Dell Extends Cyber Recovery to Identity Platforms and AI Infrastructure
Dell extends PowerProtect cyber recovery to identity platforms and adds identity threat detection to managed response.
Rob Emsley, Dell's director of cyber resilience product marketing, said backup and recovery alone no longer get a business running again as AI ties data, identity, infrastructure and applications into interdependent systems. Without a trusted identity framework, he said, an organization may have its data but cannot access it. Emsley and Adam Miller, Dell's global lead for security and resilience services marketing, discussed the plans with theCUBE's Dave Vellante during the AI Cybersecurity and Resilience Summit.
Dell is adding identity resilience to PowerProtect for Active Directory, Entra ID and Okta. Emsley said the goal is to ensure that when recovery begins, customers trust the identities they rely on before restoring applications and data. Dell is also adding identity threat detection and response to its managed detection and response service, aiming to spot misuse of legitimate credentials and automate a response. Miller described the 'impossible traveler' scenario, in which a user appears to log in from two distant locations faster than travel would allow. He said Dell needs to detect such activity and act quickly to remove the user from the network or otherwise stop the attack, a need he said grows with agentic identity.
On AI infrastructure, Dell is embedding PowerProtect as an option within Dell AI Factory and extending PowerProtect snapshot orchestration to PowerScale storage, with replication to ObjectScale. The moves build on PowerProtect One and Dell Cyber Detect, which Dell introduced in May to simplify cyber resilience across the data center. Miller said Dell has drawn lessons from about 6,500 AI Factory customers, including that security and resilience need to be core architectural decisions from the beginning rather than added later.
Dell's services teams run tabletop exercises and end-to-end simulations of a ransomware intrusion, its detection and the recovery that follows. Miller said one customer that restructured its recovery approach improved backup-to-recovery efficiency 17 times. Emsley stressed the importance of testing recovery. 'Everything you do, you need to test it,' he said. 'The concept of assured recovery has never been more important than it is today.'