Optimizing Cyber Resilience with All-Flash Protection Infrastructure

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Krista Case, a research director on the team here at the Future and Group. I have the pleasure of being joined today by Rob Emsley Dallas, director of Product Marketing for data protection, as well as Rich Colbert of the Dallas Field CTO.

Robin Rich, thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah, it's great to be here, Krista. Good to see you again.

Thank you. So we've been hearing a lot about this concept of cyber resilience, and I wanted to sit down today to have a conversation about how this is translating into best practices for data infrastructure and data protection. Robin Rich, I was especially interested in sitting down to talk with you both today because I know that Dell recently introduced a new all-flash power protected data domain appliance.

But before we get there, I wanted to take a minute to outline why this is all so timely. So here at futurum, we recently fielded some survey work regarding cybersecurity decision maker requirements and really what they're experiencing on a day-to-day basis. What we found was that approximately 80% of organizations have experienced what they would deem to be a significant cyber breach over the last 12 months.

We also found as we dug a little bit further, that data breaches and data exfiltration as well as ransomware were two of the top three incident types that these respondents most often had experienced. Beyond that, we found that data loss was the most common consequence of these cyber incidents. So this is all translating into an emphasis on resilience for our data and for our data infrastructure.

For me personally, I define cyber resilience based on some of the feedback that I'm hearing from customers as the ability to mitigate data loss and downtime, especially when we think about critical business services and critical data. So, Robin, rich, I'd like to throw this back over to you and get your thoughts and feedback based on what you're hearing from customers. How do you think about or define cyber resilience these days?

Yeah, let me start and then Rich will, uh, uh, probably add some of his field perspective. You know, certainly for, for several years. You know, we, you know, we've seen the same data as you've had.

Um, you know, certainly, you know, cybersecurity has been around for a long time. I think we all recognize that, that customers have been very focused at preventing bad actors from entering their networks, uh, traversing their networks and, and, you know, generally causing havoc. Um, I think one of the things that, that we've seen over the last few years is they're starting to realize that there's no such thing as absolute security.

Um, and the reality is, is that no matter how good your defenses are, um, bad things can happen to good people, you know, and I think that's where, um, the, uh, the importance of, of having good, good resilience strategy. And as you say, you know, resilience is all about being able to protect yourself, um, and bring the business back, um, when you need it. In fact, when we think about, um, helping customers become more cyber resilient, we really think about it in three distinct areas.

Uh, the first is around, uh, securing your environment, which is really around reducing the attack surface, which really sort of plays to that, that prevention, um, discipline, uh, as it retain re pertains to cybersecurity, uh, it involves really hardening your environment. Um, really as well as hardening your environment is it's working with vendors that, that keep the whole path from, um, where, um, infrastructure is manufactured, uh, to where it's deployed as secure as possible. So the concept of a secure supply chain.

So that's really the, the first pillar. The second is to be very vigilant, uh, and to detect and respond to any threats that, uh, that may occur within your environment. A lot of that is around monitoring.

Uh, it's around, uh, uh, identifying when, uh, things change in the environment, uh, and being able to, uh, to really, uh, look at all of the information that you may collect and really boil it down to things that you really need to care about. So detection and, and response becomes, uh, a very critical, uh, pillar within becoming more cyber resilient. And then last but not least, is really where certainly backup infrastructure has historically been a, uh, a lifesaver, which is the ability to recover from cyber attacks, um, and to ensure that what you are recovering is good known data.

So that really, you know, is the, the three pillars that we think about when we think about cyber resilience, secure detect, and recover. Now, to add onto that, i, I, I think, um, we have a director of cyber resiliency, a gentleman by the name of Jim Shook. And, and he, um, you know, when you get into the definition of cyber resilience, one of the things that he's known to say is it the literal definition is the ability to withstand and recover from a bad incident, right?

The ability to be prepared. And, and, and what he's really driving at is the mindset has shifted over the last few years, um, away from just playing defense, right? The, the idea, uh, you know, to quote Gardner, you know, embrace the breach is that, like you said, Rob, good, good things, uh, bad things happen to good people.

And so people are, are accepting the fact that it's not a matter of, of if, but when and if they're likely to experience something bad along the way. So the posture, like you said, you know, reducing the threat funnel, uh, for an organization, be proactive. Um, the defense comes up first, but then the ability to respond to withstand and then recover your business, uh, rapidly from a, uh, malicious cyber attack.

So this issue of responsiveness leads us back to the commentary regarding all Flash. I think this is a very important piece of the conversation because when we think about data protection, historically, we haven't always thought about all Flash, because certainly there is a price tag to be associated upfront, and we can certainly have some conversations regarding the overall TCO of the solution. But I would say this need for cyber resiliency has caused a rethink of the data protection requirements, and it has created a use case for the performance of all flash systems for data protection.

And this is because it allows us to do things like take backups more frequently and take them faster and be able to recover much more quickly than perhaps we would've been able to using hard disc based systems. So, Robin, rich, both, I'd love to get your take on this and from, from the Dell perspective, actually, the value that you see in using all Flash for data protection for cyber recovery and cyber resiliency, and why Dell chose to make this investment in this new appliance. Yeah, for sure.

Um, so certainly Rich and I have been lucky enough to have worked with, with Dell's, um, backup appliances for, um, almost too many, too many years to to mention. Um, but, um, as you say, stated, uh, historically those backup appliances have been, um, built using hard disk drives to store the backups, store them very efficiently. Um, but really over probably the last several years, you know, we've, uh, um, enhanced those backup appliances with, um, all flash, uh, for things like caching, uh, to, uh, improve, um, performance, uh, but still storing the actual backups on hard dish drives.

Um, so, um, this year, uh, as you mentioned, you know, we decided to introduce some additional options, uh, into the Power protect data in domain, uh, family of, of appliances, uh, where, um, everything in the appliance is all implemented with, uh, with all clash storage, with, uh, with SSD storage and certainly, um, you know, that provides some real benefits from both the performance and the efficiency perspective. On the performance side, you know, one of the things that we see, um, is, uh, backup performance, um, has never really been an issue, an issue for the data domain, you know, based upon the architecture that we have as far as how we ingest data, um, into, uh, the appliance itself using, uh, using memory to, uh, uh, uh, increase the, the ingest speed. Um, but restore performance with the new, uh, or flash appliance, uh, is up to four times, uh, what we've been able to achieve with the equivalent, um, capacity, uh, within a hard disc drive option, right?

So that becomes critically important, as you say, when you need to recover a lot of data, um, uh, as fast as you possibly can, and certainly as a result of a cyber attack. That's one of the reasons to do that. So, uh, restore performance at fourex replication performance, uh, both for a disaster recovery perspective, but also if you are making use of a cyber recovery vault, the ability to replicate data between all Flash, uh, appliances is two times, uh, is fast.

And then when you get into the vault, another performance attribute that is, that benefits from all Flash is the ability to analyze your cyber recovery vault data to ensure that what you have in the vault is good and recoverable. So that, uh, has a two point x faster restore performance, a sorry, faster, um, uh, uh, analysis performance. And then on the efficiency side, um, using, um, SSDs, uh, gives us the ability to deliver more capacity in, uh, less rack space, uh, and more importantly, uh, allows us to dramatically up to 80% reduce the power and cooling that's involved in, uh, using, uh, an North Flash appliance.

So certainly in many parts of the world where energy costs are skyrocketing, the ability to move away from implementing hard d drives in the data center, uh, and only implementing, uh, SSDs and all Flash, um, has become, uh, a requirement of many, uh, uh, customers in certain parts of the world. So certainly, um, Dayton domain, uh, the all flash appliance that we, uh, recently announced is definitely, uh, a major step forward for us. Yeah, it, it's always been a question of when, not if, um, you know, I'm looking back through history.

EMC, you know, prior to being acquired by Dell, had the year of all flash, uh, in the data center, which is about 10 years ago. Uh, about five years prior to that data domain engineering started working on kind of prototypes of what it would look like with all-Flash. The, the challenge was it was prohibitively expensive at the time, and most folks didn't find the value of applying that to operational recoveries.

Um, that, that gap has become much, uh, smaller in terms of the difference of the cost between hard disc and all-flash. It's not, it's not zero, but it is significantly smaller. Um, and what we're finding is the, uh, imperative for customers to have that faster recovery, uh, speed, um, if, if for nothing else than peace of mind organizations look and say, well, what if I have to recover my entire estate in a very short amount of time, um, that restore speed and that, and that, uh, that capability is important to them.

And so what we have noticed is that some general purpose, uh, flash arrays have started to encroach and make their way into, uh, the data protection space. And we think that the speed and the performance is, is absolutely, uh, a good thing, but we also think there's a lot of additional value about durability and security, uh, that come along with a purpose-built protection, uh, device like the power Protect data domain system. Uh, and Rob hit exactly on the head, you know, the backups themselves we're pretty much on par with a flash array, even with the hard drive versions of data domain, but it's the, it's the faster stores, the faster replication offsite as well as into a vault.

And then of course, the integrity scanning, which can be much faster, uh, with a, um, uh, all flash data domain system. Yeah, we, we like to talk about, um, the Power protect data domain platform. Um, and, and you know, we, you know, this is really the essence of, of what makes the data domain platform, um, so appealing to customers are, uh, the data services that the platform delivers and those data services, whether or not you are using our dish drive options or the All flash appliance are exactly the same.

Um, rich mentioned a couple security, um, and efficiency. Um, the other two are durability and flexibility. This is really, you know, the, uh, all of the capabilities that are delivered by, uh, the data domain, you know, operating environment, uh, that that really goes above and beyond what general purpose or flash storage, uh, can deliver.

You know, and I think that, um, I think one of the reasons why, uh, we've endured, uh, so much success, uh, in this particular space, uh, is really driven by those, uh, data domain platform data services, uh, that really, when you try and compare that to general purpose storage, you really don't see the same types of, of capabilities. Absolutely. I know we were talking off camera before we all started this recording about how not all flash is created equal by any means, and certainly wanna double click on that before we do.

You both made a couple of comments that I wanted to underscore, rich. I was glad you brought up the year of all Flash. Um, I remember it well with EMC and it's a good reflection because I think over the last few years as you were referencing, what has it been maybe 10 years or so, we've been tiering and strategically finding ways to introduce all flash performance and capabilities into the environment.

And Rob, you were talking about building from using all-Flash from a caching perspective, for example, into this full appliance here that, that Dell has introduced. So certainly it's very important to have that steady integration with the eye to some of the things that we've been talking about, including cost efficiencies and cost savings over the lifespan of the technology. And naturally, of course, um, the returns that we're seeing in terms of the recovery speed, of course, being critical here.

And Rob, I was glad that you brought up the forensics capabilities and the cyber recovery vaults and the ability within the architecture to do the data scanning and conduct checks to make sure that you do have those clean and recoverable data copies. Because when we work with customers and practitioners, that is what we hear is that they think they have taken this backup copy and they think it is recoverable, but then they're impacted by a cyber incident and they find that they're unable to recover using that backup copy. So they're then left in a situation where they either end up losing more data or it takes them longer to recover.

So certainly all very important points. I did wanna circle back to this concept that we need to look beyond the raw horse power and really factor in some of these capabilities that we've been talking about, including the quality checks of the data and the ability to create immutable and air gapped data copies. These have all become table stakes for cyber resiliency and cyber recovery, and I think all of those points have been, you know, very well made.

So anything else either one of you might add in terms of how you've maybe seen the architecture within the Dell portfolio evolve to support some of these additional capabilities, or maybe even the customer perspective in terms of how you've seen customer requirements evolve to have that perspective towards broader cyber resilience? Yeah, why don't you start, rich? Yeah, I would, I would jump in and say that, um, speed, speed alone is not gonna help if your data isn't secured and validated.

And I think you made that point very well. Uh, I've, you know, experienced customers who have been working on recovering data and they don't get the right data back until the third or the fourth try of the recovery. So at that point, the, the concept of speed has gone out the window.

It's really the accuracy and, and, and the valid validity of the data that needs to be there. Um, we also talk a little bit about the encroachment of general purpose storage into a backup space where you've got perhaps backup software and then storage just simply looks at it as, Hey, I just, I've got a file or an object, but it's not really deduplication aware of what's going on inside the file. So you've got this really weird, um, contrast between, I, I want, uh, immutability and I want deduplication, but the box doesn't understand everything going on.

So I'm, I'm, now I'm doing some unnatural things to make my, my data flow in a certain way. Um, you've also got this, this concept of, of tiering where if your, you know, efficiency isn't up to par, you might be storing a very short amount of data on a flash tier and then sending the rest up to the cloud to object storage from a cost perspective. So tiering is okay, but you want to be able to, you know, manage it in such a way that it, it has all the data that you need, uh, rapidly available for recovery, and that you're not pushing things out the out the door, uh, too quickly from our response perspective.

So we've seen a lot of change and, and a lot of dynamics in the marketplace, and it's, it's become more confusing, I think for customers as they've been pursuing these kind of one-off all flash arrangements that, that aren't really as, as pure or native or, or, or kind of cleanly executed as the data demand appliances. Um, you know, the validation of cyber sense is absolutely critical if you want to recover quickly because you know that you're recovering the right copy from day one. Uh, the data and vulnerability architecture on data Maine is absolutely critical because you trust and you know that copy is good and has been kept immutable and is in the exact same condition as when you created that backup.

Um, so all of this kind of interrelates, but what we're seeing in the field is, is as customers have this drive and desire to get a faster recovery experience, they're experimenting with some things and some of those things are instructing us that we need to get out to market with a flash appliance. And some things are actually, uh, taking them a step backwards and we're trying to help, you know, kind of mitigate those, those mistakes that are being made in in those architectures. Yeah, I think, you know, we like to think of our data domain appliances as really the foundation to cyber resilience.

You know, one of the things that for the longest time, you know, that foundation has not only been, um, uh, used by, uh, our own, um, software solutions, but also, uh, we have an open ecosystem of, uh, partners that have integrated with with data domain, you know, and certainly, um, you know, we have many customers that, that take advantage of that integration. But certainly, um, you know, one of the things I think you are aware of is that the Power protect portfolio is really, uh, what we have to help customers achieve cyber resilience. Certainly, you know, data domain has that foundation, uh, but then Data Manager, uh, is our application that allows customers to, to manage the data that they have within their environment, uh, whether it be on premises at the edge or in the cloud, and certainly, you know, that, uh, uh, pairs with, with data domain to provide a, a full, um, solution to help customers achieve that cyber resilience.

You know, when it comes to, uh, customers, uh, that desire a cloud-based capability, you know, then that's where something like Power Protect backup services comes into play. So the Power Protect portfolio for us is really our end-to-end solution, uh, that allows customers to sort of work with Dow, uh, to, uh, uh, to, uh, implement, uh, and achieve cyber resilience. And that's an important point.

I look across cybersecurity marketplace as a whole, and certainly as you're referencing, the ability to have a more integrated approach and the flexibility to have different consumption models and different offerings with more specific features, depending on the resilience requirements of the particular workload being protected, for example, certainly becomes important. Well, Rob, rich, thank you so much. We certainly did cover a lot of ground today and it's a very important conversation.

Um, and Dell is doing some very important work in this space, so I know I look forward to, you know, keeping updated, um, on how this story is evolving, you know, within Dell, but also within the industry as a whole, and continuing to work with you both moving forward.