Zero trust and cloud capabilities essential for data management in enterprises

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Srinivaschary T, Lead- Solution Architect, Dell Technologies India

1. Can you share the details of Dell PowerStore Plus launch?

Dell Technologies’ PowerStore+ launch adds to the upgrades introduced over the past year. Our latest upgrades in PowerStore promises to improve DevOps and system performance across the customer’s value chain. Along with these, our new innovations make the PowerStore+ suite, the most sustainable of our storage offerings, delivering on more operations per watt. We offer simplified data backup to multicloud environments for customers to drive innovation with flexible storage automation along with introducing new security enhancements to accelerate Zero Trust adoption to help customers better protect, detect and respond to cyberattacks.

2. Why is Zero Trust needed in storage infrastructure?

Zero Trust is a cybersecurity framework that automates an organization’s security architecture and orchestrates a response as soon as systems are under attack. The challenge, however, lies in implementing a complete solution guided by the seven pillars of Zero Trust. No company can do this alone.

To help private and public sector organizations simplify adoption, Dell is building a Zero Trust ecosystem. It brings together more than thirty leading technology and security companies to create a unified solution across infrastructure platforms, applications, clouds, and services.

PowerStore has always had a strong “security DNA,” safeguarding data with advanced capabilities like hardware root of trust, data-at-rest encryption and AIOps security analytics. As with everything about the platform, the focus is simplicity and automation – delivering “always on” protection without increasing management complexity or relying on human vigilance to be effective. In 2023, the newest PowerStoreOS release adds even more cybersecurity features to meet the stringent requirements, while also enabling an authentic Zero Trust experience for business solutions.

• Multi-factor authentication. Highly secure, yet simple and familiar to users, MFA shields PowerStore from hackers and also mitigates poor password practices by employees.
• Secure and immutable snapshots. Prevents snapshots from being modified or deleted prior to their designated expiration date, even by an administrator with highest privileges. Easy to schedule and automate via PowerStore’s protection policies.

3. How will multicloud change the scenario for Indian businesses?

The digital landscape of today’s time is rapidly changing, and it is important to effectively manage data across cloud environments to meet the ever-evolving needs of businesses and customers. Multicloud helps Indian businesses derive insights from data at faster time-to-market as this approach is easy to manage. The ability to access an ever-expanding set of innovations across clouds will open an entire ecosystem to deliver modern IT. The strategy also helps Indian businesses manage costs and operations, with better flexibility and agility in IT. Application efficiency is another important advantage in the multicloud environment. Addressing the new cloud needs, our latest PowerStore upgrades will provide enterprises convenient backup to the cloud capability through PowerStore’s deeper integration into Dell’s physical and software-defined data protection solutions.

4. Please share trends in the storage market in India?

Data and storage systems keep on innovating as they are the top agendas in every enterprise’s digital transformation effort. We expect innovations to pick up in the following areas –

• Software approach to data management: To effectively manage unstructured data software-first data management strategy is more favorable as the hardware approach is inherently limited to the data which exists within the systems, lowering the effectiveness of storage in an enterprise where data is likely to be far more distributed. To effectively manage unstructured data.
• AI/ML in storage: The new-age workloads have inspired businesses to use infrastructure that is optimised to manage the data. The upcoming trends will need AI/ML linked storage with a competitive degree of analytics. To take on the new market opportunities, enterprises will be needing infrastructure that can make data accessible at a faster time, without compromise.
• Multicloud upgrades: Management of data is expensive which is why cloud storage has become increasingly popular. This trend will continue to grow with the proliferation of cloud-native solutions. However, data and workloads are interlinked which is why successful cloud management will be crucial for businesses. The multi-cloud approach will be ideal in creating an ecosystem where data can move freely and securely.
• Zero Trust in storage: The infrastructure which manages data will rapidly evolve to include new-age security architecture like Zero Trust, and enterprise class compliances.
• Sustainable IT: Organizations will be looking to increase their sustainability efforts. Through intelligent infrastructure, storage architectures will become more energy efficient, compact, and resourcefully manufactured.

5. How is Dell helping Indian businesses achieve their sustainability goals?

At Dell Technologies, our vision is to become the most essential technology company for the data era. We are doing this by redefining IT with an open and modern software-defined architecture designed for the digital future, providing our customers with the simplicity, agility, and control of their technology, which leads to improved business outcomes in the aaS, distributed and multicloud world.

At the heart of data center efficiency and sustainability is data. Businesses are bracing themselves for zettabytes of data to manage. Our finding reveal most often data will become a burden rather than an opportunity.

That is where modern storage comes in. And there are three ways Dell’s modern storage portfolio advances sustainability: Energy efficiency, Thermals and cooling and Infrastructure consolidation.

First, we are reducing the energy intensity of our technology and making it more efficient with each new generation.

Our latest Dell storage innovations exemplify this. PowerMax delivers up to 80% power savings per TB and up to seven times more capacity per array in half the rack space – compared with previous generation. All this while maintaining 99.9999% availability. And Dell PowerStore 3.0 delivers up to 60% more IOPS per watt.

Dell storage is architected for adaptive cooling to reduce energy consumption. Our fans speed up as environmental temperatures rise, or CPU usage increases, to maintain optimal temperatures without using any more energy than needed.

Finally, our storage helps you consolidate your infrastructure so you can reduce the physical and carbon footprint in your data center.

To increase data density, Dell guarantees data reduction across our broad storage portfolio, while helping you get the most value from flash media. Specifically, Dell guarantees a 4:1 reduction ratio across its PowerStore and latest PowerMax Open Systems platforms, with no pre-assessment required.

Beyond our storage sustainability features, the Dell Future Proof program (including Tech Refresh and Recycle) and Dell APEX aaS offerings provides even more innovative ways for sustainably managing your IT infrastructure.