Dell Puts Supply-Chain Security and Agent Identity at Center of Agentic AI Defense

Kamlesh Shah, director of product management for Dell AI Factory Solutions, and Ash Lakshmanan, director of product management for Dell Services, spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante during an exclusive broadcast for the AI Cybersecurity and Resilience Summit on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio.

Shah said AI systems are growing at a speed and scale that require enterprises to be ready to act at that speed and scale, and that such readiness does not happen overnight.

According to Shah, Dell’s approach begins with supply-chain security: vetting suppliers before a product is even envisioned and extending protection across the full life cycle of a deployment. Dell offers those capabilities through Dell AI Factory and also runs them in its own internal IT operations. He said Dell’s experience as both an AI infrastructure provider and a large-scale AI user has created a model customers can replicate, with the goal of turning deployment lessons into repeatable patterns rather than having customers reinvent controls.

Shah said agents change the threat model because they do more than answer questions. Given a goal, an agent can take multiple steps, find and use tools, call systems of record and communicate with other agents, making its behavior less predictable.

That puts policy enforcement checks, runtime sandboxing and telemetry recording who authorized what at the center of security. Shah said the agent itself should have an ability and identity tied to a particular workload, not broad permission to work on all applications. The layer at which an agent operates should use delegated, narrowly scoped, time-based permissions, he said.

Lakshmanan said Dell Services helps customers choose an architecture and turn a promising use case into an environment they can operate, govern and iterate on. The work covers security across a four-layer stack spanning hardware, runtime, data and applications. He said customers most often underestimate observability across all four layers.

“Your old tools just cannot look at AI workloads. Your old tools that could look at human identities and possibly machine identities cannot look at agent identities,” Lakshmanan said.

Lakshmanan noted that some customers that ran Dell’s penetration-testing services against chatbots they planned to release learned the bots were not ready and could have been exploited by a hacker. Dell is also working with Nvidia Corp. to bring agentic AI from the deskside to the data center, he said.

“We need new tools, platforms and skills to tackle this,” Lakshmanan said. “But the foundational elements of security have not gone away, which is the layered security approach we talked about. You still need to narrow your attack surface. You still need 24/7 continuous observability, and you need to be prepared as if a breach could happen.”

Dell sponsored the segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors had editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE, according to the disclosure.

Editor's Summary Dell executives say agentic AI introduces new identity, observability and supply-chain risks that legacy security tools do not address. Dell is promoting layered defenses, workload-specific time-based permissions and penetration testing through its AI Factory and services offerings. The company is also working with Nvidia on agentic AI deployments from endpoints to data centers.