 Okay, we're back digging into trusted infrastructure with Parasar Kodadi. He's a senior consultant for product marketing and storage of Dell Technologies. Parasar, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Great to be with you, Dave. Yeah, coming from Hyderabad, awesome. So I really appreciate you coming on the program. Let's start with talking about your point of view on what cybersecurity resilience means to Dell generally, but storage specifically. Yeah, so for something like storage, you're talking about the data layer, Dave. And if you look at cybersecurity, 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 enabling zero trust, advanced authentications, identity management systems and so on. And in fact, with the advent of the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, really these detection tools for cybersecurity 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 the principles of zero trust to the data layer? How can you leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at access patterns and make intelligent decisions about maybe an indicator of compromise and identify them ahead of time, just like how it's happening in other applications. And when it comes to cyber resilience, 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 quantify the infrastructure and 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 really cybersecurity and cyber resiliency at storage layer. And of course there are technologies like, you know and network isolation, 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 build that into the infrastructure or is that sort of a separate software module that points at various infrastructure components? How does that work? Both, Dave, right at the data storage level, we have come with various data characteristics depending on the nature of data. We've developed a lot of signals to see what could be a good indicator of a compromise. 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 cybersecurity 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 security teams so that they can take actions in platforms like the sign systems, XTR systems and so on. But when it comes to which layer of 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 the various patterns of data access, who is accessing, 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 detect those patterns and flag them as indicators of compromise and allowing automated response, manual control and so on for IT units. Yeah, thank you for that explanation. So Dell Technologies World, we were there in May. It was one of the first live shows 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 emphasize security 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 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, Dell storage, this, these elements have been at the core of our, core strength for the portfolio and the source of differentiation for the storage portfolio. With almost decades of collective experience of building highly resilient architectures for mission critical data, something like PowerMax system which is the most secure storage platform for high end enterprises. And now with the increased focus on cybersecurity, 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-architect solution by design is delivered to them to ensure cyber protection at the data layer. Got it. We were talking earlier to Steve Keniston and Pete Geer about this notion of Dell trusted infrastructure. How does storage fit into that as a component of that sort of overall theme? Yeah. 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 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, air gap isolation it really started with power protect cyber recovery. That was the solution more than three years ago we launched and that was first in the industry which paid way to kind of data isolation being a core element of data management and 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 the other key thing we focus in trusted infrastructure Dell trusted infrastructure is the goal of simplifying security for the customers. So one good example here is being able to respond to these cyber threats or indicators of compromise is one thing but an IT 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 compute infrastructure. So that's one of the key ways where how we are helping simplify the kind of the ability to respond ability to detect and respond these threats in real time for security teams. And you mentioned about zero trust and how it's a balance of not kind of restricting users or put heavy burden on multi-factor authentication and so on. And this really starts with, what we are doing is provide all the tools when it comes to advanced authentication 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 what are the most critical parts of their business or what are the applications that the most critical business operations depend on and similarly identify 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 by security teams by the infrastructure teams. And another intelligence that gives a lot of flexibility for even developers to do this is today we have APIs 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 a balance, right? And sometimes if an organization had a recent attack the level of awareness is very high against cyber attacks so for a time 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 to dig into the storage tunnel extract that data and then somehow populate that dashboard. You're saying you're automating 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 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 respond to threats that have been detected elsewhere through the API. That's great, all right. The real fast API for PowerScale is the best example for that. Excellent, so thank you, appreciate that. Give us the last word, put a ball on this and bring this segment home please. Absolutely, so a Dell storage portfolio using advanced data isolation with air gap, having machine learning based algorithms to detect indicators of compromise and having great mechanisms with granular snapshots being able to recover data and restore applications to maintain business continuity is what we deliver to customers. And these are areas where a lot of innovation is happening, a lot of product focus as well as if you look at the professional services all the way from engineering to professional services the way we build these systems, the way we configure and architect these systems cybersecurity and protection is a key focus for all these activities. And Dell.com slash securities is where you can learn a lot about these initiatives. That's great, thank you. At the recent Reinforce event in Boston we heard a lot from AWS about you know, the 10 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 the CISO has to pick up from where the cloud leaves off 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 CISO simpler. And that's really, my takeaway is in part anyway your job and companies like Dell. So Parasar I really appreciate the insights. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much Dave. It's always great to be in these 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 theCUBE.