Dell Technologies is extending its PowerProtect data protection and cyber recovery portfolio to cover identity systems, the company said, adding identity resilience alongside data protection for customers that rely on Active Directory, Entra ID and Okta.
The company is also adding identity threat detection and response capabilities to its managed detection and response service. The aim is to catch misuse of legitimate credentials as it happens and shut it down automatically, according to Dell.
Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience product marketing at Dell, said recovering data is not enough if the identity systems controlling access are compromised, because a business may have its data but be unable to reach it without the identity platform it depends on. He said the goal of the identity resilience work is for customers to trust the identities they rely on before bringing back applications and data.
Adam Miller, global lead for security and resilience services marketing at Dell, described the kind of attack the managed service targets, citing a user logging in with valid credentials from an IP address never used before. He said Dell needs not only to detect that but to automate a response quickly enough to remove the person from the network or otherwise stop the attack, and he said the same governance will be needed for agentic identities as for human ones. Emsley and Miller discussed the work with theCUBE's Dave Vellante for the AI Cybersecurity and Resilience Summit.
On the AI infrastructure side, Dell is embedding PowerProtect as an option within the Dell AI Factory and extending PowerProtect's snapshot orchestration to PowerScale storage, with replication to ObjectScale. The moves build on PowerProtect One and Dell Cyber Detect, which Dell introduced in May to simplify cyber resilience across the data center. Miller said Dell is drawing on lessons from about 6,500 AI Factory customers, and that security and resilience need to be a core architectural decision from the start rather than bolted on later, as he said happened in the cloud transition.
Dell's services teams run tabletop exercises and end-to-end simulations of a ransomware intrusion, its detection and the recovery that follows. Miller said one customer that restructured its approach to improve recovery speed saw backup-to-recovery efficiency improve 17 times.
Emsley said testing is essential to everything Dell does, and that the concept of assured recovery has never been more important than it is today.
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