Dell promises to “make it easy” for its customers to create networks built on a zero trust framework, while letting its channel partners resell the company's expertise in this security environment to their own customers.
The services identify security gaps, find a path to long-term cyber resilience and recommend technologies to get to zero trust.
This includes offering a recurring vulnerability scan by Dell of the customer’s environment.
“We understand how difficult this is, how complex this is, to move to a different architecture to adopt principles that are intuitively obvious but difficult to implement. It is our job to make that easy,” Dell global chief technology officer John Roese said.
“The litmus test of our security products and technology is do they take friction out of the customer journey in adoption of zero trust principles?"
"Do they shift the burden to us and not the customer? Do they accelerate the customer’s ability to adopt zero trust architecture?” he added.
Dell hopes to change how end customers look at security in three ways: making sure the platform itself, the hardware and software customers use are securely designed and supplied; making sure the system where the data and applications live and work only “allows the good;” and then create a recovery plan for when all of that fails.
“We don’t believe a single product of any flavour can solve all security issues. We don’t believe that there is a silver bullet to security,” Roese said.
“But we do believe that there are architectural approaches, product approaches, ecosystem approaches that can dramatically change the security posture of a modern enterprise,” he said.
To this end, customers can now opt for Dell to disable PC ports prior to shipment to help prevent tampering of BIOS settings.
Dell is also expanding availability of tamper-evident seals to Asia-Pacific and Europe, the Middle East and Africa to offer more physical security measures during shipment.
Meanwhile, thanks to a collaboration with Microsoft Intune, Dell said it is “first to market” with firmware protection that provides telemetry between Intune, as part of Microsoft Endpoint Manager, and Splunk consoles.
This allows IT administrators to secure, control and configure Dell PCs, including BIOS configuration and password management.
This will be available in a future release of Microsoft Intune.
Some of the zero trust offerings are available now, with others set for next year.
“Channel is absolutely critical for us,” said Dell’s Arun Krishnamoorthy, global strategy lead for resiliency and security, during a briefing for media.
“As we move into the future, there will be a lot of co-delivery options where we will partner with the channel.”
