 We're kicking off with Deepak Rangaraj, who's PowerEdge Security Product Manager at Dell Technologies. Deepak, great to have you on the program, thank you. Thank you for having me. So we're going through the infrastructure stack. And in part one of this series, we looked at the landscape overall and how cyber has changed, and specifically how Dell thinks about data protection and security in a manner that both secures infrastructure and minimizes organizational friction. We also hit on the storage part of the portfolio. So now we want to dig into servers. So my first question is, what are the critical aspects of securing server infrastructure that our audience should be aware of? Sure, so if you look at compute in general, right? It has rapidly evolved over the past couple of years, especially with trends towards software defined data centers and with also organizations having to deal with hybrid environments where they have private clouds, public cloud, edge locations, remote offices, and also remote workers. So on top of this, there's also an increase in the complexity of the supply chain itself, right? There are companies who are dealing with hundreds of suppliers as part of their supply chain. So all of this complexity provides a lot of opportunity for attackers because it's expanding the threat surface of what can be attacked. And attacks are becoming more frequent, more severe and more sophisticated. And this has also triggered a ramp in the regulatory and mandates around the security needs. And these regulations are not just in the government sector, right? So it extends to critical infrastructure and eventually it loads again into the private sector. In addition to this, organizations are also looking at their own internal compliance mandates and this could be based on the industry which they are operating in or it could be their own security postures. And this is the last given which servers are operating into them. And given that servers are the foundational blocks of the data center, it becomes extremely important to protect them. And given how complex the models of the platforms are, it's also extremely difficult and it takes a lot of effort. And this means protecting everything from this supply chain to the manufacturing and then eventually assuring the hardware and software integrity of the platforms and also the operations. And there are very few companies that go to the lens that Dell does in order to secure the server. We truly believe in the notion of a security mentality that security should enable our customers to go focus on their business and proactive with everything on their business and it should not be a burden to them. And we heavily invest to make it possible for our customers. So this is really important because the premise that I set up at the beginning of this was really that as a security pro, I'm not a security pro, but if I were, I wouldn't want to be doing all this infrastructure stuff because I now have all these new things I got to deal with. I want a company like Dell who has the resources to build that security in, to deal with the supply chain, to ensure the provenance, et cetera. So I'm glad you hit on that. But so given what you just said, what does cybersecurity resilience mean from a server perspective? For example, are there specific principles that Dell adheres to that are non-negotiable, let's say? How does Dell ensure that its customers can trust your server infrastructure? Yeah, like when it comes to security at Dell, right? It's ingrained in our product medium. So that's the best way to put it. And security is non-negotiable, right? It's never an afterthought where you come up with a design and then later on figure out how to go make it secure, right? With our security development lifecycle, the products are being designed to counter these threats right from the beginning. And in addition to that, we're also testing and evaluating these products continuously to identify vulnerabilities. We also have external third-party audits with supplements as process. And in addition to this, Dell makes the commitment that we will rapidly respond to any mitigations and vulnerabilities, any vulnerabilities and exposures found out in the field and provide mitigations and patches for those in a timely manner. So this security principle is also built into our server lifecycle, right? Every phase of it. So we want our products to provide cutting-edge capabilities when it comes to security. So as part of that, we are constantly evaluating what our security model has done. We are building on it and continuously improving it. So a few years ago, our model was primarily based on the NIST framework of protect, detect, and recover. And it still aligns really well to that framework. But over the past couple of years, we have seen how computers evolved, how the threats have evolved, and we've also seen the regulatory plans. And we recognize the fact that the best security strategy for the modern world is a zero-trust approach. And so now, when we're building our infrastructure and tools and offerings for customers, first and foremost, they're cyber resilient, right? What we mean by that is they're capable of anticipating threats with standing attacks and rapidly recovering from attacks and also adapting to the adverse conditions in which they're deployed. The process of designing these capabilities and identifying these capabilities, however, is done through the zero-trust framework. And that's very important because now we're also anticipating how our customers will end up using these capabilities at their end to enable their own zero-trust ID environments and ID zero-trust deployments. We have completely adapted our security approach to make it easier for customers to work with us, no matter where they are in their journey towards zero-trust adoption. So thank you for that. You mentioned the NIST framework. You talked about zero-trust. When I think about NIST, I think as well about layered approaches. And when I think about zero-trust, I think about if you don't have access to it, you're not getting access. You've got to earn that access and you've got layers. And then you still assume that bad guys are going to get in. So you've got to detect that and you've got a response. So server infrastructure security is so fundamental. So my question is, what is Dell providing specifically to, for example, detect anomalies and breaches from unauthorized activity? How do you enable fast and easy or facile recovery from malicious incidents? But what you said is exactly right. Breaches are bound to happen. Given how complex our current environment is, it's extremely distributed and extremely connected, right? Data and users are no longer contained with an officer where you can set up a perimeter, firewall and say, yeah, everything within that is good. We can trust everything with that. That's no longer true. The best approach to protect data and infrastructure in the current world is to use a zero trust approach, which uses the principles nothing is ever trusted, right? Nothing is trusted implicitly. You're constantly verifying every single user, every single device and every single access in your system at every single level of your ID environment. And this is the principle that we use on PowerEdge, right? But with an increased focus on providing granular controls and checks based on the principles of these privileged access. So the idea is that servers first and foremost need to make sure that the threats never enter and they're rejected at the point of entry. But we recognize that breaches are going to occur. And if they do, they need to be minimized such that the sphere of damage caused by the attacker is minimized. So they're not able to move from one part of the network to something else laterally or escalate their privileges and cause more damage, right? So the impact radius, for instance, has to be reduced. And this is done through features like automated detection capabilities and automated remediation capabilities. So some examples are, as part of our end-to-end boot resilience process, we have what we call a system lockdown, right? We can lock down the configuration of the system and lock down the firmware versions and all changes to the system. And we have capabilities which automatically detect any drift from that lockdown configuration. And we can figure out if the drift was caused due to authorized changes or unauthorized status. And if it's an unauthorized change, you can log it, generate security alerts, and we even have capabilities to automatically roll the firmware and OS versions back to a known good version and also the configurations, right? And this becomes extremely important because as part of zero trust, we need to respond to these things at machine speed and we cannot do it at a human speed. And having these automated capabilities is a big deal when achieving that zero trust strategy. And in addition to this, we also have chassis inclusion detection where if the chassis, the box, the several boxes opened up, it locks alerts and you can figure out even later, if there's an easy power cycle, you can go look at the logs to see that the box opened up and figure out if there was a, making a known authorized access or some malicious actor opening a chain something in your system. Great, thank you for that. A lot of detail and appreciate that. I want to go somewhere else now because Dell has a renowned supply chain reputation. So what about securing the supply chain and the server bill of materials? What does Dell specifically do to track the provenance of components it uses in its systems so that when the systems arrive, a customer can be a hundred percent certain that that system hasn't been compromised. Right, and we're talking about how complex the modern supply chain is, right? And that's no different for servers. We have hundreds of components on the servers and a lot of these require firmware in order to be configured and run and these firmware components could be coming from third party suppliers. So now the complexity that we're dealing with requires the end-to-end approach and that's where Dell pays a lot of attention into assuring the security of our supply chain and it starts all the way from sourcing components, right? And then through the design and then even the manufacturing process where we are vetting the personnel at the factories and vetting the factories itself. And the factories also have physical controls physical security controls built into them and even shipping, right? We have GPS tagging of packages. So all of this is built to ensure supply chain security but a critical aspect of this is also making sure that the systems which are built in the factories are delivered to the customers without any changes or any tapper. And we have a feature called the secure component verification which is capable of doing this. What the feature does is when the system gets built in the factory it generates an inventory of all the components in the system and it creates a cryptographic certificate based on the signatures presented to us by the components. And this certificate is stored separately and sent to the customers separately from the system itself. So once the customers receive a system at their end they can run our tool. It generates an inventory of the components on the system at their end and then compares it to the golden certificate to make sure nothing was changed. And if any changes are detected we can figure out if there's an authorized change or an authorized change. Again, authorized changes could be like upgrades to the drives or memory and an authorized change could be any sort of tapper. So that's the supply chain aspect of it. And build of materials is also an important aspect to guaranteeing security, right? And we provide a software build of materials which is basically a list of ingredients of all the software pieces in the platform. So what it allows our customers to do is quickly take a look at all the different pieces and compare it to the vulnerability database and see if any of the vulnerabilities which are being discovered out in the wild affected platforms. So that's a quick way of figuring out if your platform has any known vulnerabilities and it has not been patched. Excellent, that's really good. My last question is I wonder if you give us the sort of summary from your perspective what are the key strengths of Dell's server portfolio from a security standpoint? I'm really interested in the uniqueness and the strong suit that Dell brings to the table. Right, yeah, we have talked enough about the complexity of the environment and how ZeroPress is necessary for the modern idea environment, right? And this is integral to Dell Powerhead servers. And as part of that, security starts with the supply chain. We have already talked about the secure component verification, which is a unique feature that Dell platforms have. And on top of it, we also have a silicon-placed platform root of press. So this is a key which is programmed into the silicon on the black servers during manufacturing and can never be changed after. And this immutable key is what forms the anchor for creating the chain of press that is used to verify everything in the platform from the hardware and software integrity to the boot on pieces of it, right? In addition to that, we also have a host of data protection features where it is protecting data access in news or in flight. We have self-encrypting drives which provides scalable and flexible encryption options. And this coupled with external key management provides really good protection for your data address. External key management is important because, you know, somebody could physically steal the server and walk away, but then the keys are not stored on the server. It's stored separately. So that provides you an additional layer of security. And we also have dual layer encryption where you can complement the hardware encryption security encrypted drives with a software level encryption. In addition to this, we have identity and access management features like multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, roles, scope and time-based access controls, all of which are critical to enable that granular control and checks for zero trust approach. So I would say, like, you know, if you look at the Dell feature set, it's pretty comprehensive. And we also have a flexibility built in to meet the needs of all customers, no matter where they fall in the spectrum of, you know, risk tolerance and security sensitivity. And we also have the capabilities to meet all the regulatory requirements and compliance requirements. So in a nutshell, I would say that, you know, Dell Powered Server's cyber resilient infrastructure helps accelerate zero-trust adoption for customers. Got it. So you've really thought this through all the various things that you would do to sort of make sure that your server infrastructure is secure, not compromised, that your supply chain is secure, so that your customers can focus on some of the other things that they have to worry about, which are numerous. Thanks Deepak. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE and participating in the program. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into the networking portion of the infrastructure. Stay with us for more coverage of a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and collaboration with Dell Technologies on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.