End-to-end Infrastructure security – cybersecurity vs cyber resilience

One of the top concerns for businesses today is security.  Though all businesses agree with increased Cyber Security and Cyber Resilience in principle, many are unsure of their differences and therefore are confused where to begin. Putting it simply, Cybersecurity focuses on keeping ‘them’ out while cyber resilience focuses on responding when ‘they’ get in.

Cybersecurity is a series of measures to prevent hackers penetrating IT systems. Although following the best practices will prevent the great majority of attacks, hackers will always find their way through when least expected. Though prevention is better than cure, the stark reality is that one-hundred percent prevention is not possible. Therefore, IT teams also need robust cyber resilience measures focusing on ‘when not the if’ a cyberattack will happen.

Organisations need to move from a “secure perimeter” mindset to a “secure architecture” philosophy. Servers and storage solutions need to be designed with defence mechanisms and features that make them more resilient to threats from the ground up. These mechanisms and features must be continuously improved from the date of initial deployment through upgrades, and such improvements must continue even during repurposing and retiring of equipment. Embedded security ensures that only valid, signed updates are permitted for the server BIOS, peripherals and specifically storage devices.

Dell hardware is built using trusted partners to ensure quality hardware components with operationally tested and security-verified firmware.

Fully protecting an environment from everyday threats requires “defence in-depth” with multiple layers of security. Firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, antivirus/malware, endpoint protection, applications, services, as well as security operations and management are all part of a multilayer defence.

Dell EMC VxRail provides the fastest and simplest path to security transformations from Core to Edge to Cloud, delivering the agile infrastructure needed for full stack integrity and end-to-end lifecycle management. This drives operational efficiencies, reduce risk and enables teams to focus on the business.

Built for VMware, with VMware, to enhance VMware, VxRail is the first and only HCI system jointly engineered with VMware to eliminate the operational complexity of deploying, provisioning, managing, monitoring, and updating of VxRail Hyper-converged Infrastructure.

VxRail has security built in at every level of the integrated technology stack. Starting from PowerEdge server through VxRail HCI System Software, including the integrated VMware software, securing the Core, the Edge, and the Cloud, ensuring availability, integrity, and confidence for every workload.

VxRail is powered by Dell PowerEdge server platform with embedded hardware and system-level security features to protect the infrastructure with layers of defence. Breaches are detected more quickly, allowing the system to recover to a trusted baseline. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers are the critical hardware that make up the nodes in a VxRail cluster, using cryptographically signed and verified firmware to build a system of trust. Leveraging security technologies built right into the silicon, capabilities like Intel’s Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) verify that the server executes only the intended version of firmware, BIOS, and hypervisor while preventing the undetected introduction of malware.

VxRail software lifecycle management VxRail composite bundles may include updates to BIOS, firmware, hypervisor, vSphere, or any of the included management components that makes updating the complete software stack much simpler and therefore reduces the vulnerability to attacks.

Security transformation begins with a secure IT infrastructure. VxRail provides a secure, modern infrastructure from the Core to Edge to the Cloud. As a hyper-converged infrastructure, the advantage of VxRail is that it is designed, engineered, built, and managed as a single product to reduce the possible attack surface by reducing the number of components that are involved in the infrastructure.