As technology companies work with enterprises on their digital transformations, data and its security is top of mind. Because there are so many factors to consider, from data access permissions to methods of intelligently detecting breaches, transformative efforts based on digital assets can quickly get complicated. So what are technology companies doing to help educate their customers and walk them through the many changes, innovations and options of modern computing architecture and services?

“Customers are really looking to adopt new technologies to be able to securely store their data,” said Niels Hagoort (pictured, left), virtualization consultant and architect at VMware Inc. “I think it’s challenging. What is the right path? Where to go from here? And which technologies to adopt, and which technologies you probably should leave behind? It’s a quest, I would say.”

Hagoort and Chris Wahl (pictured, right), chief technologist at Rubrik Inc., spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed data security and ways they are helping businesses navigate the challenges. (* Disclosure below.)

Navigating the complex world of data security

As companies wrestle over big data and data security, many wonder how they can ever keep up, according to Hagoort. While many are still running on traditional storage, VMware has been helping customers with secure, hyperconverged infrastructure solutions like vSAN. This is an integral piece in everything VMware is doing to support enterprises’ multicloud needs, spanning public and private clouds with siloed data.

“I do see a lot of traction with vSAN, and that’s I think primarily because of  performance enhancements,” Hagoort said. “On the other hand, I see the economics come into place. So we had several customers who were actually looking at it from a cost perspective, and they managed to cut down on cost with using vSAN.”

Rubrik has been along for the ride, becoming vSAN certified as it launched its Alta 4.2 version of its Cloud Data Management software-defined platform. It has also launched Radar, a data management application that uses machine learning on application metadata to detect and alert unusual activity, such as ransomware.

“What that’s doing is actually taking every data point that we have on the backups that we take of your applications, lining those up into a machine learning model,” Wahl explained . “If we detect there’s an encryption of some sort — like ransomware attack is probably the cornerstone use case for this — we alert the security team … and we tell them everything that we see in the environment.”

One of the ways VMware is helping out customers is by educational materials — including a recently updated version of “VMware vShere 6.7 Clustering Deep Dive.” During the update of the book, Rubrik helped, according to Wahl.

“We spend a lot of time focusing on what customers are looking to do, what partners are looking to do, and really just trying to draw the spotlight on really great things like the “Clustering Deep Dive” book,” Wahl concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: Rubrik Inc. sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. Rubrik, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE