 Hey guys and girls, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2023. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is our second day of coverage, our first full day. We were here last night as well. A lot of news to unpack, a lot of hot topics. One of those hot topics is cyber resiliency. We've got two of our alumni back to talk about that. What it actually means, how they're delivering it for customers from a Dell perspective. Rob Emsley is back with us, Director of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies and David Noyesville, VP of Product Management. Guys, great to have you back. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, thanks for having us Lisa. Yeah, great to be back. Isn't it great to be back? It is. It is. So I've been hearing so much about cyber resiliency the last year particularly and I always wonder to different companies and customers, what does it mean to actually be cyber resilient? As we know in today's age, ransomware is no longer a, is it going to happen? It's when the supply chain obviously the risks though that we've all experienced. How do you David and maybe Rob, commentary from you, how do you define, how does Dell define cyber resiliency? Well, it's a number of different things, but holistically we kind of talked about the three eyes a lot, which is immutability, isolation and intelligence. And really immutability is kind of like your first line of defense. That's making sure that you can't delete your good copies of data that you can keep snapshots and make sure that nobody's tampered with them and get back from them, which is great. But that's where a lot of the products that provide cyber resilience stop is around immutability. Really what we believe is that not only that, if you've got to compromise, there's potential that something's been compromised for quite some time. And by the way, someone's got keys to the kingdom could potentially cause even more damage. And so we talk about isolation as the next step, which means taking your data and putting it in another location that's air gapped where the bad guys can't get at it because it's not open all the time and basically there's not a pathway for them to get there. And then intelligence is the last part, which is more than just looking at, hey, is my data changing frequently, but actually being able to look at the data and go based on the signatures of what we know attacks look like, we believe that attack occurred and here's what the impact was. So you can get back as quickly as possible. That recovery is table stakes. Absolutely, absolutely. I think the reason why that's so important is if you just take one of those, I can do isolation, okay, I got an air gap. But when I talk to practitioners to say, yeah, the other thing that I worry about is that sometimes ransom, you got to go to a process. It's too hard. And so the bad guys are like, let's just threaten to release their data. And so, and if they do that, then you're screwed. Okay, so you have to have that third piece which is the intelligence. My question is, do customers, how well do customers understand that how comprehensive are they taking this approach? Kind of pre-pandemic, post-pandemic. I think the number of attacks have just gone up and up and up. The volumes have gone up. And people realize now that you need a clean room environment to bring your data back into. You can't just bring it back into production because your DNS could have been compromised. Your Active Directory could have been compromised. So those compromises could be so prevalent within your environment that if you don't come back into an air-gapped clean room environment, there's a chance that you bring your data back and you're hacked all over again. So customers are starting to understand that. And then the second part is, you may have had an attack that's been latent in your environment for a very long time. We talked to customers who maybe they've gone 30 days and the data's already been compromised. The days of malware going in and just randomly encrypting everything, that's over. Now it's a much more sophisticated attack. It's like flip a few bits. You can't bring the files back online. But if we know what kind of signatures to look for, then we can identify that that happened, where it happened. And that makes that recovery process that we discussed so much faster. If I have to bring back a few hundred files versus millions and billions of files, that's a much faster recovery process. And recovery of a business. Rob, can you comment on, as we talked about ransomware being a, it's happening all over the place. Customers have to be able to be resilient. Can you comment on how Dell is working to incorporate some of the design principles that David talked about? Talk about that from a Dell Technologies perspective. Yeah, for sure. I mean, certainly one of the biggest misconceptions that customers have is that it's not going to happen to me. My industry is not a big enough focus for cyber criminals. And that is really just proving to not be the case. I mean, we've seen customers ranging in every industry segment, whether it be education to healthcare, to certainly to finance, which everybody thinks that's where people go first. But really the cyber criminals are looking to disrupt every customer across every segment and then look to them for financial benefit. So certainly from our perspective, this is where backup and recovery over the last few years has become a central element of the discussion around how to become more cyber secure. And certainly the element of cyber resiliency, backup and recovery is not there to prevent bad things from happening to you. It's there to get you to be able to recover when the inevitable happens. You know, and that's I think why you're seeing in the backup and recovery market, so much focus is on cybersecurity. And certainly we've been finding that our cyber recovery solution has become almost like one of the first discussions that we have with our clients. Certainly our existing clients that've been with us for a long time are extending their environments with cyber recovery vaults that provide isolation and intelligence, but also we're finding that completely new customers that maybe their previous environment has failed them are coming to us based on our expanded story. What's the profile slash persona titles of the customers that you're engaging with? Who is it? Is it SecOps? Is it the sort of admin team, the storage team? What is interesting, I think that in years gone by there was always the joke that when you went to sell back at you would take the stairs down to the basement, but really now when you're selling back in recovery in the modern world, you're taking the elevator to the top floor, to the boardroom, you're talking to the CISO, you're talking about risk, you're talking about, it's not a case of if but when, it's a case of you will be hacked, you need to embrace that and be ready for the time to bring the business back online. So definitely the level of customer that we're talking to is definitely increased. You only have to look at the examples around the world of customers that have been impacted, around the level of people in those companies that are having to talk to the media, having to go public. And it's not the IT director, it's the CEO. It's the CISO that are having to get on the phone, get on the news channel to explain what they've done and how they've recovered. Nobody wants to be the next headline, right? But to your point, it's those folks at the top that have to answer to brand reputation damage, customer churn, the failure of the business. David, talk a little bit about, in addition to cyber resiliency, some of the other expected outcomes, as Rob pointed out, there is no industry that is safe from the sophistication of these hackers. But in terms of some of the other expected outcomes, what can customers expect Dell to deliver for them? Well, I think there's a couple of things. I mean, we talk about our security, but we also talk about being more modern, and we also talk about resilience. So, look, you're talking to Dell, let's just talk about resilience for a minute. We have a great heritage in our data protection portfolio. Our purpose-built backup array, the PowerProtect DD, previously known as Data Domain, has just a long history and heritage of being just bulletproof in terms of extremely stable, highly resilient, can't lose data, no matter what. And that makes its way into all of the products, and our next generation products, we've launched recently an integrated appliance called DM5500, which has that DNA in it. Second one we talked about is simplicity. So what can you expect from Dell? We understand customers' pain points, and one way of avoiding errors and loss of data in the environment is not just building a cyber vault, but making sure that the environment is wrapped up and simple. And what I mean by wrapped up and simple is you can't make any mistakes. We want to make it easy to deploy, we want to make it easy to use, and we also want to prevent you from creating situations where you put yourself in harm's way. So the whole goal of the products that we're putting out now is to make sure that it's easy to use as possible, and make sure that they're basically, don't let you put yourself in the foot. Now, security plays itself, plays through all of that in a number of different ways as well. So because you're buying from Dell, we own the product top to bottom, the software all the way through the hardware stack. So it's not just about immutability and detecting that a cyber attack has occurred, but we can actually secure the entire box to make sure that the BIOS is secure, that someone can't go in, just because you used immutability instead of retention lock that said, hey, this data has to be retained for seven years. I can't go in as a hacker and push the clock forward to 2033 and all of a sudden, all my data is now deletable. Whoops, and now I go and delete it all. I can actually lock the whole thing down because I own that operating environment. Doesn't mean we're not building software defined solutions. We want to be able to pick those same solutions up and run them in the cloud, run them anywhere, but when we ship as a Dell solution top to bottom, that vertical integration gives us a lot more control to keep the bad guys out. How are customers wanting to consume this capability? One of the realities is it's many ways. It's multiple consumption models. You still have people interested in capital expenditure, OPEX and subscription is certainly on the rise. We still have many customers that look to deploy backup and recovery on premises, but we're definitely seeing more and more customers look to deploy backup and recovery in the cloud. Certainly if their workloads move to the cloud, then they want the ability to use the same backup and recovery solutions that they've relied on on premises in the public clouds. So if you think about yesterday's announcement around APEX storage for the public cloud, a key element of that that we've been doing for several years is APEX protection storage. It started, really. And that has been where we have literally almost 2,000 customers around the world and over the last three years we're proud to say that we're protecting over 17 exabytes of data across all of the three major public cloud providers. And the great thing is that it's the same DNA as David mentioned that they've been relying on within their physical appliances. We lift and shift it and we provide it as a complementary solution to object storage within the public cloud. So if you think about object storage, people always think, well, that's a very cost-effective architecture, but when you marry that with industry-leading deduplication, the cost to serve for them, because cloud is not free, so efficiency in the cloud becomes a very key element. And we've sort of looked at all of the solutions across public cloud environments. And we're up to 80% more cost-effective when you're deploying Dell data protection solutions in the public cloud. So it's both the protection and then expanded to cyber recovery, because one of the things that we've talked to you about in the past, is cyber recovery on premises, but also cyber recovery with APEC protection storage in all of the public cloud providers. If I may, like, Rob brings up a really good point about people wanting to get those cost advantages of protecting data in the cloud. I was talking to some customers at Dell Tech World here who are getting 80 to one reduction in their particular environment. So if you think about reducing your cloud costs by 80 to one, it's just phenomenal in terms of driving down the actual cost of infrastructure. That's a big deal. So you mentioned some great stats, Rob. Caitlin Gordon actually mentioned the same. Was it 17 exabytes of data protected in the cloud? You talked about thousands of customers, yet the Global Data Protection Index Survey, that's something that Dell sponsors every year, showed that from over a thousand decision makers, still two thirds of organizations are still concerned. We don't have the right existing measures in place here, two thirds of them also believe that, ah, this feature of work, this remote work from anywhere is a risk. So obviously, the value prop is there, the TAM is there. What do you say to prospective customers who come to you in this two thirds bucket saying, we don't have the confidence? Dell, help us get there. It's interesting, and you bring up an interesting stat because I think some of it is because until you've been impacted, you have a kind of a lack of confidence that the tooling that you have is going to get the job done. One of the things that has often been written about is that customers need to think about how they can become cyber resilient organizations. And one of the ways to do that is to hire for failure, hire people that have actually experienced a cyber attack because then they're not afraid to understand what is needed. So some of it is, they're concerned that they're technology but often that's a shorthand that they're just concerned that the technology and the organization is just not prepared to go through the steps that are necessary. And that's where Dell can help them because we've certainly been talking about technology but the other side of the coin is people. And Dell has a lot of people working in global services and it's amazing, and David knows this, even customers that haven't implemented are cyber recovery bolts but are using our Dell backup and recovery products. When they have issues, people are only a phone call the way. Incident response and the ability to put people boots on the ground immediately and to man like 24 by seven help decks for them becomes so important. And then one of the big differentiators, remember is Dell is an end-to-end infrastructure company. So it's not just backup and recovery that needs to be looked after. We're able to bring equipment quickly and urgently in order to bring back production environments. Because remember, when your production environment is impacted, it's often a crime scene. You can't get back to it. The authorities are investigating what happened. So you need a supplier that can not only look after your data but can give you a place to put it back. And that's one thing that Dell is fantastic at doing. You know that dynamic that you mentioned about a lot of customers, the nature of data protection, backup is if you've been snake bitten, then you go out and get your stuff protected even down to the PC level. That's the way it used to be. I think there's much more awareness of it now. Do you think that people are beginning, I mean, it's still a fear factor, I get that. But there is a business case in terms of, if I can use insurance terms, reduction in expected loss. There's a probability that within the 10-year period, you're going to take a loss of X and that insurance company will bet their business on that. Is there a more of a mathematical business case approach to this beyond, hey, board, your reputation's going to go down the toilet? Are people beginning to quantify the business case in new ways? Well, I mean, I think they are and I think that they're recognizing that they need to invest more and that's why those investments are happening. And you see it throughout the data protection industries that people are investing more. But not just in terms of buying infrastructure but also in terms of bringing in those expert people who can make sure that, yes, not only is there going to be a cost incurred if we actually experience one of these things but let's bring in people who are experienced, who've done this a thousand times. At Daltec World here, we announced something called product success accelerators. We talked about backup, but there's a product success accelerator specifically for data protection. And if you were to be able to pay for that additional service, you're going to bring in people who have a runbook of how they've done this at a thousand different customers and they're going to basically do it using well-known, tried and true, tested techniques to make sure that you have consistent policies that are set up in the right way that you can get back your data and they'll be with you the whole way. So it is an additional investment and we see people making that investment and they're making that business case and that's why we're taking that elevator to the CISO because they understand that even when budgets are tightening and you're in kind of this economic times that we're in right now that this is not the kind of thing that you can basically skimp on. So, but they have to make a choice. Like with your data, how far do you want to go? You can go as far as just doing immutability, which we talked about earlier and that's kind of the least that you want to, probably the least investment that you can do to protect your data. You can go all the way to that cyber vault that we talked about, that's the most and customers have to make that choice. For what portion of my data just requires immutability and what portion requires that extra investment because it's so mission critical, this set of applications run my business and without them that's the lifeblood. I need to be able to get them back quickly and they're willing to make that investment. And if I don't have the talent, you're saying you can provide me with a service that can close those gaps and I can do that through partners? Well, they're looking to expand that to partners later but right now it's a Dell-driven service that will expand over time. But basically there's three levels which is one is we're going to help you get set up and we're going to train your people so that you have the expertise in-house to go and do that. You'll teach me how to fish. Teach you how to fish. The next one is we'll come in and periodically make sure that everything's okay, we'll check, okay, you're all in your compliance, everything looks good, all of the bits that you have to set are all set, you're at the right code levels and so on and so forth. And then there's kind of a third level which is not quite a fully managed service but it's like a eight by five level of service which means that we're going to be with you every step of the day, every step of the way during the work day. We're going to make sure that if you have a question as you're doing things, you've got a buddy standing right next to you who's well versed in cybersecurity and they're going to actually help you and make sure that you're successful. And if you're willing to make those investments depending on where you land and where your business case that you make to your executive staff lands, you can choose one of those services and get the outcome that you're desiring. A lot of flexibility in what Dell's delivering which doesn't surprise me. Guys, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today, talking about modern, simple, resilient data protection, how you're delivering it and what the outcomes are the customers can expect. We really appreciate you guys joining us on the program today. Thank you, thanks for having us. Great to see you both. Likewise, you have to come back. Thanks. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. Up next, JJ Davis is back on theCUBE. We're going to be talking about Dell's ESG priorities and some of the progress, probably a lot that they've made on their moonshot goals we talked about last year. Stick around.