 Welcome back to a blueprint for trusted infrastructure. We're here with Rob Emsley, who's the Director of Product Marketing for Data Protection and Cybersecurity. Rob, good to see you, new role. Yeah, good to be back, Dave, good to see you. Yeah, it's been a while since we chatted last and one of the changes in my world is that I've expanded my responsibilities beyond data protection marketing to also focus on cybersecurity marketing, specifically for our infrastructure solutions group. So certainly that's something that really has driven us to come and have this conversation with you today. So data protection obviously has become an increasingly important component of the cybersecurity space. I don't think necessarily of traditional backup and recovery as security, to me it's an adjacency. I know some companies have said, oh yeah, now we're a security company they're kind of chasing the valuation bubble. Dell's interesting because you have data protection in the form of backup and recovery and data management, but you also have security, direct security capability. So you're sort of bringing those two worlds together and it sounds like your responsibility is to connect those dots, is that right? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think that the reality is that security is a multi-layer discipline. I think the days of thinking that it's one or another technology that you can use or process that you can use to make your organization secure are long gone. I mean, certainly you're actually correct. If you think about the backup and recovery space, I mean, people have been doing that for years. You know, certainly backup and recovery is all about the recovery. It's all about getting yourself back up and running when bad things happen. And one of the realities unfortunately today is that one of the worst things that can happen is cyber attacks. You know, ransomware, malware are all things that are top of mind for all organizations today. And that's why you see a lot of technology and a lot of innovation going into the backup and recovery space. Because if you have a copy, a good copy of your data, then that is really the first place you go to recover from a cyber attack. And that's why it's so important. The reality is that unfortunately, the cyber criminals keep on getting smarter. I don't know how it happens. But one of the things that is happening is that the days of them just going after your production data are no longer the only challenge that you have. They go after your backup data as well. So over the last half a decade, Dell Technologies with its backup and recovery portfolio has introduced the concept of isolated cyber recovery volts. And that is really the, we've had many conversations about that over the years. And that's really a big tenant of what we do in the data protection portfolio. So this idea of cyber security resilience, that definition is evolving, what does it mean to you? Yeah, I think the analysts team over at Gartner, they wrote a very insightful paper called, you will be hacked, embrace the breach. And the whole basis of this analysis is so much money's been spent on prevention is that what's at a balance is the amount of budget that companies have spent on cyber resilience. And cyber resilience is based upon the premise that you will be hacked, you have to embrace that fact and be ready and prepared to bring yourself back into business. And that's really where cyber resiliency is very, very different than cyber security and prevention. And I think that balance of get your security disciplines well-funded, get your defenses as good as you can get them, but make sure that if the inevitable happens and you find yourself compromised that you have a great recovery plan and certainly a great recovery plan is really the basis of any good solid data protection backup from recovery philosophy. So if I had to do a SWAT analysis, we don't have to do the WOT, but let's focus on the S. What would you say are Dell's strengths in this cyber security space as it relates to data protection? One is we've been doing it a long time. We talk a lot about Dell's data protection being proven and modern. Certainly the experience that we've had over literally three decades of providing enterprise scale data protection solutions to our customers has really allowed us to have a lot of insight into what works and what doesn't. As I mentioned to you, one of the unique differentiators of our solution is the cyber recovery vaulting solution that we introduced a little over five years ago, five, six years. Power up attack cyber recovery is something which has become a unique capability for customers to adopt on top of their investment in Dell technology data protection. The unique elements of our solution are really threefold and we call them the three eyes. It's isolation, it's immutability, and it's intelligence. And the isolation part is really so important because you need to reduce the attack surface of your good known copies of data. You need to put it in a location that the bad actors can't get to it. And that really is the essence of a cyber recovery vault. Interestingly enough, you're starting to see the market throw out that word from many other places but really it comes down to having a real discipline that you don't allow the security of your cyber recovery vault to be compromised in so far as allowing it to be controlled from outside of the vault, allowing it to be controlled by your backup application. Our cyber recovery vaulting technology is independent of the backup infrastructure. It uses it, but it controls its own security and that is so, so important. It's like having a vault that the only way to open it is from the inside. And think about that if you think about vaults in banks or vaults in your home. Normally, you have a keypad on the outside. Think of our cyber recovery vault as having its security controlled from inside of the vault. So nobody can get in, nothing can get in unless it's already in and if it's already in, then it's trusted. Exactly, yeah. Exactly. So isolation is the key. And then you mentioned immutability is the second piece. Yeah, so immutability is also something which has been around for a long time. People talk about backup immutability or immutable backup copies. So immutability is just the additional technology that allows the data that's inside of the vault to be unchangeable. But again, that immutability, your mileage varies when you look across the different offers that are out there in the market, especially in the backup industry. You make a very valid point earlier that the backup vendors in the market seemed to be security washing their marketing messages. I mean, everybody is leaning into the ever present danger of cybersecurity. Not a bad thing, but the reality is is that you have to have the technology to back it up, you know, quite literally. Yeah, yeah, no pun intended. And then actually pun intended. Now what about the intelligence piece of it? That's AI, ML, where does that fit? For sure. So the intelligence piece is delivered by a solution called cyber sense. And cyber sense for us is what really gives you the confidence that what you have in your cyber recovery vault is a good, clean copy of data. So it's looking at the backup copies that get driven into the cyber vault. And it's looking for anomalies. So it's not looking for signatures of malware. You know, that's what your antivirus software does. That's what your endpoint protection software does. That's on the prevention side of the equation. But what we're looking for is we're looking to ensure that the data that you need when all hell breaks loose is good. And that when you get a request to restore and recover your business, you go, right, let's go and do it. And you don't have any concern that what you have in the vault has been compromised. So cyber sense is really a unique analytic solution in the market based upon the fact that it isn't looking at cursory indicators of malware infection or ransomware introduction. It's doing full content analytics, looking at, has the data in any way changed? Has it suddenly become encrypted? Has it suddenly become different to how it was in the previous scan? So that anomaly detection is very, very different. It's looking for different characteristics that really are an indicator that something is going on. And of course, if it sees it, you immediately get flagged. But the good news is, is that you always have in the vault the previous copy of good known data, which now becomes your restore point. So we're talking to Rob Emsley about how data protection fits into what Dell calls DTI Dell trusted infrastructure. And I want to come back Rob to this notion of and not or because I think a lot of people are skeptical. Like how can I have great security and not introduce friction into my organization? Is that an automation play? How does Dell tackle that problem? I mean, I think a lot of it is across our infrastructure is security has to be built in. I mean, intrinsic security within our servers, within our storage devices, within our elements of our backup infrastructure. I mean, security, multifactor authentication, elements that make the overall infrastructure secure. We have capabilities that allow us to identify whether or not configurations have changed. We'll probably be talking about that a little bit more to you later in the segment. But the essence is security is not a bolt on. It has to be part of the overall infrastructure. And that's so true, certainly in the data protection space. Give us the bottom line on how you see Dell's key differentiators. Maybe you could talk about Dell. Of course, I always talks about its portfolio, but why should customers lead in to Dell in this whole cyber resilient space? Staying on the data protection space, as I mentioned, the work we've been doing to introduce this cyber resiliency solution for data protection is, in our opinion, as good as it gets. You know, you've spoken to a number of our best customers, whether it be Bob Bender from Founders Federal or more recently, at Dell Technologies World, you spoke to Tony Bryson from the town of Gilbert. And these are customers that we've had for many years that have implemented cyber recovery vaults. And at the end of the day, they can now sleep at night. You know, that's really the peace of mind that they have is that the insurance that a data protection from Dell's cyber recovery vault, a power of attack cyber recovery solution gives them, really allows them to just have the assurance that they don't have to pay a ransom. If they have an insider threat issue and all the way down to data deletion, is they know that what's in the cyber recovery vault is good and ready for them to recover from? Great, well, Rob, congratulations on the new scope of responsibility. I like how your organization is expanding as the threat surface is expanding. As we said, data protection becoming an adjacency to security, not security in and of itself, a key component of a comprehensive security strategy. Rob Emsley, thank you for coming back in the Cube. Good to see you again. You too, Dave, thanks. All right, in a moment, I'll be back to wrap up a blueprint for trusted infrastructure. You're watching theCUBE.