Dell’s Sameer Shah: The Top Security Priorities Driving Customer Resilience This Cybersecurity Month
As organizations adopt AI, strengthen resilience strategies and prepare for emerging threats, partners are looking for ways to guide customer conversations while uncovering new services and infrastructure opportunities.
In this Cybersecurity Month conversation with CRNtv, Sameer Shah, cybersecurity portfolio marketing leader, integrated marketing for Dell Technologies, explores the cybersecurity trends driving customer discussions and how partners can position Dell's security and resilience capabilities to address them.
Kena Johnson: Let's start with Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Why does it matter, and what opportunity does it create for partners?
Sameer Shah: Cybersecurity Awareness Month was started in the United States a little over 20 years ago by the National Cybersecurity Alliance and CISA, which is a government agency. The intent was to create a platform for education and awareness around the relatively new field of cybersecurity. It’s a great opportunity to sit down with customers, talk about cybersecurity, look at potential needs and create sales opportunities for products and services Dell has around cyber resilience [and] embedded features in our storage and server platforms.
Kena Johnson: From your perspective, what are the cybersecurity conversations customers are having most often right now?
Sameer Shah: AI security is top of mind. Dell is selling a lot of AI infrastructure [and] our Dell AI Factory. As those implementations turn into AI workloads, they create a lot of data and a lot of cybersecurity risk goes along with those. Securing [AI workloads] and the data around them is a huge imperative.
There's also a different side of that which is using advanced AI models to find vulnerabilities and address them. That is so rapidly evolving that when we were first working on this program, we hadn't considered that. It's now an important piece of our program.
Resilience as a superpower [is also] one of our key themes this Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Resilience is the ability to absorb an attack with minimal disruption and keep operating and get back to normal as quickly as possible.
Post quantum cryptography, or PQC, is a very big deal as quantum computers get closer to go live. They could potentially make traditional encryption systems ineffective. We have to figure out how we're going to handle those and Dell products contain a lot of these capabilities already.
Then we talk about security outcomes. We want to make sure that when teams are frantically working on the day-to-day of cybersecurity that they're actually achieving the right outcomes and they have the right information and skills to talk effectively with their boards and their stakeholders to get alignment around the security strategy.
Kena Johnson: With those challenges in mind, how is Dell helping customers improve security and resilience across their environments?
Sameer Shah: On the one hand, Dell is not a pure security company, but it's been in our DNA for over 40 years. Products like server storage have strong embedded resilience and security features in them.
Our security and resilience portfolio is a great set of tools to help secure data and ensure that companies can recover from an attack very quickly.
It's all about educating partners, helping them take that message to customers and applying technologies to emerging environments like AI so we can ensure that our customers are free to innovate and grow, knowing that they're secure.
Kena Johnson: If partners remember one thing from our conversation today, what should it be?
Sameer Shah: Most importantly, know that Dell is heavily focused on cybersecurity. Because we've built so many features into our infrastructure [and] created tools like the security and resilience portfolio, there are great value initiatives that can be taken to customers. Know what those are and make sure you can speak to them and share the value with your customers.
You asked for one, but I'm going to give you a two for one. The second big take away I would is don't be concerned. Take advantage of all the tools that Dell's creating for partners. Be confident and comfortable having those conversations with our mutual customers because it's very important. And October is a great month to be doing it.
Access more actionable cybersecurity insights visit: dell.com/cybersecuritymonth.