News

Dell-EMC Union To Yield New Security Solutions

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• October 19, 2016

The first fruits of Dell's $67 billion acquisition of EMC will comprise a new platform that combines its existing endpoint security offerings with those from EMC and its RSA and VMware AirWatch businesses.

The new endpoint security and management portfolio is one of several announcements made at Dell EMC World, a two-day gathering in Austin, Texas, that kicked off Tuesday.

The Dell-EMC deal closed six weeks ago, representing the largest ever merger of two IT infrastructure providers. During Tuesday's opening keynote, Dell Founder and Chairman Michael Dell expressed confidence that the newly combined company will not only succeed, but thrive.

"Today, Dell is the largest enterprise systems company in the entire world," he said.

Dell pointed to the benefits of coming together to address the growing prevalence of cyberattacks and threats.

"Every time I sit down with our colleagues with RSA or SecureWorks and they take us through not what happened in the last quarter but just this week, it's very scary," Dell said during a press conference following the keynote session. "The nature of the attacks and the sophistication of the attacks is increasing."

Dell's new security suite will come out of its client solutions group, which includes its PC offerings.

"You have a package from us that meets the changing needs of the workforce," said Jeff Clarke, Dell's vice chairman of operations and president of the client solutions group, during a session announcing the new suite. "We now have the ability for endpoint security that's unmatched in the market."

Initially, Dell will offer the new portfolio as a bundled suite, Clarke said, and over time the various products will interoperate with each other. Ultimately, Dell will offer a single management console for the entire offering, Clarke said.

The company is looking at this platform as three key components: identity and authentication, data protection, and unified endpoint management. The bundle will include:

• Dell Data Protection-Endpoint Security Suite, which provides authentication, file-based encryption and advanced threat protection.
  
  
• MozyEnterprise and MozyPro, the company's cloud-based backup and recovery, file sync and encryption offering.
  
  
• RSA SecurID Access, the multifactor, single sign-on authentication solution.
  
  
• RSA NetWitness Endpoint, a tool designed to use behavioral analytics and machine learning to provide more rapid remediation to advanced threats.
  
  
• VMware AirWatch, the company's mobile device management offering. With this release, Dell said organizations can use Dell Data Protection with AirWatch to report on activity for compliance.

Dell believes companies are looking to streamline the number of security solutions in their organizations. A new benchmark survey from Technology Business Research (TBR) shows that large companies typically have 50 security products and smaller organizations have 10. Companies would like to get those numbers down to 45 and eight, respectively, according to TBR's findings.

This is the second year in a row that customers are spending more of their budgets on endpoint security than on any other segment, said TBR analyst Jane Wright during a panel session at Dell EMC World.

"Customers are telling us that they're spending more money than ever on endpoint security," Wright said. "And it's not just that they want to protect those nice, pretty endpoints. They're looking to protect the data that's on those endpoints or passing through those endpoints at any given time."

The increased spend isn't just on products, Wright added. "They are dedicating more people and creating more policies and procedures and testing than ever before."