Dell Technologies launched an attack against ransomware, and competing backup and data recovery vendors, with new software and managed services that it says can help enterprises recover from a cyberattack.

The new products drop as the REvil ransomware gang, responsible for the attack against meat supplier JBS over the summer and Apple supplier Quanta earlier this year, reemerges from the depths of the dark web. JBS ultimately paid an $11 million ransomware to decrypt its systems, and after attacking Quanta, REvil leaked stolen blueprints for yet-to-be-released Apple devices.

“Ransomware continues to be a topic for many of our customers,” said Rob Emsley, director of product marketing for data protection at Dell Technologies. And the growing amount of data that customers need to manage, store, and be able to recover in the event of a cyberattack compounds the threat (and potential cost) of ransomware.

According to Dell Technologies’ most recent Global Data Protection Index study, also released today, organizations manage more than 10 times the amount of data than they did five years ago. Additionally, 62% fear their existing data protection measures may not be sufficient to cope with cyberthreats, and 74% agree they have increased exposure to data loss with the growth of employees working from home.

To address these problems, Dell announced three new products and services. This includes a new backup software for virtual machines (VMs) called Transparent Snapshots, and it will be globally available this quarter at no additional cost to existing Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager customers.

Dell has been developing this technology over the past couple of years, and it’s a big deal because it essentially replaces vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) and provides faster VM backups, all in software, Emsley said.

Like most other backup vendors, Dell has supported VADP for years. “It’s really been the default mechanism to deliver image-level backups,” he said. “With this announcement, we’ve been able to develop an alternative to VADP that provides both performance benefits and dramatic simplicity, bringing the ability to deliver VM image-level backups with near-zero impact on your production virtual machines.”

Some customers, and other vendors, integrate storage arrays to make the VM backup process easier and faster, but adding storage hardware “comes at a cost,” Emsley added. “This is a software-delivered methodology that doesn’t require any supplemental hardware capabilities in order to make the virtual machine backup work better.”

By automating VM image-level backups and requiring less infrastructure, Transparent Snapshots deliver up to five times faster backups and up to a five-time reduction in VM latency, the vendor claims. “Reduction in latency means the impact on a production workload becomes near zero,” Emsley explained.

The second new product is called Smart Scale, and it’s a new capability specific to Dell EMC PowerProtect appliances that helps organizations manage multiple data protection appliances at exabyte scale. “It also gives management insight into how the environment is running and how best to direct backups to different appliances within the data center,” Emsley said.

Using Smart Scale, customers can configure multiple appliances as a single pool giving them the ability to see and manage large data sets in one entity: as many as 32 PowerProtect appliances and more than 3 exabytes of logical capacity.

Dell EMC PowerProtect appliances with Smart Scale is in technology preview today, and Dell plans to make it generally available in the first half of 2022.

And finally, Dell announced new managed services for cyber recovery.

Dell previously provided both proactive and reactive managed security services. On the proactive side, this includes managed threat detection and response, and on the reactive side, this includes managed incident response after an attack.

With today’s announcement, customers can tap Dell to manage their Cyber Recovery Vault operations and support recovery activities. “This provides an additional level of recoverability, not from operational issues or disaster-type situations, but cyber-specific attacks,” such as ransomware, Emsley said.

Dell’s cyber recovery software and hardware includes 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. This product “has seen triple-digit growth year over year,” Emsley said.

After working with customers to deploy the vaults, “Our Global Services team is quite often asked, ‘Can you provide the management of both the day-to-day operations of the Cyber Recovery Vault? But then also, when there’s an incident, can the Global Services team manage the recovery?’” Emsley said.

This latest managed security service does just that.