The cybersecurity landscape has shifted for enterprises. What was once considered a disaster for companies that suffered a ransomware attack or data theft is now being factored in simply as the cost of doing business.

“It wasn’t too long ago where a cyberattack was considered a ‘game over’ play,” said Jim Stout (pictured, left), advisory systems engineer for data protection GTO at Dell Technologies Inc. “You got attacked, it was out, investors are going to flee and there’s no coming back. That’s changed drastically. It’s now about being able to recover, being resilient from that attack.”

Stout spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at VMware Explore 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Michael Wilke (right), senior consultant for product marketing at Dell, and they discussed how VMware Inc. and Dell collaborate to provide enterprise customers with data protection solutions tailored for a multicloud world. (* Disclosure below.)

Protection across public clouds

The reality of an inevitable attack has led many enterprises to adopt a posture of cyber resiliency, an ability to store the most critical data in well-protected cyber vaults and retain backup copies of data for faster recovery in the event of a breach. Dell works closely with VMware to provide cyber resilient solutions geared for the multicloud platform.

“Now it’s not just small virtual machines. It’s massive databases that are mission critical. How do you protect those?” Wilke asked. “We have north of 17 exabytes of data protected in public clouds from Dell. Much of that is using VMware multicloud services.”

One of the ways that Dell provides VMware integration is through a feature called Transparent Snapshots, as part of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager. The solution is designed to support the backup of virtual machines without business disruption and are less-intrusive than proxy-based tools.

“One of the challenges customers face as they try to transform is how to take these large transactionally heavy workloads and virtualize them and cloud enable them,” Stout said. “VMware has done a lot of work to make that happen, but there still was risk and still challenges with trying to protect those workloads. We can protect those workloads; we can protect them much faster than any other capability.”

As Dell navigates the challenges of protecting enterprise workloads, it is finding that cybersecurity and data protection are now receiving significant attention. An area that was once relegated to the lower levels of an organization now involves executives at the highest level in most enterprises today, according to Wilke.

“The conversation is getting easier, because the people at the table have changed,” Wilke said. “It’s everybody from the board to the C-suite to the traditional IT operations people. It’s a high priority so that’s at least helping the conversation.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore 2023. And be sure to also check out the next episode of Dell’s “Navigating the Road to Cyber Resiliency” series with theCUBE on August 29 at 9 a.m. PT.

(* 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