 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. My name is Dave Vellante. And I'm currently in our studios outside of Boston as we prepare to gather for the first in-person Dell technologies world since 2019. One of the major structural changes in the technology business during the pandemic was IBM's spin-out of Kindral, a world-class technology services provider that lived inside of IBM. Kindral is a large business with trailing 12-month revenues north of 18 billion. It's got 90,000 employees worldwide. Kindral has long-term contracts, predictable cash flows, and in my view is one of the most undervalued companies in the technology sector. As a separate company, Kindral is able to turn many of its former internal IBM roadblocks into tailwinds. And ecosystem partnerships are one of the best examples of new opportunities that are opening up for the newly separate company. In this next segment, we're going to dig into a new partnership between Kindral and Dell technologies and what is the most critical priority for organizations today, cyber resiliency. And with me are two really impressive and talented guests. Chris Lovejoy is Global Security and Resiliency Practice Leader at Kindral. Michelle Weston is Vice President of Global Offerings for Security and Resiliency also at Kindral. Ladies, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on and spending some time with us. Thank you. Okay, let's zoom out a little bit and start with a big picture. What would you say are the one or two major trends or changes even in cyber that you've seen since the pandemic? Maybe Chris, you could start us off and Michelle, you can chime in. Sure, happy to. And I think part of this actually preceded the pandemic. And the fact is, a lot of organizations have been engaging in the adoption of new technologies be it cloud, AI, IoT, whatever that may be. And they've been introducing that technology without adequate security control. And during the COVID pandemic, when technology transformation happened for existential reasons, what we were seeing is organizations throwing out even more technology at cyclic rates with absolutely no security control whatsoever. And in the meantime, the regulators who are watching this in horror are introducing new requirements in and around what we're calling cyber resilience today. And it's all based on this concept that, conventional cybersecurity assumes that the adversaries could be kept out of organizations. You could protect the organization and sort of block it. As rising numbers of disruptive attacks like ransomware attacks have shown, those approaches don't work. And so what we're seeing is that the market is really moving toward this concept of cyber resiliency, which goes beyond cybersecurity. It assumes that the advanced adversaries, or frankly, many adversaries, can overcome conventional protections and that organizations need to prepare to recover. So our approach, the approach that we're taking to the market is really to help organizations in binding security, plus continuity, plus disaster recovery, when giving them the ability to anticipate, protect, withstand and recover from any adverse condition associated with their cyber real estate. And this is why we're so excited to work with Dell because they're really paving the road for us to actually work together in solving these needs for our clients. Got it, that makes sense. Now, Michelle, as Chris was saying, these worlds are coming together, what used to be adjacencies, oftentimes afterthoughts bolted on. And now you've got the work from home and hybrid work, not to mention, as Chris was saying, you're injecting AI and all this data. This is a complicated situation for a lot of people, isn't it? Yeah, and it was only even more complicated during the pandemic as well. I think another trend that we saw is the enterprise was outside the enterprise, right? Everyone was working from home. They weren't in the data centers. Their own resiliency and security protocols were already at risk because they were so manual and people-intensive. And yet we know the bad actors actually took advantage of that, right? Data centers were less monitored. We had all of the employees working from home. Now the enterprise is outside of the enterprise, but you still need security and resiliency for all of those endpoints, right? And I think that's driving a higher need coming out of the pandemic. And even with this hybrid model of, okay, we'll return to work, but not in the same fashion that we did prior to the pandemic, that's the new reality. The other thing that I would say is that those customers that had adopted cloud already and cloud enabled their business, they were able to fare the best during the pandemic. They were able to sustain their businesses. Alternatively, and it's kind of a different lens to it, I think the pandemic actually drove new ways of working and some really creative solutions. I mean, if you look at food delivery services that proliferated during the pandemic or gyms that are now offering fitness online, fitness classes online, people had to think intelligently and creatively on how they sustained their businesses. So I think all of that's coming together, but certainly this need of, as you said, not thinking of security and resiliency as an afterthought, but as a forethought, planning for those things efficiently and effectively that we find customers that do that, do it the best. And I think that Kendral offers a unique value proposition here because bringing both together is a journey that we started a couple of years ago that we've only accelerated with the spin of the Kendral company. Yeah, interesting. So I wanted to talk about that partnership because Dell's got this massive channel, it's got infrastructure, technology, expertise, but Dell's a product company. Kendral is a services company. So it's a really good match in that sense. Maybe you could talk about how the partnership came together and what are the critical aspects that folks need to be aware of? Yeah, I would say Dell's an excellent partner for us and they have been for a number of years. So in a lot of ways, that's not new, okay? We've been partnering in market together for quite some time. In fact, the solution that we'll talk about today was first put into market in 2018. And you're absolutely right. We come together in the best ways. They're leveraging our strengths with regard to managed services, professional services. And we're certainly looking at them as a key technology provider for our portfolio. We've worked together for years. We manage backup environments based on their data protection solutions, including data domain, but what was unique? And I think we were both ahead of the market at the time was the 2018 solution that we put into market and have only enhanced and augmented it ever since. It's called Cyber Vault is the solution from Dell Technologies. We certainly manage that solution in market for them today. And then we have unique differentiation in our Kindrel portfolio that we've integrated with that and add to their cyber incident recovery features. Dell initially put the solution in market coming out of some of the ransomware attacks that they had, cyber attacks that they had. They realized there was a need to protect the large data domain install base around the world. They developed some proprietary solution software on top of their large data domain boxes. And in any cyber incident recovery solution, you need a few things. You need the ability to assure a mutable storage. A copy that you can assure has not been altered so that when you initiate the recovery, you know that you've got a clean copy and you're not propagating whatever is there. So the solution has that, it has the other component that you need, which is the ability to scan the data for anomalies. So they're scanning the backup files continuously to look for anomalies. And then lastly, you need some form of data mover, which the data domain solution offers. So they came to us in 2018 and said, look, we've got the solution. We think we're ahead of the market. We were also investing in cyber incident recovery with a key asset that we acquired in market in 2015 that we've continued to bake cyber incident recovery features and functions into. And they said, let's marry the two and let's have you provide all of the managed services capabilities around this for clients. That is a key piece because when it comes to cyber, there's always a level of confidence that customers have. Yes, I can recover from any adverse condition. If you ask them, can you recover from a cyber attack with 100% assurance? I don't think there's a customer today that could say given how sophisticated and how much these attack vectors are changing that they have that 100% confidence level. So a managed service provider, a phone a friend in the event of is a unique value proposition. And that's what the two companies are bringing together for customers today. Thank you. So Chris, maybe as a services company, you have to be agnostic to technology, the best fit, et cetera. But prior to the spin, we never would have heard of something like this. And so maybe you could talk about the partnership from your perspective. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I do want to sort of double click on this a little bit and you mentioned it in your opening, headwinds being tailwinds now. And I think this is incredibly important. What people don't realize about Kindrel is that we were never able to as the services organization that was really focused on strategic outsourcing and providing other kinds of services to clients while under the IBM banner, we were really never able to talk about the technical depth that we had across any number of platforms, including the hyperscalers. And we have thousands upon thousands of people with hyperscaler certifications. We have experience with pretty much every security and resilience technology out there. We have broad and deep relationships with organizations like yours that we were never able to speak about. Now, when it comes to a client, let's be realistic, everybody is engaged in some sort of IT modernization program. And while, and we have to realize also that those IT modernization programs, oftentimes they have no destination per se. We talk about them as a journey, but with no destination. They just keep going and going and going. And the directions change every day depending on what the strategic requirements are from whatever C-suite you have sitting at the table, what the competitive trends are, what the market is telling you, et cetera. And so what clients are saying to us is that the value we offer is that we can untangle the mess that is their environment. We can meet them where they are, we can get them where they wanna go. And so, when it comes to a relationship with Dell, we believe that, particularly in the area of security and resilience, that there is a unique proposition to be had around the services and the cross-platform experience and certifications and skills that our teams have, married with the technology advances that Dell has made in the world, as well as our experience in sort of the two that have been frankly hidden over the past few years, I think we have something unique that we can offer to the market, particularly as I said, in this space of security and resilience where all of our clients are looking for some sort of solution to this, I can't spend enough money to protect myself. I need to make sure that if the worst happens that I can bring myself back again, that's what we can do for our clients. Great, thank you. Michelle, I want to go back to the solution for a moment. You mentioned a number of things, integrations. I got like a zillion questions here. I'm interested in what kind of integrations. You talked about immutability. Where does that occur? Is that in the cloud? Is that Dell technology? Is scan for anomalies? Again, what is that? Is that some kind of AI magic? You got a high-speed data mover. Is there an air gap involved? Maybe help me fill in some of those gaps. Yeah, and I think you've netted out the solution. Any cyber incident recovery solution, in my mind, would have those three things. They have some form of immutable storage. This could be cloud object storage. In the case of the Dell solution, they're actually using their retention lock feature on the large data domain devices, right? So think of this solution as having two data domains. They both have this retention lock feature. That's the immutable storage. They're able to move data back and forth between the two. That's another key piece. And then finally, for any incident recovery solution, you need the ability to scan and make sure that there aren't anomalies, in this case in the backup files. So they're using a third party to scan those files for anomalies. And when one's detected, that kind of gives the indication that something may be there and then they can go in and triage it and clean the environment if needed. So we certainly manage that end-to-end, and that is one approach. It is an on-premise approach. It uses the data domain technologies. We know that clients have a lot more than that, right? So where Kindrel comes in with its cyber incident recovery solution that also integrates with Dell's cyber incident recovery solution, is we support cloud, multiple infrastructure. We have also immutable storage that we leverage. And then in terms of our anomaly scanning capabilities, in this case, we're using technology that we had originally developed in IBM Research that we integrated into the software product. Again, this is based on an acquisition we did in market five years ago called Sinovi. It's a software product. It ingests and automates all of your workflows in the event of any failover, failback, any outage, including cyber. And that technology underpins a lot of what we do on the incident recovery perspective. Dell's used data domain. We've used the software. Both solutions have all three components of a cyber incident recovery solution. When they're integrated, there's real power there, right? Because now you're looking at protection, not just of the backup environment, but all environments, including production. You're looking at being able to scale beyond on-prem. And more importantly, you're looking at the speed to recover, right? Not needing to rehydrate the data, but to be able to recover with the RTOs and RTOs that are expected of our customers. On the resiliency orchestration side, the Kendral solution, this is push of a button, failover, failback. In the event of an outage, you can recover the entire hybrid estate in the matter of minutes. And what we know with respect to any outage, it's costly. We know that downtime is costly, but with respect to cyber, we know that that's more costly than a typical outage, sometimes forex. You don't always recover from the brand damage, from the loss of customers. So being down and coming up as quickly as you can with the additional data verification, data validation and assurance that you're not propagating whatever is there is the value prop that both companies are really serving. And where does an air gap fit in into this equation? Is that yet another layer of protection? What's the best practice there? So think of the air gap is just between the data movement and the immutable storage, right? You need to be able to cut connection in a way, right? That is an air gap solution. And it's based on the immutable storage that both have. Okay, and that would be, it could be local, I guess, but it also could be, it should be maybe remote, yes? Mm-hmm, exactly. And the ability to manage and orchestrate that air gap is a key value prop again of the Kendral solution. Okay, and so I've mentioned local or remote. I mean, obviously the trade-off is recovery time, you know, I guess RTO and RPO. So a lot of layers is what I'm hearing is that's all security pros in this framework. Let me give you another example. The reason why this is so important, most of our DR processes today, they all rely on people, right? We had a large client that was impacted when we Rybia and they were impacted with Petia. They had a great DR plan. They were a customer of ours. We managed that service for them. Their DR plan was still people intensive. And when that attack happened, it took out the badge readers to the people that you've invested in can't get on site to manage the incident, can't bring up the environment. And then if you look at going back to the very beginning of our conversation, COVID being sort of another way that that happened with access and the ability to continuously monitor and have the people on site, that ability was impacted. So this is where you need to invest in technology, people and processes to make sure that you are as robust as you can be. And as Chris said, your ability to anticipate with stand and recover from any adverse condition, that's the value prop that our global practice brings. To your point, the adversary is well-funded and motivated. Chris, we'll give you the last word. Where do you want to see this partnership go? What's next? What should we look for in the coming months and years? Yeah, I think very simply, and I'm going to put my CISO hat on for a minute because I think it's important to speak for the customer as a customer. At the end of the day, I think most CISO executives don't realize the extent to which security, continuity and disaster recovery have been separate silos. And what is shocking to our clients when they get into a ransomware event in particular is the fact that they have their systems, their services, their data is locked up. Their backups have been sort of implemented or have been sort of subverted. They call on the pros. They call on the folks that help them with the incident response. The incident responders are able to identify the ransomware strain. They're able to contain the ransomware strain, but the damage is done. Now what? How do you bring the environment back? How do you know that the data is good? How do you find the system configurations and load them again? In what order do you load them? What they don't realize is that security and recovery, they have to be merged together. And so what I think that we can do, it's not just build customer demand. It's not just sell a solution. We can really help clients. And so my hope is that we are able to bring cyber resilience into every organization, every large enterprise out there that needs to continually service their clients and their employees. They need to stay in business. That we're able to bring the solution to them in such a way that they're able to bring back their environments to serve their clients when the worst does happen. Great, yes, thank you. We're definitely seeing that data protection world and the cybersecurity world, they are adjacencies, but they really are coming together and part of a comprehensive plan. Okay, we have to leave it there. Thanks so much folks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time and your insights. Thanks for having us. And thank you. Thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Keep it right there. 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