As AI workloads flood enterprise data centers, the resilient infrastructure that supports them is becoming just as important as the models themselves — and just as exposed to sophisticated threats.

That urgency is front and center for Dell Technologies Inc., which is rolling out a set of cyber resilience and data protection enhancements designed to close the gap between AI ambition and operational security. Enterprises building AI factories often skip the foundational safeguards that make such infrastructure trustworthy, according to Jim Shook (pictured, left), director of cybersecurity and compliance practice at Dell Technologies.

“We’ve been through this a couple of times now,” Shook told theCUBE. “We start something new. We want privacy by design, we want security by design, and then push comes to shove. Everybody’s moving very quickly to deliver results, and sometimes the infrastructure — the key concepts and the basic building blocks — get left behind. We want to make sure in the AI world that that’s not the case.”

Shook and Rob Emsley (right), director of cyber resilience product marketing at Dell Technologies, spoke with theCUBE’s Christophe Bertrand at the RSAC 2026 Conference, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Dell’s latest announcements for resilient infrastructure and expanding data protection to mid-market customers. (* Disclosure below.)

Resilient infrastructure expands from enterprise to mid-market

Dell’s announcements reflect what the company calls a three-part enhancement of its PowerProtect portfolio — new capabilities for PowerProtect Data Manager software, a new entry-level PowerProtect Data Domain appliance to extend cyber resilience down to small and medium businesses, and an expansion of its managed detection and response service to cover PowerScale, Dell’s AI data storage platform.

“It’s very important for us to make PowerProtect not only a backup infrastructure solution, but really become more of a resilience management solution across the entire data landscape,” Emsley said. “The ability to bring solutions for other parts of our infrastructure, specifically PowerScale, becomes very important. So, we introduced anomaly detection natively into the PowerProtect portfolio to look at indicators of compromise within the backup copies, but we’re now expanding that … to PowerStore — the ability to analyze storage snapshots for any indicators of compromise.”

AI infrastructure faces the same underlying attack vectors as traditional systems, even as unique risks like data poisoning and model manipulation draw more attention. According to Dell’s own Cyber Resilience Insights research, only 40% of global organizations have successfully contained and recovered from a cyberattack or incident drill with minimal impact.

“As amazing as AI is, it’s still running on infrastructure,” Shook noted. “If that infrastructure isn’t resilient … then you’re not going to be very safe. You’re not going to be able to meet risk or governance or compliance issues. We’re in a unique position at Dell that we can look across all of that — from the training data, to running the models, to the infrastructure, logs, services — all of those pieces. We want to bring all those to bear to make this easier for our customers to address the challenge.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RSAC 2026 Conference:

(* Disclosure: Dell Technologies sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell Technologies nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE