After one of the computing industry’s largest acquisitions with the Dell-EMC merger last year, many existing customers wondered how they’d take full advantage of all the technology extended by the massive organization, and what it would mean for their data. How would data now be protected? And what exactly is the difference between data security and protection?

“It really is a question we get a lot. One really good way to think about it is, data security is about making sure things don’t go wrong, and data protection is about recoverability when and if things go wrong, which they inevitably do,” said Ruya Atac-Barrett (pictured, right), senior director of data protection marketing at Dell EMC, Dell Technologies Inc.’s infrastructure group.

Some Dell EMC use cases, however, indicate security and protection are beginning to converge as technology evolves.

Atac-Barrett and Marti Vandemore (pictured, left), senior vice president and director of information technology and operations at Heartland Financial USA Inc., sat down with with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Rebecca Knight (knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

The guests discussed how transforming Heartland Financial, as well as other businesses’ information technology departments, to cloud-based platforms is changing data security, and how that upgrade is actually causing a new set of issues to be dealt with.

Data security, protection and the data fog issue

Until a few years ago, Heartland Financial was using a traditional tape backup system. As customer needs expanded, the backup window began to get shorter, and the company realized it would have to convert to a more modern IT setup. As time has gone by, that window to recover data as shrunk from days to just a few hours, Vandemore stated.

“The backup windows were shrinking, so we were having shortened windows to be able to get our data backed up and protected,” Vandemore said. “The recoverability was going to take too long, and if we did have a significant issue we were not going to be able to meet our recovery time objectives.”

The transformation in the IT industry has made it much easier for Heartland Financial to take advantage and protect its data, but that evolution has come with its own set of problems. Instead of being a centralized IT network and a massive data depository in one place, between four walls, the network infrastructure and platform is now scattered among various IT services and providers, in various locations, and that has created an issue called “data fog.”

With inputs and outputs coming from so many locations, it becomes a challenge for Heartland Financial and other businesses to manage them all, according to Atac-Barrett.

“We’re seeing data really moving to where the customers are to the edge, and those four walls pretty much disappeared,” Atac-Barrett said. “So you have no longer the data center but more centers of data. It’s really all about how do you protect that data that’s no longer between for walls.”

Vandemore went further and explained how the data fog and spread is affecting Heartland Financial, and he discussed how the company is dealing with it.

“It’s certainly starting to hit us, and our data is starting to spread, but we’re working with Dell EMC to make sure that as that data spreads that not only is it secure, backed up, it’s protected and you still have control over it,” Vandemore said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell EMC World. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE