Customers Need a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure For a Resilient, Adaptive Cybersecurity Strategy – Partners Can Help

In 2017, there were more than 5,000 publicly disclosed data breaches, according to Risk-Based Security. The implementation of sweeping regulations, as well as the damaging effects of financial penalties and brand reputation, have elevated the need to protect and secure data.

Unfortunately, outdated legacy infrastructure can make it difficult to defend against risks and vulnerabilities. Organizations need modern infrastructure that is built, deployed and supported to handle even the most-demanding workloads.

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) does just that while also creating new, margin-rich opportunities for channel partners.

The Partner Opportunity: Protecting Your Customer’s Sensitive Data

As security breaches make headline news, customers are looking to channel partners to solve this pervasive— and potentially costly—challenge. With the ability to start small and scale out, HCI not only gives partners an ideal entry point to quickly demonstrate value, it also accelerates the sales cycle and creates on-going opportunities for growth as customer needs evolve

The Dell EMC VxRail Appliance, developed jointly with VMware, is a secure, resilient hyper-converged infrastructure system that protects vSphere®-based virtual environments. VxRail is built on the latest generation of Dell EMC PowerEdge™ servers and Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors with embedded hardware and system-level security features that include:

  • Cryptographically signed and verified firmware to ensure the server executes only the intended version of firmware, BIOS and hypervisor while preventing the undetected introduction of malware.
  • Encryption that protects the confidentiality of data in use, in motion and at rest.
  • Flexibility to encrypt on a per-VM basis, allowing a single cluster to have both encrypted and non-encrypted VMs.
  • Key management services compatible with the KMIP 1.1 standard.

Why Partners Are Ideally Positioned to Secure VMware-Based Environments with HCI

IT organizations want solutions that can be quickly implemented to minimize risk exposure. However, they also need solutions from proven, trusted partners who can bring the right solution. Fortunately, this means that partners can realize faster time to revenue, while also enabling the addition of value-added services that will contribute to long-term profitability. The flexible scale-out design of HCI can also help reduce the cost of delivering support, creating yet another opportunity for partners to impact the bottom line.

Why is VxRail the HCI solution of choice for channel partners who want to maximize the opportunity to secure VMware-based environments?

VMware vSphere has a “secure by default” intent whereby system configurations are set for secure bias by default and, depending on the risk profile of the business, the system configuration can also be further hardened. Using the Dell EMC VxRail STIG compliance scripts with automation tools, VxRail can be quickly and easily configured to a hardened state as well. The STIG can also be used to monitor the secure state of the system and, if necessary, revert the configuration back to a known secure state.

In order to support efficient lifecycle management and reduce complexity, the VxRail team engineers, tests, and releases updates to all system software components as a bundle. A software bundle can include updates to BIOS, firmware, hypervisor, vSphere, or any of the included management components.

VxRail Manager reduces lifecycle management complexity while making infrastructure more secure by reducing the time and risk normally associated with patching. Fixes are quickly developed to mitigate the threat when vulnerabilities are detected, and then extensively tested on the VxRail platform before being released to customers. Automated notification proactively lets administrators know when to apply system updates, which can be applied while the system remains online to avoid business disruption.

The Opportunity for Partners Is Real: Start Securing Customer Infrastructure Today with HCI

As a fully integrated, pre-configured, and pre-tested VMware hyper-converged infrastructure appliance family, VxRail gives channel partners a unique opportunity to impact a customer’s bottom line—and their own—by dramatically simplifying IT operations, accelerating time to market, and delivering incredible return on investment.

Read the complete paper and prepare to talk to customers about the benefits of hyper-converged infrastructure for a resilient, adaptive cybersecurity strategy. Then share the five steps to protecting your virtualization environment with customers and start a conversation about VxRail.

About the Author: Pawel Pabich