One of the side effects of COVID-19 has been to accelerate companies’ adoption of cloud and certain cloud native technologies. This means that protecting data in these new environments is no longer a problem to be figured out on a rainy day — it’s a pressing concern right now. Making data protection an every-man-for-himself sport may be one way to meet the challenge. 

“I think we’ve seen a lot accelerate with this whole situation we’re all in with the global pandemic,” said Caitlin Gordon (pictured), vice president of marketing at Dell Technologies Inc. “The digital transformation has been compressed; it would have taken people years, but now they’ve been forced to do that in months.”

Gordon spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a CUBE Conversation. They discussed the latest upgrades to Dell PowerProtect and how companies can secure data as they hurriedly shift to new environments. (* Disclosure below.)

Data protection at the speed of development

Accelerated IT initiatives as a result of the pandemic are wide-ranging. For instance, containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications) may have been on many companies’ roadmap, but now we’re seeing real-life adoption explode, according to Gordon. With it, conversations around protecting Kubernetes — the open-source container-orchestration platform — are being had much more frequently.

Ransomware attacks are also becoming more common in this increasingly digital, cloud-based world we’re in now, Gordon explained. Thus, the need for data protection across environments and overall cyber resiliency is more urgent than ever.

As a result, a lot of DevOps teams are pressed to deliver new applications, often containerized or cloud native, to meet new demand for digital interaction. “We need to enable developers, as seamlessly as possible, in their own language, to be able to protect, to be able to store data, so IT can feel good about it,” Gordon said. 

Many have opined that the best strategy for rapidly modernizing companies is to protect data itself rather than build a firewall around a particular environment. Dell seems to agree; it is working to marry data protection and storage all the way down through engineering.

To that end, Dell has upgraded its PowerProtect integrated data-protection and data-management suite with something called Data Manager. It allows users to do their own data protection as they’re building applications in on-premises data centers or the cloud. It offers this consolidated and centralized data management from a single console, “so [they] … can keep all of those policies in place and keep that centralized governance but really support the acceleration and the digital transformation that those folks are driving,” Gordon said. 

Dell has also completed a number of deep integrations with VMware Inc. to support containerized Kubernetes workloads. This is crucial now as companies are deploying containers in unprecedented numbers. “Although we didn’t think so pretty recently, containers are part of production applications. They need to be stored in persistent storage on the storage side, but … probably even more critically and urgently, they need to be protected,” Gordon stated.

Dell is steadily shifting the focus in its storage portfolio from speeds and feeds to data protection, ease-of-use in development, etc. “I couldn’t be happier that our conversations have … moved off of speeds and feeds and into these much more compelling and business-centric conversations, because I think we can add a lot more value to the business that way,” Gordon concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE