Dell, AWS Collaborate On Cybersecurity Technology

‘The channel is key to bringing our cyber recovery technology to customers. This gives our partners additional options to implement cyber recovery vaults,’ says Rob Emsley, Dell’s director of product marketing for data protection and cyber resiliency.

Dell Technologies Wednesday unveiled Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS, a new offering that makes Dell’s cyber recovery vault available to customers through the AWS Marketplace.

Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS is targeted at giving customers multiple layers of data protection, and in particular is aimed at helping provide safe and quick recovery after a cyberattack, said Rob Emsley, Dell’s director of product marketing for data protection and cyber resiliency.

Dell is building on the series of backup appliances it rebranded under the PowerProtect brand a couple of years ago, Emsley told CRN.

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The company has been delivering its cyber recovery vault for a few years, he said. Cyber recovery vault is Dell’s technology for isolating data from attack via an “air gap,” or a way to lock down management interfaces and requiring separate security credentials and multifactor authentication to access the data, Emsley said. It has been available for on-premises data protection for five or six years, and earlier this year was offered in partnership with Faction, a Denver-based provider of colocation services as a way to provide data protection as a service, he said.

“We’re now extending cyber recovery vault deployment from on-prem to colo to the public cloud with AWS,” he said. ”And because the cyber recovery vault is based on our backup appliance, it is available in both physical and virtual versions.”

Dell earlier this year made cyber recovery vault deployable as a VMware virtual machine for on-premises deployment and is now making it deployable in AWS environments, giving customers the ability to access it via a virtual appliance or as software in AWS, Emsley said.

“We’re not just deploying immutable backup copies of data,” he said. “PowerProtect Cyber Recovery also handles all the security, which is independent from the backup administrator security. Cyber criminals always go after production workloads, but now they realize they can also go after the backup data. We’ve put a lot of work in to isolate the data including air gap technology.”

Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS is a good offering that has already proven itself, said Hassan Kassih, senior director for the national data center and cloud practice at ConvergeOne, a Bloomington, Minn.-based solution provider and longtime Dell EMC and AWS channel partner.

ConvergeOne may be the first company in the U.S. to deploy the technology in a school district, Kassih told CRN.

“After we deployed it, the school’s systems went down after a cyberattack,” he said. “But they were able to recover in only a couple days. The school was back in business, and the students were back to studying. This is the first time we could see an overseas attacker get full access to the system but not be able to access the data vault. So we won.”

ConvergeOne has a dedicated Dell practice focused on cybersecurity, particularly around backup as a service and disaster recovery as a service, Kassih said.

“Using Dell to offer cyber protection as a service will help customers looking to expand with AWS to lower their risk,” he said.

Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS is an important offering for Dell’s channel partners, Emsley said.

“A large percentage of our data protection business goes through the channel,” he said. “Many channel partners extend their work with us to provide consulting and deployment of cyber recovery solutions. The channel is key to bringing our cyber recovery technology to customers. This gives our partners additional options to implement cyber recovery vaults.”

AWS has a partner program specifically for its AWS Marketplace offerings so that customers looking to get a private offer through the AWS Marketplace can do so via Dell or its channel partners.

“It’s important that customers have options,” he said. “But we think most customers will work with Dell partners.”

Because Dell already offers virtual data protection appliances for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform as well as for AWS, Emsley said it is reasonable to expect Dell to make its Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery technology available through Azure and GCP in the future.