Dell Technologies will open a Zero Trust Center of Excellence in collaboration with CyberPoint International and the Maryland Innovation Security Institute (MISI) in Spring 2023 at DreamPort, the U.S. Cyber Command’s premier cybersecurity innovation facility. Dell also unveils new cybersecurity services that allow organizations to assess their Zero Trust and cyber resilience maturity, endpoint security solutions to support hybrid work, and ransomware protection for object storage data.
Zero Trust is a cybersecurity model that shifts how organizations approach security from relying solely on perimeter defenses to a proactive strategy that only allows known good activity across ecosystems and data pipelines. It allows organizations to better align their cybersecurity strategy across the data center, clouds, and at the edge. Dell aims to serve as a catalyst for customers to achieve Zero Trust outcomes by making the design and integration of this architecture easier.
“In a multi-cloud world, an organization’s cybersecurity strategy must transcend its infrastructure and extend to its applications and data,” said John Roese, global chief technology officer, Dell Technologies. “We believe a Zero Trust strategy is the best path forward. Dell has the proven IT and security foundation, technology integration experience, and extensive global partner ecosystem to help simplify customers’ cybersecurity transformations.”
“Zero Trust is a fundamental paradigm shift emphasizing the need to protect applications and data pipelines – beyond networks – across a multi-cloud topology. The launch of our Zero Trust Center of Excellence, as well as new cybersecurity services and solutions, will enable our customers in Asia Pacific and Japan to stress test their security architecture and enhance their cyber resilience. This is especially critical in this ever-changing cyber landscape that we’re navigating,” said Amit Midha, president, Asia Pacific & Japan, and Global Digital Cities, Dell Technologies.
“Indian businesses should trust their employees, partners, customers, extended communities, and companies in order to protect their digital identity. Digital trust must be an executive-level, IT imperative especially as the volume of data and the points of exchange increase exponentially with hybrid work. Cloud services, hybrid workloads, and DevOps have led to a convergence of traditional IT operations and technology development. With the endless increase in new devices, systems, and connections, the traditional corporate boundary no longer exists. Remote and hybrid workforces make securing a sprawling corporate infrastructure even more complex. Zero Trust offers a blueprint for ensuring everything that connects to an enterprise is known and trusted. Companies should thus consider Zero Trust as a strategic imperative to prevent and protect against cybersecurity threats. It is a necessary component of digital transformation, which enables companies to transfer critical processes online and create new forms of inter-organizational connection,” said, Mr. Ripu Bajwa, Director and General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies India.
Center of Excellence to speed Zero Trust adoption
Together with MISI, CyberPoint International, and a team of industry small, women-owned, and veteran-owned businesses, Dell will power the Zero Trust Center of Excellence at DreamPort to provide organizations with a secure data center to validate Zero Trust use cases. The Center of Excellence will use the Department of Defense Zero Trust Reference Architecture as its foundation for organizations to test configurations before deployment in their own environments. By orchestrating across an extensive ecosystem, Dell will deliver a repeatable blueprint of the architecture, providing a quicker path to adoption, and easing the integration and orchestration burden for customers.
“We believe our critical collaboration with Dell Technologies at the DreamPort Center of Excellence will drive rapid innovation and integration of Zero Trust solutions to help the U.S. government and commercial enterprises defend increasingly complex and ongoing cyber threats,” said Horace Jones, president, CyberPoint International.
Cybersecurity services to align with Zero Trust and reduce risk
To help organizations align to Zero Trust principles and achieve cyber resiliency, Dell Cybersecurity Advisory Services provide organizations a roadmap to Zero Trust that builds on their existing cybersecurity assets. These services find and address security gaps, determine advanced technologies customers should implement, and help them learn how to enable continuous vigilance and governance for long-term cyber resiliency. By working with Dell, organizations have the tools and actionable insights they need to better secure their data and IT environments.
To minimize attack surfaces and better protect organizations, Dell offers a new Vulnerability Management service with Dell experts who regularly scan customer environments for vulnerabilities, provide a full picture of exposures and help prioritize patching efforts.
Commercial PC cybersecurity offerings support hybrid work
With breaches happening above and below the operating system, secure devices are foundational to a Zero Trust-ready organization. Dell continues to enhance its portfolio with new offerings that help customers prevent, detect, and respond to threats wherever they occur, and allow greater control of the IT environment:
- Hardware protections for the industry’s most secure commercial PCs:[i] To address growing supply chain threats, customers can now opt for Dell to disable PC ports prior to shipment, which helps prevent BIOS settings tampering. Dell is also expanding the availability of tamper-evident seals to Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa to offer more physical security measures during shipment.
- Firmware protections to detect growing threats: Organizations can detect potential tampering of a PC’s BIOS with the new integration of telemetry between Microsoft Intune, as part of Microsoft Endpoint Manager, and Splunk consoles. Within the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center, IT administrators can secure, control and configure Dell PCs, including BIOS configuration and password management. These capabilities, which Dell is first to market with, will be available in a future release of Intune, helping ensure user productivity while reducing IT complexity.
- Advanced software protections: New capabilities from Dell speed threat detection and remediation. Additionally, a new data loss prevention offering helps protect sensitive data from unauthorized downloads onto external USB storage devices, providing greater visibility and policy control on this behavior.
Enhanced cyber protection and recovery for object storage
To address the growth of object storage data, such as videos and photographs, it is critical to take advantage of the latest cyber protection solutions to isolate data, intelligently detect threats, and enable fast data recovery.
The Dell ECS Enterprise Object Storage platform expands cyber protection capabilities to help secure object data to an isolated cyber vault residing locally or in a remote environment. Accessible through the AWS S3 protocol, critical applications, and backup servers can continue to access the isolated copy while supporting legal compliance in the event of a cyberattack compromising the primary and secondary data copy. Together with AI-powered threat detection and immutability, the new solution provides organizations with a rapid path to data recovery from ransomware and other malicious attacks.