In today’s technology environment, organizations hold some serious concerns around cybersecurity. Perhaps they’ve just been hacked, or maybe they’re just feeling exposed.

Where can they start making a difference? For Dell Technologies Inc., the strategy has been to bring together some of its key services that will help customers tackle those challenges in cybersecurity, especially with a recent rise in ransomware.

“Cybersecurity is really a risk mitigation conversation,” said Arun Krishnamoorthy (pictured), senior director of cybersecurity product management at Dell. “What we’ve learned over many years of our experience working with our customers and really solving real problems for them, this is one of the blueprints that’s emerged for us in how we engage and talk to customers.”

Krishnamoorthy discussed the details of that strategy with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at the Dell Data Protection: Episode 2 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed reducing exposures, protecting assets and managing proactively. (* Disclosure below.)

Helping customers prepare

When it comes to helping customers prepare before a breach even occurs, Dell does a portfolio assessment to evaluate an organization’s risk. One of the most important things in cybersecurity is that it shouldn’t just be a chief information security officer and their team that is concerned with the matter, according to Krishnamoorthy. That means that the business units, IT teams, application teams, risk teams and security teams should be collectively working together.

“This widely varies between different companies, because they’re in different stages of maturity and they have different priorities,” Krishnamoorthy said. “We need to understand that risk appetite and exposure first, and then understand and build that strategy.”

Another important part of Dell’s strategy involves layer technology architecture. To look at it a different way is to consider some recent zero-trust mandates, according to Krishnamoorthy. With the remote workforce that organizations have today, along with multicloud, a very diverse distributed workforce is accessing diverse distributed applications today.

How you now “connect these different pieces together is where some of the new technologies are evolving,” he added.

One of the interesting challenges is that in the old model, organizations often had one data center and one firewall and knew who was coming in and what they were doing. That’s changed now. That’s because, in the distributed model, organizations have to build security postures along the way.

“If I’m a user with a laptop and I’m coming in, what applications do I access? Where do they sit? How do I traverse the network and how do I protect every piece of it?” Krishnamoorthy said. “What you’re looking at there is the technology stack, and we want to make sure that every piece of that is protected.”

All of this can sound complicated to customers. That’s why Dell’s first priority is understanding what exposures customers have today and then solving those. As an example, Krishnamoorthy recalled one customer who had multiple domains and websites and had forgotten about them.

“When we do our attack surface management assessment, we uncovered that these assets were out there, exposed for the bad guys to operate on. So, let’s understand the open vulnerabilities you have and make sure that we [are addressing] it,” he said. “While we are doing that, let’s also take a protection point of view. Let’s protect what you have.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Data Protection: Episode 2 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Episode 2 of the “Navigating the Road to Cyber Resiliency” event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE