Dell Technologies and Amazon Web Services (AWS) teamed up to offer an air-gapped cyber vault designed to secure, isolate, and recover data from a ransomware attack. This is Dell’s first move to bring its Cyber Recovery Vault to the public cloud, and the vendor plans to expand this capability to Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and other public cloud providers within the next year.  

Dell is not the only vendor to offer data protection for AWS. “Many vendors in the backup and recovery market often promote mutable backup copies that you can store in the public clouds,” said Rob Emsley, director of product marketing for data protection at Dell Technologies. But, he added, what differentiates Dell’s cyber recovery vault from other services is that it's controlled from within the vault itself.

The cyber-vault leverages AWS users’ current backup infrastructure, such as Dell’s PowerProtect appliances, but it is independently configured, operated, and self-managed. “That provides a reduction in the attack surface when it comes to ransomware attacks,” Emsley said.

The service isolates customers’ critical data with an operational air-gapped vault, which locks down management interfaces and requires separate security credentials and multi-factor authentication for access.

Dell worked with AWS to set up a virtual private cloud infrastructure with access controls to separate the Cyber Revocery Vault environment from the rest of the backup environment, Emsley explained.

“We make use of multi-layered cloud security with AWS to build these virtual private clouds and build the private network subnets that isolate the Cyber Recovery Vault from the rest of your clouds or on-premises data center,” he added. 

After identifying a ransomware attack or a malware attack, users can access the vaults and the data inside to “go back to a point in time before the attack occurred,” Emsley said. From that point, they can either choose to recover the data to their on-premises infrastructure or to another virtual private cloud inside AWS. 

Dell built its PowerProtect Cyber Recovery portfolio around five years ago, originally focusing on on-premises infrastructures within customers’ data centers. The portfolio included an on-premises, air-gapped Cyber Recovery Vault with multiple layers of physical and logical security to isolate critical data from ransomware and other threats.

Then earlier this year, Dell expanded the deployment options to co-locations facilities through its partnership with multicloud data services provider Faction. This move paved the way for cyber-vault deployments in the public clouds, according to Emsley.

The cyber vault is the latest addition to the ​​Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS portfolio. “All of our data-protection software is available within the AWS Marketplace,” including an AWS-based backup service that supports software-as-a-service application, Emsley said.

“The last six months, we've been offering our data protection software as a transactable offering via the public cloud providers,” including the cyber vault for AWS, he added. 

“We really have a long history of delivering data protection across the multicloud, whether it be AWS, Azure, or GCP,” Emsley touted. “As of this quarter, we have over 1,400 accounts that leverage our data protection solutions for public clouds, and we have over 8 exabytes of data that we protect within the public clouds, and that number increases on a monthly basis with the information that we get from our public cloud providers.”