Introducing the ‘Boxes and Lines’ Whiteboard Nugget Series

I’ve been spending a lot more time in the office recently and naturally I’m tending to bump into colleagues and fellow team members in the corridor ( I know maybe I should be spending more time at my desk!). Interestingly enough however, if we do get into a conversation around infrastructure security, which is quite often, then nobody has the time to digest a verbalised version of ‘PowerPoint Martin’.

More often that not, they are looking for a quick explainer of what a particular feature/function is and in what context does it sit within the ‘Big Picture’. Upon reflection, in a world pre-pandemic, this is something I used to do all the time in my role as a ‘technologist’. Sure, we still need to delve deep into the architecture every now and again, as I have and will continue to do in this blog around Zero Trust, Cyber Resilience and the NIST Framework in particular. However, most people I deal with tend to be pretty industry and tech savvy, and readily understand the big picture, or the ‘why’. Like my ‘corridor friends’ they are really looking to understand quickly the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ with a large dash of ‘brevity’ on the side.

Still, in pre-pandemic reflection mode, I was thinking how I had done this before? Anybody who knows me, will have just virtually ‘rolled their eyes’ in anticipation of the answer. I like to draw, scribble, more often than not scrawl, ‘boxes and lines’ on a whiteboard, to articulate the ‘how’. So there you have it, the purpose and title of this blog within a blog. My firm commitment, that I will adhere to unwaveringly, is that there will be no PowerPoint, not even a screengrab. If I can’t scribble it on a whiteboard and talk about it for 5-10 minutes then it won’t be here…..

So where to begin? Apologies I am going to do exactly what I said I wouldn’t do…. a brief nugget on the big picture. I’ll forgive myself on this occasion as context is important for future ‘nuggets’ in the series. So what is the Dell Trusted Infrastructure?

Very broadly… brevity is beautiful as they say. Dell Trusted Infrastructure’ is propped up by three key pillars.

• Protect Data and Systems:
  • Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE), Safe BIOS, RBAC/MFA, Tamper proof secure Logging and Auditing, Automated compliance monitoring, Hardware Root of Trust, secure boot chain of trust, digitally signed secure updates etc. The list is pretty long
• Enhance Cyber Resilience:
  • So here we have not just the product platform focus around Power Protect Cyber Recovery and the other CR based platforms but also some other offerings and features across the portfolio that help detect threats before they happen. For example AI/ML based storage monitoring and anomaly detection. CloudIQ Cybersecurity is a key offering underpinning this pillar, as well as the next
• Overcome Security Complexity:
  • Advanced Services, partner integrations, CloudIQ, Storage and Security Automation etc.

All three pillars transcend the Dell portfolio offering from Storage, Server, HCI, Data Protection and Networking. Ultimately underpinned by industry standards, frameworks and recommended best practices such as the NIST Cyber Security Framework , with a keen eye on Zero Trust as the emerging industry wide security North Star.

Phew, That was pretty brief and hopefully to the point. Clearly there is an awful lot of great innovation going on within each of the pillars. The next post in ‘Boxes and Lines’ series will dig into into a little deeper into and intrinsic feature or two within the ‘Protect Data and Systems’ pillar perhaps.

Stay tuned…..

DISCLAIMER
The views expressed on this site are strictly my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of Dell Technologies. Please always check official documentation to verify technical information.

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