In part 3 of this blog series we discussed our vision for future data protection.
It will be a multi-year effort to fully realize, but our early efforts in this journey are already starting to bear fruit. Recently we released support for the protection of Kubernetes containers on VMware – a first-to-market data protection solution that will enable our customers to accelerate innovation and increase their agility across multi-cloud environments by leveraging containers for application deployments while ensuring the protection of critical data wherever containers are deployed.
Going forward, our customers can expect to see a steady stream of new data protection capabilities being released on a quarterly basis as we continue to prime the pump of our agile software development engine. As we build for the future, it is important to point out that our industry leading data protection solutions continue to simplify the protection and security of critical workloads and data across private, public and hybrid cloud environments, while dramatically lowering the cost of protection in the cloud.
Consider the four key capabilities that Dell EMC Data Protection solutions deliver to our customers today:
1) Dell EMC Data Protection is native to the cloud
Industry-leading Dell EMC cloud data protection solutions are used by over 1,000 customers to protect over 2.7 Exabytes in the public cloud. The seamless integration with the cloud ecosystem and marketplace enables users to simply and rapidly install solutions such as PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition to efficiently protect applications and data in the public cloud while significantly reducing costs.
Additionally, born-in-the-cloud workloads leveraging public cloud snapshots can be seamlessly protected using PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager, a Dell EMC SaaS offering that automatically discovers, assigns policies and protects public cloud workloads and data across multiple clouds.
And in a recent first-to-market solution, Dell Technologies delivers data protection support for Kubernetes containers through PowerProtect Data Manager. This gives organizations the ability to deploy workloads on containers across any cloud – private, public or hybrid – and ensure the rapid protection and recovery of the mission-critical data running on containers in edge, core and multi-cloud environments.
2) Dell Technologies is the only vendor with a full spectrum of data protection solutions
Supporting full business service protection from edge to core to cloud, requires solutions that entail backup and recovery as well as disaster recovery and orchestration. Dell Technologies has leading products in both spaces that will ultimately be fully integrated into PowerProtect Data Manager.
A single product will provide a full continuum of data protection capabilities with continuous data protection, to deliver extremely robust recovery point and recovery time objectives, with automated backup and recovery, for the protection, compliance and security of mission-critical data assets across hybrid, multi-cloud environments. These capabilities will be further augmented through our Cloud DR offering, where the whole workload environment can be recreated in the cloud directly from backup copies.
3) Intelligent protection and recovery
Autonomous protection and recovery will free users from the day-to-day burdens of data protection management. It all starts by making the underlying hardware infrastructure self-managing. Dell Technologies delivers this capability today by leveraging AI/ML-based automation to proactively detect hardware-related issues and provide predictive maintenance and resource management on the Dell EMC PowerProtect DD appliance family.
We plan to deliver increasingly higher levels of automation by using AI/ML to analyze data protection usage and policy patterns in order to better predict the required policies and SLAs for supporting workloads across edge, core and multi-cloud. This will be built on PowerProtect Central, a SaaS platform that collects and analyzes behavioral patterns across multi-cloud environments (while of course complying with all required privacy and security measures).
4) Data management and security
Cyber threats are becoming increasingly pervasive. Organizations of all sizes now report that they are regularly targeted with malware and ransomware attacks. Protecting data means more than performing daily backup operations, it also means safeguarding data from a broad range of cyber threats.
Dell Technologies delivers solutions that are integrating data protection (backup) with security into a more holistic approach for safeguarding data. PowerProtect Cyber Recovery integrates data protection storage with air-gapped data protection to prevent malicious deletion of backup copies, as well as malware detection mechanisms to ensure backup copies are clean and ready for recovery. Additional enhancements are planned through the collaboration of Dell EMC with VMware, SecureWorks and RSA.
Proven and Modern Data Protection
As we enter the data decade, we are increasingly mindful of the pivotal role data will play in opening new frontiers in advancing human progress. From making affordable, quality health care available to billions of people globally, to delivering breakthrough advancements in eco-friendly, sustainable food production, to helping illuminate the minds of underprivileged youth across every corner of the globe – it all starts with data. That is why we do what we do. Our mission is connected to safeguarding the critical data assets that will make these aspirations, and many more like it, a reality in the coming years.
We are tremendously excited, energized and humbled to be the industry leader delivering today’s proven data protection solutions, while developing the modern data protection capabilities organizations need so that our customers can focus on what they do best.
