Kyndryl announced an expanded partnership with Dell Technologies to jointly develop cybersecurity resilience services.

The collaboration is about “this new concept of cyber resilience, which is really around creating the connection between security and high availability,” Kris Lovejoy, global security and resiliency practice leader at Kyndryl, explained. “So that if there is a cyber incident, the organization can bring its functions back up again and ensure that the data that has perhaps been encrypted [can] be unlocked.”

This Cyber Incident Recovery service provides an air-gapped data vault for Dell’s storage, servers, and data protection systems.  It is designed to complement Dell’s existing backup and disaster recovery services to ensure one copy of the data is offline and inaccessible to malicious actors to help customers recover in the event of a cyberattack.

Dell is the latest in a string of partnerships announced by Kyndryl after IBM spun off its Global Technology Services (GTS) under the new company in late 2020. The managed infrastructure provider recently teamed up with several major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, to strengthen its cloud portfolio.

“Dell Technologies and Kyndryl are uniquely positioned for the hybrid cloud and data era,” Denise Millard, SVP, global alliances at Dell Technologies, said in a statement. “It's more important than ever to have confidence in the safety of your data,” and the two companies partnered to help customers achieve that. 

On top of the partnership, Kyndryl recently unveiled its Recovery Retainer Service to help customers assess their cybersecurity resilience readiness and ability to recover from cyberattacks. It offers intake workshops, expert support, and recovery services.

Kyndryl is seeing more focus on and more investment in the concept of cyber resilience and technologies that bridge security and recovery, Lovejoy said.

“This concept of cyber resilience, where organizations are investing in, ensures that they have not simply the means to identify and contain a ransomware event, but assuming that they get impacted by the ransomware event they're also able to recover,” she explained. 

“Resilience is this understanding that essentially you can't spend enough money to keep all the bad guys out,” she added. 

This concept of assuming a breach is similar to zero trust. Lovejoy noted that buzzword is just the deny-by-default philosophy gaining attention.

“Zero trust is an old philosophy made new again. It's nothing more than default-deny, but just with a sexier title,” she said.