Not so long ago, back-up was a simple bolt-on solution. Data was duplicated, and disruptions were fixed with a restore. Easy-peasy.

Then came cloud computing, and data ran wild. From physical to virtual locations, in the public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, and at the edge … data is everywhere. And as data became dispersed, the threat surface for cyberattack expanded in unison. Even ephemeral locations, such as containers, became part of the data-protection equation.

“Information technology is spanning from the edge to the core to the cloud,” said Arthur Lent, senior vice president and chief technical officer of the Data Protection Division at Dell EMC. “And there is a need to have a cohesive ability and approach to protect that data across its lifecycle,”

Lent joined Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s Boston studio for a CUBE Conversation on the state of data protection.

In a separate CUBE Conversation, Vellante also discussed data protection with Nelson Hsu (pictured, center), director of solutions product marketing at the Data Protection Division at Dell EMC, and Colm Keegan (pictured, right), senior consultant of product marketing at Dell EMC. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the complete video interview with Lent below:

Protect data, or pay the cost

As protecting data has become increasingly difficult, the rise of mobile technology has simultaneously led to customers demanding higher levels of service, making disruptions damaging to the bottom line and brand reputation. According to figures in the Dell EMC “Global Data Protection Index” report, on average an unplanned system downtime incident costs $527,000, while an incident that results in loss of data costs almost double that at an average of $996,000 per incident.

“When you move into a mission-critical environment, your entire environment needs to be protected,” Hsu stated.

Dell EMC has uniquely positioned itself to help customers with data protection solutions that are both simple and consistent across environments, according to Keegan. “We’ve been solving data protection challenges for customers for literally decades now,” he said.

To address the needs of the new dynamic and dispersed data environment, the company is “taking those proven solutions and pairing them with modern capabilities,” Keegan stated.

The company currently protects over 2.7 exabytes of data for more than 1,000 customers in the cloud, Hsu pointed out. Simplicity and consistency are Dell EMC’s core tenants, according to Hsu: “We go across the edge, the core, and the cloud … allowing [customers] to use the tools that they know today to be able to protect their data wherever that data resides.”

Cloud partnerships strengthen compatibility matrix

One of Dell EMC’s secret weapons in cloud data protection is its close relationship with VMware Inc., which is also under the Dell Technologies Inc. family umbrella.

“As organizations start consuming cloud, they’re going to go with the platform that they’ve been operating under for years now. So, it’ll be VMware,” explained Keegan, referring to VMware’s command of the virtualization market.

However, while VMware is a “very strategic aspect and partner,” Dell EMC understands the importance of offering compatibility across multiple clouds. So, the company also has partnerships with Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Watch the complete video interview below with Hsu and Keegan below:

Automated data protection for Kubernetes

Container adoption is on the rise, with Dell’s research showing 57% of enterprises planning on deploying containers in 2021, according to Lent. While it might seem counterintuitive to need protection on a technology designed to be stateless, it is still important to be able to restart a Kubernetes cluster and get the application environment back up and running in a pre-disruption state, Lent explained.

While containers were conceived to be stateless, there are instances where they do store information. “We are seeing people use stateful containers and put databases in containers in development, and they want to roll that into production,” Lent said.

In this instance, it is important not only to back up the container definitions, but have the ability to backup and restore the data that is inside the container, he added.

The key to data protection in a dynamic environment is artificial intelligence, according to Lent. “You can no longer have people handcraft and tailor exactly what to protect and exactly how to bring it back after protection,” he said.

Instead, he advocates using AI and automation “to have the environments be automatically discovered, automatically protected, and have automated workflows for the recovery scenarios.”

Dell security solutions offer protection and security

As a data-protection market leader, Dell EMC continued to evolve its enterprise solutions. The company’s next-generation data management platform, PowerProtect Data Manager, protects data and delivers governance control for business-critical workloads across evolving physical, virtual and cloud environments.

As well as software protection, Dell EMC offers data protection and back-up products specifically tailored to cloud, VMware virtual environments, and cyber recovery. Embedded in the cyber-recovery product is CyberSense capability, an automated function that analyzes data to ensure that it is clean and safe before storing it in the protected vault.

This can quickly pay for itself, as Hsu described in one recent “worst-case scenario”: A healthcare provider was infected with ransomware and threatened. Without protection, it would have had to pay up or risk the criminals deleting all its data. This type of situation could have been a disaster, such as in the case of three hospitals in Alabama that were closed to all but critical patients after a ransomware attack crippled their computer systems.

However, this healthcare provider averted disaster. “With our cyber-recovery offering, they protected their data in an air gap vaulted solution,” Hsu said. “And they didn’t have to pay for that ransom.”

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE