Protect Your Organization’s Data with Multi-Cloud Data Security

Did you know that ransomware attacks are advancing to the point of corrupting the primary copy of a corporation’s data? Now imagine this happening to petabytes of data across multiple hyperscalers. The results are devastating. As companies move to multi-cloud deployments, they must also consider the additional security measures needed to safeguard their most valuable asset: their data. Tune in to the CTOAdvisor, Keith Townsend, as he puts Faction and Dell Technologies in the hot seat about multi-cloud data security.

 
Hey, how’s it going? It’s Keith Townsend, principal of the CTO advisor, and we have two returning guests. Matt from Faction Inc. CTO is your title, right Matt? CTO advisor is talking to a CTO on the CTO dose. That works out really, really well. And then Jodey from Dell EMC, who’s functionally a CTO. Jodey, I don’t know if your title is field CTO or not, what’s your title?”

That used to be field CTO, did that for many years, talking to executives and customers all over planet Earth, about strategies of technology. But now, I made a bit of a transition over into the Dell Technologies corporate side of the house. I’m a global evangelist for primary storage and multi-cloud.

Addressing Multi-Cloud Security Concerns

Well, Jodey, I think Michael will be very pleased. I’m gonna make you earn your money today. We’re going to talk about a board-level conversation because I have two C-level advisors on the CTO dose. We’re talking about something extremely important to the C suite over the past year, year and a half, which is data security. In the previous video, Matt, you shared with me about the petabyte-scale of the Faction Inc. and PowerScale combination. But when I think of petabyte scale, the first thing that comes to my mind is not necessarily multi-cloud access, but security. Can you two talk to me about what it is that Faction Inc. and Dell Technologies are doing together to address the security concerns of the C suite?

And I think you’d start off by understanding that there’s the core product, the Dell Technologies PowerProtect for multi-cloud. And it really gives you this, to your point, a petabyte-scale repository to save data, especially copies of data, and I am seeing amazing results of this. I have one customer that now has written over 100 petabytes of data to this repository. I shared that screenshot with you getting over 102 to one D dupe. That’s not a promise, but it’s a really neat result.

And then on top of that, the PowerProtect for multi-cloud, we have this Cyber Vault, cyber protect offering where, you know, it adds a bunch of capabilities on top of that, where there’s some orchestration software for recovery, there’s a worm capabilities, so you can have right only media with this programmatic air gap. You know, and one of the things that we know about the challenges of ransomware is that, you know, you can be attacked, you can have your primary copy corrupted, but ransomware today has gotten really smart, and wants to go and try to touch and delete and corrupt your other copies to force you to pay the ransom because you can’t recover. And so this air gap really protects you not only protects your data but protects you from ransomware attacking that secondary copy as well.

What is PowerVault storage?

So, Jodey, I know how to buy Faction Inc., and I know how to buy PowerScale and PowerProtect via my relationship with Faction Inc. Talk to me a little bit more about PowerVault, how does this fit in the portfolio of products?

When we look at what’s going on to the Data Protection schema with the primary storage infrastructure, and then our data protection, you know, strategy around PowerProtect that PowerProtect ecosystem allows us whether it’s infrastructure Baselight data domain, or as Matt was just mentioning, the software aspects that allow you to create the wrappers around that, that create a seamless point of recovery, protection, and even things like deep mining analysis of that. So when you get into, you know, making that acquisition, we actually have a very strategic partnership with Faction, in which all of this can be consumed as a service through them. So you don’t have to make these capital expenditures.

This can be in an operational model, in which you can consume the technology, get that air gapping capability. So making sure that you know, something is protected before it’s corrupted, and also the software wrapper around it to do deep mining analytics on that backup infrastructure and data set to make sure that the data itself hasn’t been manipulated or corrupted. So I think that’s that all-inclusive package of protecting your storage investment and infrastructure, wherever it’s going, even if it’s in a multi-cloud environment, and also being able to do that deep mining analysis to ensure that your air-gapped and protect and even click button recoverability from that.

How to Get Started with PowerProtect and Cyber Recovery Vault

So Matt, talk to me about the existing customer’s journey. If I wanted to implement whether it’s PowerProtect or Cyber Recovery Vault in my existing deployment today, how can I do that?

Sure. I mean, if you were using one of the other services today, and you wanted to say, you know, add another tier for data protection, we can do that seamlessly. We could do it attached to the same fabric, we could do sub fabrics and separate those. Whether your data is in the cloud, and you want to protect it, whether it was in the multi-cloud service that Dell and Faction offered together, and you wanted to protect it.

But I will say, you know, most of the people that are adopting this are actually in their data centers, or in branch offices, right, they’re actually taking data, using software to basically escrow those backup copies into the service, using cloud more for the recovery and the protection, where the primary copy still lives in, say, an enterprise data center. And that works seamlessly. We can, you know, get the replication over the internet, over a private carrier circuit, through data center cross-connect, if they’re in a place like Equinix, or a core site, they can connect directly to the platform. So they’re all options. And then of course, you know, the software and the hardware make it really easy to get that backup copy in place.

Multi-Cloud Managed Services

So again, the thing that I want to focus on because this is, you know, the CTO advisors running a series. This stuff is hard. Multi-cloud is hard. Data protection and multi-cloud is hard. I need my employees and my engineers working on stuff that involves the application side of innovation. And data protection, even though it’s important, I need to be able to outsource the actual management of these systems to other entities that we trust, and this is a managed service or can be consumed by managed service.

Yeah, many parts of this are a managed service. And then there’s a little bit of things that, you know, customers get to do themselves as well. So they have more control of the environment. But I’m glad you touched on, you know, this concept of the service and the outsourcing because there’s something a lot of people don’t necessarily think of, as they go to take that, you know, secondary copy, secure it for cyber reasons, you know, protect themselves against ransomware, which is that aspect of compliance.

Because a lot of people may undergo some series of audits today, but they may not be prepared to undergo an audit in a second data center or an audit for that second copy. Right? So the fact that we have, you know, type two, sock one, type two sock two, HIPAA, and we can sign BAAs is, you know, those types of super hard to pass and hard to maintain audits means that whole thing for an entire new stack in order to do that cyber protection isn’t something you have to do the heavy lifting yourself. Because I mean, as hard as the operational aspect is, I think I would say the compliance aspect is literally even harder.

Cybersecurity Solutions for Your Business

I agree. Having to have done PCI audits and PCI remediations it is not necessarily the technology, but getting the processes and the certifications and the clients and working with QSR auditors that become the problem. If you have a cybersecurity problem, you can always reach out to the folks at Faction Inc. and Dell Technologies. If you have specific questions that we didn’t address, you can reach out to me on Twitter at CTO advisor on Twitter. DMs are open.