Is network security an oxymoron?

Like jumbo shrimp and awfully good, network security seems ripe for inclusion in the roll call of combined contradictory words, especially when considering the steady parade of high-profile breaches and cyberattacks. In the past month alone, a Toyota division’s computers were knocked out by an attack in Australia, Microsoft Corp. revealed widespread attacks against political organizations in Europe, and a Chinese hacking group reportedly stole data from a cloud-based firm in Norway.

Against this backdrop of a turbulent threat landscape, security researchers and executives will gather in San Francisco next week for the RSA Conference. And while the dialogue during the week-long event will certainly focus on important themes, such as information privacy and developer/security/operations, or DevSecOps, the heart of the conversation still remains the same: data protection.

In advance of the conference, Dell EMC, RSA’s parent company, released new capabilities for its data protection appliance portfolio, including multicloud support. It’s a recognition by the company that as data continues to be spread across multiple platforms, customers will need a greater level of confidence in the multicloud world.

“We can’t just think about data protection as backup,” said Beth Phalen (pictured), president and general manager of the Data Protection Division at Dell EMC. “We have to think about it as the comprehensive way that customers can get access to their data, even if they’re attacked.”

Phalen spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts. Rüya Barrett, vice president of marketing, data protection, at Dell EMC, and Stefan Voss, senior director of product management at Dell EMC, also spoke with Vellante in separate interviews. They discussed how the changing security landscape is driving data protection investment, recently launched multicloud recovery support for Dell EMC’s appliance lines, cyberthreats that drive the need for data isolation, and tools to bridge the gap between information technology and security professionals. (* Disclosure below.)

Driving protection and oversight

IT leaders are in a “no-excuses” business. Even if data is spread across multiple application environments, if a business needs mission-critical information, it had better be accessible.

“The vision of IT being some back office that is separated from the rest of the company is no longer true,” Phalen said. “Customers want their application owners to be able to drive data protection and then have that compared with a central oversight so they can still have that global view.”

An IDC report released last fall found that nearly half of IT transformation, or ITX, projects involved data protection. And approximately one-third of ITX budgets were devoted solely to this area as well. However, IDC also found that the highest data protection deficiency was in cross-cloud support.

To address this issue, Dell EMC announced plans this month to add new capabilities for its Data Domain and Integrated Data Protection Appliance portfolio to support greater protection in the multicloud world. New software will now include support for Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud, along with previous integration for major cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure.

Dell EMC also implemented Native Cloud Disaster Recovery across its IDPA line and enabled faster restores and quicker recalls from the cloud.

“We are announcing a tremendous push with our data protection appliances family, both in Data Domain and Integrated Data Protection Appliances, and the software that basically makes those two rock,” Barrett said.

Watch the complete video interview with Phalen and Barrett below:

Dell EMC has been operating in what is known as the purpose-built backup appliance industry and currently holds more than 55-percent market share for the segment, according to IDC. The latest announcements were designed to capitalize on a growing need for backup and recovery support as the enterprise world expands its cloud footprint.

“We’ve been modernizing our portfolio over the past three years, and now we’re at this exciting point where customers can take advantage of all of our strengths in a multicloud environment, in a commercial environment and for cyber-recovery,” Phalen said. “This market is hot, it is important, and it is changing rapidly.”

Sophisticated attacks

A sobering reminder for why Dell EMC’s enhancements are important to overall network security can be found in one of the more high-profile attacks to occur in recent years. In 2017, the NotPetya cyberattack ravaged systems around the globe, infecting the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., shipping powerhouse Maersk, and FedEx, among others.

“The company size almost doesn’t matter because everybody can lose their business fairly quickly,” Voss said. “We learned that recovery is real and we need to have a recovery strategy.”

NotPetya was especially sinister not only because it spread like wildfire, but it proved remarkably adept at destroying master boot records and encrypting data as it went along. To protect against this kind of cyber-devastation, enterprises would need data isolation.

In October, Dell EMC launched its new Cyber Recovery software and Cyber Recovery Services, designed to use automation and security analytics for isolating critical datasets yet allowing for faster system recovery.

“We have the mechanisms to get data into the vault,” Voss said. “The problem is how to automate the workflow. That’s a software that we wrote that goes along with the Data Protection Appliance.”

Malware-free backups

One of the challenges confronting the computing industry is how to bridge the gap between data restoration specialists and security professionals. Raw backups might be found and accessed quickly after an attack, but they may not always be clean of malware surreptitiously dropped by a hacker.

RSA has been pursuing solutions for this through tools, such as Archer and NetWitness. ThreatConnect Inc. recently announced interoperability features with Archer to improve threat intelligence-sharing across multiple platforms. The NetWitness platform uses behavioral analysis and machine learning to better detect potential attacks.

“The more that we can bridge that gap through technology and reporting, the better it is,” Voss said. “We can be of service and say, ‘You might want to look at this copy over here.’”

Watch the complete video interview with Voss below:

Dell EMC is clearly betting on the recent enhancements for its data protection technology to instill a measure of trust and confidence among customers that critical information will be safeguarded, regardless of how sophisticated the attacks may become.

“They can get the same level of digital trust that they’ve had with us on-premises,” Phelan said. “But now, as they expand into the cloud for disaster recovery, long-term retention, and data protection in the cloud, that confidence comes with them.”

(* Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored these segments of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE