When it comes to solving customer challenges, Dell Technologies Inc. has always stated that it views its large partner ecosystem as being a key strategic advantage. Among those partners is World Wide Technology Inc., which was named Dell Technologies 2023 North America Partner of the Year.

World Wide Technology helps its OEMs and customers facilitate, add value and bring expertise to deploy the best data protection solutions, according to Michael Ambruso (pictured), technical solutions architect of data protection and cyber resilience.

“The important thing is setting good expectations, right? The first thing we need to do is look at what applications need to be protected — get a firm understanding of what needs to be protected, where are the customer’s crown jewels,” he said.

Ambruso shared more details of what that strategy looks like with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at the Dell Data Protection: Episode 2 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed establishing outcomes and some of the insightful lessons the company has learned. (* Disclosure below.)

Starting out with a discussion

When it comes to setting expectations, World Wide Technology seeks to help customers understand what their recovery point and time objectives need to look like. That way, they can be assured that they’re going to be able to recover the data appropriately. From there, the company develops a plan to execute on that and understand what those timelines need to look like. That way, when the company does get into deployment, nobody’s surprised, according to Ambruso.

“Definitely start out with a discussion, because you always want to have a conversation. But then, we can perform an assessment,” he said. “We do app rationalization studies [and] help understand the dependencies.”

If protecting a large application, it’s important to make sure that all the little pieces are protected together, according to Ambruso. It’s also important that the right stakeholders are engaged in those early discussions.

Of course, post-pandemic, there has been a lot of talk about zero trust. While it may have been a bit of a buzzword before the pandemic, everyone’s on that path today with many still working remotely, which is something that lends itself to many lessons, Ambruso added.

“The biggest thing, again, is that especially in large organizations, this needs to be a top-down scenario,” he said. “If you try to work it from the bottom up, it becomes very difficult, because the first thing you do is walk in and tell everybody that what they’re doing is not sufficient. When it’s a top-down perspective, you have to make sure that you engage both the security and the information teams.”

The big overall lesson learned is to not try and “boil the ocean” from day one, according to Ambruso. That’s because such an approach will result in a project that nobody is able to swallow.

In a post-pandemic world, what World Wide Technology is encountering is that there’s a much greater awareness in organizations of the need to manage data and protect it. What’s being seen is that there’s more awareness of security out to the edge and the fact that data isn’t going to always be sitting in the middle of a big data center in some centralized location, according to Ambruso.

“We’re really seeing post-COVID, a lot of customers have moved a lot of solutions to cloud-based — incorporating the cloud solution and understanding how to protect the data that’s in the cloud, as well as the data that’s sitting inside the four walls,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Data Protection: Episode 2 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Episode 2 of the “Navigating the Road to Cyber Resiliency” event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE