Today’s organizations have been confronted with so many cybersecurity options that a vocabulary of terms now exist to describe it.

Phrases such as “alert fatigue,” “tool sprawl” and “cybersecurity overload” are commonly used to describe the multitude of products and solutions in the security market today. This has led major cybersecurity providers to address “analysis paralysis,” where customers become unsure what the right steps are to protect critical systems and data in the enterprise.

“Cybersecurity as a broad topic is quite wide,” said Michael Wilke, senior consultant for product marketing at Dell Technologies Inc., in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE for this story. “There is so much noise out there that customers get a little paralyzed. Our focus is on helping organizations take the proper next steps for advancing cyber readiness, whether that’s a more robust defense to prevent an attack or greater resiliency to recover from an attack.”

This article is part of SiliconANGLE’s ongoing exploration of cybersecurity trends in 2023. This piece highlights key developments from Dell Technologies, a media partner and sponsor of the Data Protection series on theCUBE.net.

New security services

Last November, Dell delivered a jolt of energy to the data protection market with the launch of several new services for its security portfolio. The announcements included the release of a new appliance for its PowerProtect line, security enhancements for Dell APEX storage services and the use of Google Cloud for cyber recovery.

Dell’s focus has been on helping organizations simplify data protection and improve cyber resilience while enabling IT self-service capabilities. Shortly before making its data protection announcements last year, Dell released the results of a study showing that 65% of respondents in IT organizations viewed increased operational management time and complexity as one of the top five cybersecurity challenges.

“The big challenge customers have seen is inadequate cyber resiliency,” said Jeff Boudreau, chief AI officer and past president and general manager of the Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell, in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “They are feeling very exposed. And with cyberattacks being more sophisticated, if something goes wrong it’s a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. Customers want to simplify IT, extract more value from their data and ensure their data is protected and recoverable.”

Dell followed up its November announcements with updates in July. The news included new software releases for PowerProtect Data Manager, Appliance, Cyber Recovery and the DD Operating System. Enhanced storage integrations, cyber recovery control and greater visibility into vault operations were part of the latest releases. Dell’s updates highlighted continued customer interest in recovery solutions that would protect data in the event of a successful attack.

“Where are you spending your money, on prevention or resilience?” Wilke asked. “The likelihood of an attack is still quite high.”

Key messages for awareness

The higher likelihood of an attack is leading Dell and other security providers to take a number of steps in raising awareness throughout the IT community. For Dell, this includes an extensive set of activities during Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October.

The company has a series of whitepapers, infographics, podcasts and blog posts built around three key messages to raise cybersecurity awareness in October. These involve educational themes that reinforce how to keep threat actors out of the IT environment, how to detect and respond when breached and how to recover from cyberattacks.

“We are embarking on a message evolution,” said Steve Kenniston, senior cybersecurity consultant at Dell, in an interview with SiliconANGLE for this story. “Customers need to think of these three areas to advance cybersecurity maturity for all of the products they put in place, not just one. The focus is to think about the solutions you are putting in your environment and making sure you have the right set of controls to protect and recover as needed.”

One of the ways that Kenniston, who is known to followers of his blog as The Storage Alchemist, and others on the Dell cybersecurity team will deploy key messaging is through “Security Spotlight,” a bi-weekly podcast series. Kenniston is co-hosting the series with Maxwell Robidoux, senior advisor of security portfolio marketing at Dell, and the pair recently aired a discussion on how to advance cybersecurity maturity. The podcast focuses on a variety of key security topics, including the importance for an organization to categorize the data it stores within its networks.

“When setting up your recovery strategy, you want to understand what is the most critical data to get the business back to operational as quickly as possible,” Kenniston said during a recent podcast. “Another key component is designing your environment not necessarily for protection or backup but designing it for recovery.”

Dell is also planning a series of LinkedIn broadcasts on a variety of topics during Cybersecurity Awareness Month, including “After An Attack: Improving Cyber Resilience,” featuring an interview with Keith Bradley, vice president of information technology at Nature Fresh Farms.

“My goal as a security lead for Dell is not to name us as among the list of the top 10 security companies in the world,” Kenniston told SiliconANGLE. “My goal is to make sure that the mindset of the people looking at Dell think of security as second nature to them. What they buy is safe and secure, and we take that argument off the table. If customers aren’t secure, you won’t make their short list of solutions to buy.”

Fighting off attacks

Dell’s work in the cybersecurity arena has allowed it to build a customer base with a vested interest in data protection and recovery. State and local government agencies in the U.S. have been especially vulnerable in recent years to ransomware attacks, and Dell has a number of public sector clients that leverage its cybersecurity solutions.

One of these is the State of Oklahoma, which moved 2.6 petabytes of data and tens of thousands of databases to a remote data center to modernize its disaster recovery profile. Oklahoma has fought off more than 3.8 trillion cyberattacks on an annual basis, according to Steve Harpe, chief operating officer for the state, which has built its reliance on Dell’s PowerProtect Data Manager an important element in its ability to keep state operations running.

Oklahoma adopted Dell’s solutions because the process for manually recovering 2.6 petabytes of data was highly intimidating.

“I had an exercise: I sat with 28 engineers, passed out a piece of paper to each of them. They had to write it down on their own and tell me how long it would take us to get our systems up if we lost four of our primary data centers,” said Harpe, in an interview for a Dell blog. “And it was everything from days, weeks, to years, to ‘never’ – I actually got ‘never’ from a couple of them. That’s a scary proposition.”

Tales such as this highlight the importance of preparing for the inevitable attack and likely breach. Dell’s Enterprise Strategy Group analysts work with organizations to assess cyber preparedness, measuring exposures and vulnerabilities to address gaps and reduce cyber risks.

These assessments are summarized in a report, which rate the most vulnerable areas and provide recommendations for improving protection and resilience. It is a thorough process, but a necessary one in a time when the threat landscape has never been greater.

“There should be concern, but there should not be panic,” Dell’s Wilke told SiliconANGLE. “The best practices around cyber resiliency will still help you recover from events.”

Image: Dell Technologies