a cyber attack. We created innovative technologies to isolate the data. In a cyber wall, we have immutable technologies that lock the data so they can't be tampered with. And we also built some great intelligence based on AIML. In fact, this is the first and only product in the world that looks as backup data does full content indexing and it's able to look for behaviors or patterns in your environment that you could normally not find with signature based detection systems. So it's very revolutionary and we want to help customers not only on the prevention side, which is proactive, we want them to be equally have a sound strategy on how they would respond and recover from a cyber attack. Okay, so there's two pieces there, proactive and then if and when you get hit, how do you react. And I think about moments in cyber. I mean, Stuxnet was obviously a huge turning point and then of course the solar winds and you see that the supply chain hacks, you see the island hopping and the living off the land and the stealth moves. So it's almost like, wow, some of these techniques of even being proactive, you're not going to catch them. So you've got to have this, you talked about the NIST framework multi-level, but I mean, customers are aware, obviously, everybody custom you talk to the solar winds, blah, blah. But it seems like they're still sleeping with one eye open. They're really nervous, right? And we haven't figured it out as an industry yet. And so that's where solutions like this are so critical because you're almost resigning yourself to the fact that, well, you may not find it being proactive, but you've got to have, you know, the last, it's like putting tapes in a truck and driving them somewhere. What do you, do you sense that? It was a major milestone in the industry, milestone, negative milestone. And that was a turning point and it was kind of a wake-up call for the industry, a new wake-up call. What's your sense of how the industry is responding? Yeah, I think that's a great point. So if you go to see the vorages that it's not, if you're going to get attacked, it's when you're going to get attacked. So the attacks are going to happen no matter what. So that's the reason why the defense in depth and, you know, the zero-touch framework comes into play. The customers have to have an end-to-end holistic framework so that they can have not just the defensive mechanisms, but also detect and respond when the attacks happen. And then as you mentioned, some of them you just can't catch all of them. So we have excellent incident response and recovery mechanisms. So if the attack happened, it caused damage, we can do forensics analysis. And on top of that, we can go and recover like the cyber recovery world. We can recover that data and make them production again, right? Ready. I guess I'm sorry, what I was trying to ask is, do you think we've understand SolarWinds? Have the industry figured it out? Yeah, you know, great question, right? I think this is where customers have to take a pragmatic approach on how they do security. And we talk about concepts like intrinsic security. So in other words, you can do a certain activity in your environment and punt the ball to some other team to figure out security. Part of what Dell does, you know, you asked the question, right? There's a lot of tools, where do customers start? One of the big values we bring to customers is the initial awareness and just educating customers. Hey, what happened in these watershed moment in these different attacks, right? WannaCry, Stuxnet. And how did those customers respond? And where did they fail? So let's do some lessons learned with past attacks and let's move forward with some pragmatic solutions. And we usually don't overwhelm our customers with a lot of tools. Let's have a roadmap. Let's do an incremental build of your security posture and over time, let's get your entire organization to play with it. You talk about awareness, obviously that's critical. But one of the other things that's critical with the cyber threats and what's going on today is the biggest threat vector still is people. Exactly. So talk to us about some of the things that you help organizations do, you know, when you're talking about, from an awareness perspective, it's training the people not to open certain links, if they look suspicious, that sort of thing. How involved is Dell Technologies with your customers from a strategic perspective about really drilling this into the end users that they've got a lot of responsibility here? Yeah, if you go to see phishing is one of the most common attack vectors to go and infiltrate these attacks. So Dell has a whole employee education program that they've rolled out. So we all are aware of the fact that, you know, clicking on links and phishing is a risk factor. And we are trying to take that same message to our customers through an employee awareness training service. So we can actually provide education for the employees from getting these phishing attacks happening. Yeah, that's really critical because as I mentioned, we talked about the sophistication but the personalization, the social engineering is off the charts these days. And it's so easy for someone to, especially with all these distractions that we have going on if you're working from home and you've got kids at home or dogs barking and whatnot, it's easy to be fooled into something that looks incredibly legitimate. Yeah, you know, you bring another great point, right? You can keep people in your environment, don't do things, don't do it. You create a friction, right? We want people to be productive. We want them to use different access to different applications, both in-house and in the cloud. So this is where technology comes into play. There are some modern malware defenses that will help customers identify some of these email phishing, spear phishing. So they are in a better prepared position and we don't want to curb productivity but we want to also make, you know, a very secure environment where people can. That's a great point as it has to be frictionless. I do have a question for you guys with respect to SaaS applications. I talked to a lot of customers using certain SaaS applications who have this sort of, there's a dual responsibility model there where the SaaS vendor is responsible for the application protection but Mr. or Ms. customer, you're responsible for the data. We are. Are you finding that a lot of organizations are going help? We've got, you know, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, that, and it's really incredibly business critical data. Dell Technologies help us protect this because this is a vulnerability that we were not aware of. Absolutely and that's why we have the backup service with Apex where we can actually have SaaS data which is backed up using Apex solution for backup and recovery. So yes, that's very critical. We have the end-to-end portfolio for backing it up, having the vault which is an air gap solution recovering from it when you have an attack. And I think the value problem that Dell brings to the table is we have the client side and we have the data center side with the multi-cloud. So we provide a completely hardened infrastructure where we're all the way from supply chain to secure OS, secure boot, and secure image. Everything is kind of hardened with stick hardening on top of that. And then we have the services layer to go and make sure we can assess the risks, we can detect and respond, we can recover, right? So that we can keep our customers completely secure. That's the value prop that we bring to the table with unmatched scale of Dell services, right? In terms of the scale that we bring to the table to our customers and help them out. Well, it's an interesting opportunity and it's certainly from a threat's perspective, one that's going to persist, obviously, we know that. Great that there's been such a focus from Dell on cyber resiliency for its customers, whether we're talking about multi-cloud on-prem, public cloud, SaaS applications. It's critical, it's a solution that every industry has to take advantage of. Guys, thank you so much for joining us. I wish we had more time. We could talk about this all day. Great work going on there. Congratulations on what was going on with Apex and the announcement and I'm sure we'll be hearing more from you in a few years. Thank you, Lisa. We are super excited about Dell services and what we can bring for managed security services for our customers. I appreciate it. Thanks guys. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from day two of our coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from Las Vegas. Dave and I will be right back with our last guest of the day.