‘Dell EMC going a step ahead to protect customers against cyber attacks’

Ripu Bajwa, Country Manager- Data Protection Solutions, India, Dell EMC shares with VARINDIA of how the shift to software defined environment and rise in data thefts has inspired Dell EMC to come up with advanced data protection and back-up solutions -

There is at present a wave of change sweeping across IT infrastructure. With the shift to cloud and Software Defined datacenter, there is a need for data protection to transform too, and to be able to transform effectively, data protection must be automated.

“We have seen an entire era of physical appliances and then virtual world and virtual servers. The storage infrastructure has to grow beyond a particular physical infrastructure and therefore extracting the software is definitely the flexible way to deploy a particular platform. Software defined is being adopted by large service providers and they look at commoditizing the servers with software taking care of everything,” says Ripu Bajwa, Country Manager- Data Protection Solutions, India, Dell EMC while explaining the software defined environment.

Having said that there are some performance oriented limitations, when looked at heavy applications. “We at Dell EMC have our own software and software defined storage. Software Defined Storage gives enterprises a path to effectively address the explosive growth of data as it offers far greater flexibility due to its distributed computing architecture. There is a faster way to restore data, which brings us to the fact that in case of any DR drill or recovery process, your recovery objective will now be shortened to the point that it will give you efficiency as much as that of a granular recovery,” he explained.

Dell EMC today is a leading data protection company in the world in terms of solution, both hardware and software. On the hardware side, it has its flagship product which is a purpose-built back-up appliance. On the software side, Dell EMC has a couple of back-up software which does very efficient, catalogue-based automatic back-up of applications.

“We have a very unique way of backing up of very large files using a technology that does source deduplication. We have multiple use cases of deduplication at source site in enterprises. We have a suite of other product line that covers archival, availability and long-term retention (which means that even tape data can be kept on disk). We are now going one step ahead and helping organizations protect against cyber threats. There are new norms where in case of an attack in an organization, we can help them retrieve very old data. The only way of doing it is by following a systematic air gap by which data can be protected and even recovered. We are very unique in providing the entire spectrum of data protection capabilities,” he says.

In the last 3 years, data has exploded to an umpteen level. For instance if we look at the industry, financial inclusion is coming in, payment gateways are coming in, transactions are happening through UPI apps, and this has eventually created a whole lot of workload increase in the BFSI sector, fintech companies, and so does in the enterprise sector. This has also increased the need for more protection of data and other critical assets as with workloads come threats.

“In the last 1 year the kind of awareness that has been built is amazing because growth is happening on data storage, and the need to protect it efficiently has also been high. Threats have increased and Dell EMC is addressing this through its portfolio of data protection solutions in the most cost effective way,” Ripu says.

He further adds, “Today you cannot advise your customer not to add any more data, but you can certainly tell them to adopt a data security landscape that can allow the business to adapt to the market growth as also at the same time remain protected.”

Dell EMC provides a wavelength of data protection as well as security solutions for SMBs which range from Integrated Data Protection Solutions to Disaster Recovery Solutions -

* Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) is something it has recently launched. IDPA is a purpose-built, pre-integrated and turnkey appliance that converges protection storage, software, search and analytics in a single appliance. It provides data protection across a wide ecosystem of applications and platforms, and offers native cloud-tiering for long-term retention.

* Isolated Recovery Solution provides complete protection against attacks and safeguards the data. This creates isolated/backup copies of the data & stores it in an environment which is totally detached from the primary data storage network.

* Disaster Recovery Solution (DR) is another solution which Dell EMC provides to protect the precious data of any organization in case of a cyber-attack.

To spread awareness among its customers for data protection, the company leverages the Dell EMC marketing engine. “We also run our own events either in Dell EMC Forums, or do specific product briefings for our customers besides conducting workshops for large customers. We also have a very efficient and a large channel eco-system which is run by the coordinated group of channel managers of Dell EMC. We leverage the channel eco-system a lot. We also leverage the account teams of both the enterprise and the commercial. That is how we reach out to our customers for maximum exposure for our products,” sums up Ripu.