Organizations are rethinking how they protect and recover their most valuable data assets as cyberattacks grow more sophisticated and AI reshapes opportunities to better defend these key assets and infrastructure. 

As cyber threats escalate, Dell Technology Inc.’s cyber resiliency offerings highlight how organizations are making data protection a board-level priority in a world where breaches are no longer a matter of if, but when. Dell’s strategy brings together security, backup, recovery, AI-driven automation and partnerships to deliver a holistic approach to safeguarding data across the entire enterprise landscape.

Recent findings from theCUBE Research reinforce how high the stakes have become. In a Q1 2025 study surveying 600 qualified respondents across North America, Western Europe and APAC, 38% of respondents cited operational disruption and 33% cited financial loss as the most critical impacts of a cyberattack. More than half of organizations reported experiencing a cybersecurity incident that impacted their ability to meet data governance requirements in the past year. Among those, 66% faced sensitive data exposure and 46% suffered permanent data deletion.

Many vendors now recognize that cyber resiliency is real and represents the evolution of traditional disaster recovery and data protection, according to Christophe Bertrand, principal analyst at theCUBE Research. It builds on familiar components but adds new elements, including changed — often more complex — workflows, stronger preparation and the critical ability to test.

“I think we’re literally facing the combination of a traditional data protection backup recovery market with some components of cybersecurity,” Bertrand said. “That is just a totally new animal.”

This feature is part of SiliconANGLE Media’s ongoing coverage of Dell’ strategy to advance cyber resiliency in the age of AI. (* Disclosure below.)

Cyber resiliency moves from IT to the boardroom

Findings from theCUBE Research show that executive teams are now contributing funding to strengthen security across infrastructure, backup and recovery processes. Increasingly, companies are adopting a “when, not if” mindset and embedding security from the ground up.

Dell Technologies Inc. has sought to position itself as a leader in this evolution with Dell cyber resiliency solutions. It’s an important shift, especially as cyber resiliency and cybersecurity continue to be at the top of IT spending, according to Rob Emsley (pictured, right), director of data protection marketing at Dell.

“Whether or not you’re looking at various analyst reports, it’s still a boardroom discussion,” Emsley told theCUBE during a recent interview. “We all know that a lot of discussions about AI are also taking place in the boardroom as companies move forward with their digital transformation initiatives. But the requirement to be secure, and especially to secure the data that you’re inevitably going to be relying upon to train your large language models, is so vitally important.”

The shift underscores how cyber resiliency isn’t just an IT concern, but a fundamental element of business continuity and digital transformation. For Dell, there’s an effort to position itself at the center of that evolution, with Dell cyber resiliency combining built-in security, advanced recovery capabilities and more.

Expanding MDR to protect backup systems

Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting data protection infrastructure, which 44% of surveyed organizations reported was impacted during cyberattacks. This finding underscores the urgent need for faster detection and response capabilities. Dell Technologies has sought to respond to these challenges by expanding its managed detection and response, or MDR service, which can manage and monitor its entire backup systems portfolio. To date, it’s been much like a black hole, according to Mihir Maniar (pictured, left), vice president of product and services at Dell.

“Attackers are going after backup systems, and organizations have not been able to prioritize it as much,” Maniar told theCUBE. “Data is important for organizations, and backup is a very important part of their entire infrastructure. It’s not being covered appropriately … and we are one of the first ever that can do this in the industry.”

The MDR expansion was launched through a strategic partnership with CrowdStrike Inc. and leverages CrowdStrike’s Next-Gen SIEM, a platform that combines data integration, artificial intelligence, workflow automation and threat intelligence. Dell integrates proprietary telemetry from its backup portfolio into the CrowdStrike platform to collect all of the log information, according to Maniar.

“We built jointly with them 60 indicators of compromise that can be used to go and detect threats that could be occurring inside the backup portfolio,” he said.

The effort focuses on three priorities for customers. Those include reducing attack vectors, speeding detection and response and enabling robust recovery mechanisms.

“With all of those elements, you really start talking about cyber resiliency versus simply cybersecurity,” Emsley said of Dell cyber resiliency. “A lot of it comes down to breadth. One of the things that we’re able to do is to really work on a secure-by-design philosophy across all parts of your infrastructure.”

Protecting critical data for the long term

Of course, cyber resiliency matters most when organizations need to protect vast amounts of sensitive and critical data. Long-term initiatives, such as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, demonstrate how strategic planning and the right technology partnerships can safeguard and preserve vital research data for future use.

“We have in total on disk right now close to 2.8 petabytes — so it’s a lot of data, and we’re generating 20 to 25 terabytes a month,” said Craig Risien, CI systems project manager for the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Oregon State University. “We’ve been doing this for 10 years. We have a lot that we’ve collected, and the program is supposed to run for another 20 years. That is something that we think a lot about — how do we do this going forward.”

The Ocean Observatories Initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a partnership that includes Oregon State University, the University of Washington and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which operates five global arrays to monitor ocean and seafloor conditions. The initiative stores and shares vast datasets, from sound recordings to temperature and chemical measurements, requiring both advanced storage and strong data protection.

To meet these challenges, the Ocean Observatories Initiative partnered with Dell to design a solution suited to its long-term needs. The team recently received $10 million in funding to build a new data center and carefully planned how to store and protect the growing data over the next five years, according to Risien.

“We went through a very careful planning process with the Dell team. It took us about 18 months, and the storage was a significant part of that, along with the cybersecurity and the resiliency part and the protection part,” he said.

For data protection, the initiative uses Elastic Cloud Storage with Superna’s Golden Copy to provide daily remote backups. It also added PowerProtect Data Domain and a Cyber Recovery vault, along with 60-gigabit-per-second transfer speeds for fast recovery if local failures occur.

Securing AI as adoption accelerates

As companies race to integrate AI into their operations, many face challenges with skills, infrastructure and cybersecurity. Dell and its partners, such as Technologent, are working to address these challenges.

“It’s a vast new landscape with a lot of new skill sets, and that brings us to a shortage of skilled workers,” said Jon Keller, field chief technology officer of Technologent. “By 2030, the … Wealth World Economic Forum says 90% of the workforce is going to have to retool their skill sets to be more AI, more technology, more cyber resilience friendly. That’s a big lift, and we’re not going to get there without the assistance of really good tools and automation and AI itself.”

Generative AI models are especially vulnerable to cyberattacks, with threats such as data poisoning posing risks to their reliability. There are still too few conversations about securing AI infrastructure, according to Kenneth Bachman, director of the Global Technology Office at Dell.

“What’s alarming is that in most cases, there aren’t a lot of conversations that I’ve been a part of — and I meet with customers every day — where the thrust of the conversation is, how do I protect my AI infrastructure,” Bachman told theCUBE.

Dell has partnered with Technologent, a full-service IT value integrator specializing in applied AI, to strengthen data and AI protection. As part of this collaboration, Technologent helps develop cybersecurity solutions for the Dell AI Factory, Dell’s “AI in a box” platform, which is delivered to customers.

“If there isn’t a business value that we’re mapping to … then we’re creating expensive toys,” Keller said. “We have to really commit to their success, commit to their making everybody we work with a champion and as successful as they can be in their organization, and really transform their IT for the future. AI is just another tool that allows that to happen.”

Expanding Dell cyber resiliency with smarter tools

The latest moves in Dell cyber resiliency show how the company is aiming to expand cyber resiliency beyond backup and recovery. Among other Dell cyber resiliency developments, Dell’s PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash appliances promise up to four times faster data restores and twice the replication performance while using less space and power. It has also rolled out its PowerStore Advanced Ransomware Detection, which uses AI analytics to validate data integrity and help organizations recover faster after ransomware attacks. The company noted that Dell has recently celebrated PowerStore’s fifth anniversary and more than 17,000 global customers.

Analysts agree that true cyber resiliency requires more than just new tools. It also depends on how organizations plan, adopt and use those tools as part of a broader strategy, according to Rob Strechay, principal analyst at theCUBE Research.

“When you’re going out and evaluating, this needs to be one of the top evaluation criteria as you go and look at that next set of kit that you’re going to bring into your infrastructure, as you modernize,” he said. “To that approach, it’s about having a strategy that looks across all of the different technologies.”

Building cyber resiliency from the start, including when it comes to Dell cyber resiliency solutions, means choosing vendors and developing code with security best practices already in place. This need is amplified by widespread skills shortages in areas like architecture, cybersecurity and AI, creating opportunities for service providers to leverage automation and AI to close the gap, according to Bertrand.

“A lot of people don’t wake up in the morning thinking about cyber resiliency. And they should,” he said.

(* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. is a sponsor of the Cyber Resiliency Summit, an event produced by theCUBE. Sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE