Strengthening Data Protection in a Multicloud World

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses face numerous challenges in securing their data across multicloud environments. According to the Dell Technologies Innovation Index Report 2023, only 34% of Indian businesses are currently employing a holistic end-to-end security strategy integrating both hardware- and software-based protections. And with 49% of the same organizations being concerned with the ballooning costs of storing and managing backup copies because of rapid data growth, it’s understandable why there is a consistent interest in not only increasing data security, but also doing so economically.

“Accelerated data growth, adoption of multicloud, an increase in cyberattacks, and shifts in the data privacy legislative landscape are leading organizations to re-think their data management and protection strategy. They are looking to address their need for scale, data efficiency, data resilience, and operational simplicity. Businesses are also keen to ensure their customers’ trust in both their brand and digital services,” said Lucas Salter, General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies, Asia Pacific, Japan & Greater China. “Dell understands the importance of these concerns and is committed to delivering innovations within our data protection portfolio. These enhancements will enable organizations to proactively address the challenges associated with multicloud data sprawl, operational complexity, and cyber resiliency – all while providing opportunities for cost optimization.”

Ripu Bajwa, General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies India, said “In a dynamic multicloud landscape, safeguarding sensitive information continues to be a paramount concern. To do so, businesses need to invest in stringent end-to-end infrastructure, to detect and respond to potential threats swiftly. Dell Technologies’ Data Protection Solutions help businesses achieve a future where the benefits of multicloud technology thrive in harmony with ironclad security solutions.

Here are more details on the latest software enhancements in PowerProtect Data Manager and PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, and PowerProtect DD Operating System.

PowerProtect Data Manager

The latest release of PowerProtect Data Manager introduces a range of powerful capabilities designed to enhance storage integrations, recovery control, and virtualization features.

With the recently announced native integration between PowerStore and PowerProtect appliances, customers can directly protect PowerStore data to PowerProtect DD Series appliances either on-premises or in the cloud. This integration is now further enhanced by PowerProtect Data Manager, which provides volume and volume group snapshot backups directly to PowerProtect appliances from PowerStore arrays using the Data Manager UI. By using Data Manager, application owners gain the advantage of centralized management and orchestration for backups and recoveries of multiple PowerStore clusters. Storage snapshots on PowerStore are encrypted, and those snapshots remain encrypted as they are copied and stored on PowerProtect appliances. That data then remains immutable based on retention lock capabilities.

With the goal of instilling additional confidence and control over data recovery processes, PowerProtect Data Manager adds Recovery Orchestration for VMware VMs. Organizations can now create secure, flexible, and reusable restore plans tailored to their specific needs. This feature allows recovery of data with precision, ensuring business continuity and reducing recovery time objectives.

To ensure availability of all VMs, at scale, without business disruption, we previously introduced the unique Transparent Snapshots capability in PowerProtect Data Manager, which simplifies VM image backups for near-zero impact to VMs or VM resources while removing the need for backup proxies, thus freeing up resources in a VMware environment. We continue to enhance and expand Transparent Snapshots capabilities, most recently by addressing the specific needs of SQL environments by introducing application-aware protection. This innovative feature enables organizations to safeguard their SQL databases efficiently by ensuring data integrity and minimizing data loss risks so businesses can maintain critical operations without interruption.

PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance

Enhancements to the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance focus on security, supportability, and workload capabilities.

A much-anticipated feature for the Data Manager Appliance is the availability of cyber recovery support. Customers can now vault-critical business data from the Data Manager Appliance to a PowerProtect DD-based cyber vault on-premises or in cloud, facilitating orchestrated recovery checks and the restoration of backup and appliance configuration data. This additional layer of protection ensures data availability and integrity, safeguarding against cyber threats.

We’ve also added retention lock compliance on the Data Manager Appliance to help organizations meet compliance requirements. Customers can configure storage units and protection policies to enable compliance-mode retention locking, ensuring data immutability and aligning with regulatory standards. We’ve extended security of the Data Manager Appliance, as well, by introducing Microsoft multifactor authentication, which adds an extra layer of challenge beyond usernames and passwords to mitigate the risk of stolen credentials.

Customers can now replicate data to and from the cloud using PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition on-premises or APEX Protection Storage for Public Cloud for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud. This ensures data availability and protection across diverse multicloud environments.

PowerProtect Cyber Recovery

Reflecting back on organizations’ concerns about meeting backup and recovery-level objectives while keeping costs in check, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery enhancements focus on improved customer experience, total cost of ownership and performance to protect critical data against cyberattacks.

Cyber Recovery now offers enhanced visibility of PowerProtect DD storage capacity and provides greater granularity of vault operations, enhancing monitoring, alerting, and reporting capabilities.

We’ve also introduced a new Configure Dashboard to simplify license management for CyberSense, which streamlines the setup and configuration of licenses for ease of access and status monitoring. In the post-attack workflow, malware file detection in backup copies enables the detection and removal of latent malware files from backups before restoring data to production environments.

Additionally, customers now have the ability to read and analyze Hyper-V VM snapshots created by NetWorker and Commvault SAP HANA backup images to detect corruption.

PowerProtect DD Operating System

We continue our quarterly release cadence of the PowerProtect DD Operating System for PowerProtect appliances. PowerProtect DDOS updates include enhanced Smart Scale workload management, which now enables automatic identification and inclusion of affinity groups when performing migrations between appliances.

PowerProtect DDOS updates also expand the supported virtual ecosystem with support for KVM VirtIO disks with PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition and enhanced cloud security of APEX Protection Storage for Public Cloud with support for retention lock compliance on AWS.