Data protection is a constant in a world of ever changing dynamics. Organizations are continuously evolving their data protection strategies to meet new business concerns. At Dell we are always monitoring what our customers need to stay ahead. One way we do this is with our Global Data Protection Index (GDPI). The GDPI is research conducted by Vanson Bourne, a B2B market research company providing services to the technology sector since 1999. For over 10 years we have been using the GDPI to help track the data protection confidence levels of organizations around the globe focusing on latest emerging trends that can potentially impact the security of their data.
Let’s start with the definition of what Dell PowerProtect Data Manager delivers….specifically, software-defined data protection, automated discovery, deduplication, operational agility, self-service and IT governance for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Ultimately, it is Dell’s next generation software platform for proven and modern cloud data protection.
We’re watching the IT landscape change, and data protection has shifted beyond IT-driven application restores and disaster recovery. Backup requirements and responsibilities have crossed over to application and data owners, and they want to do more than simply restore data.
Data Manager gives you valuable insight into protected on-premises and in-cloud workloads, applications, file systems, and virtual machines. Designed with operational simplicity and agility in mind, Data Manager enables the protection of traditional workloads including Oracle, Exchange, SQL, SAP HANA and file systems as well as Kubernetes containers and virtual environments.
You have the ability to restore data on-premises or in the cloud, AND you can do that from native interfaces. And, centralized governance control ensures IT compliance, making even the strictest service level objectives obtainable. You are enabled with additional operational efficiencies such as self service, automated discovery, SaaS-monitoring and reporting, and easy deployments, upgrades and scale. And only with PowerProtect Data Manager can you ensure availability of all your VMs at scale without business disruption.
The bottom line here: We’re talking about the evolution of data protection to deliver confidence data is protected and available.
Anomaly Detection: Proactively secures your data by using machine learning to monitor backups for suspicious activity and potential ransomware threats. By flagging anomalies immediately and providing real-time alerts, it empowers users to maintain data integrity and mitigate risks swiftly, helping ensure continuous and secure business operations.
Archive to Object: Archive to Object is designed for long-term retention, archival and lifecycle policy management, letting you save and restore data more efficiently. Unlike the Cloud Tier solution, A2O allows data recovery directly to the source without requiring Data Domain, offering greater flexibility and faster recoveries for IT operations. This feature is offered at no additional cost — customers only pay for the ECS on-premises storage costs.
Hyper-V Protection Agent: Built from the ground up to protect your Hyper-V environment, this agent offers advanced capabilities like full VM and incremental backups, synthetic full backups and file-level recovery. It empowers users with robust data protection while introducing performance enhancements and simplified backup and restore processes.
Multi-System Reporting: Provides a single, scalable interface to monitor and report on multiple Dell data protection systems across on-premise, cloud and edge environments. This empowers customers to improve control, streamline operations and reduce costs with features like role-based access controls, dashboards and multi-tenancy. Users can now effortlessly monitor up to 150 systems with enhanced efficiency and a seamless user experience.
Protection for OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt Support): This feature allows PowerProtect Data Manager users to protect VMs, both Windows and Linux, that are deployed within Kubernetes environments using the open-source KubeVirt standard. This ensures applications that can’t be containerized can still be managed alongside containerized workloads, providing a future-proof, non-proprietary solution for VM protection. Customers gain a holistic, end-to-end data protection solution for Kubernetes, particularly on the OpenShift platform, which is increasingly preferred by enterprises.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) with Google and Microsoft Authenticator: Adds an additional layer of security to PowerProtect Data Manager, ensuring only authorized users can access critical systems. Backup and security admins can enable or disable MFA per user or for specific roles, log all attempts in the audit log, and choose from multiple authentication methods (e.g., SMS, email). This feature protects against security breaches, providing peace of mind for IT environments.
Let’s talk about Anomaly Detection with PowerProtect Data Manager. This feature provides a robust layer of security by offering early detection of anomalies from every backup. This means you can gain immediate insights into potential security threats, allowing you to address any issues proactively.
Now, how does it achieve this? Our software uses fast machine learning to continuously analyze patterns within your backup meta data. This helps to identify suspicious activity as it arises, securing your IT environment from threats before they have the chance to escalate.
One significant advantage is the lightweight nature of this detection process. It operates seamlessly within your existing infrastructure of PowerProtect Data Manager. This ensures your on-premises detection is both efficient and resource-conscious, allowing you to maintain optimal system performance.
Additionally, our comprehensive evaluation ensures the integrity of your backup data, further reinforcing the security and consistency of your digital infrastructure. By identifying anomalies quickly, PowerProtect Data Manager empowers you to act before challenges become significant issues.
Overall, Anomaly Detection enhances your ability to maintain business continuity and secure your data from potential breaches or ransomware attacks, empowering you to focus on what’s most important—driving your organization’s success.
Cyber attacks, especially ransomware, are serious threats to organizations. Anomaly Detection acts as a proactive defense, using advanced algorithms to identify abnormalities before they escalate. It leverages ML to analyze data patterns, focusing on key operational metrics related to backup streams and monitoring security controls. By proactively analyzing data patterns, Anomaly Detection protects your data and assets in today’s dynamic digital environment. It serves as a defense against ransomware attacks and normal file metric changes, ensuring the integrity of your backup data.
With Anomaly Detection, you gain peace of mind knowing potential threats are addressed before they impact your organization.
Anomaly Detection enhances the security and integrity of your data environment with PowerProtect Data Manager. By leveraging advanced machine learning (ML), Anomaly Detection offers proactive security that identifies cyber threats in your production backup environment. This capability ensures early threat detections by scanning metadata post-backup to provide immediate insights into potential risks without additional licensing costs.
Here’s how it works:
- Pattern Matching uses Dell’s extensive library—comprising over 5,000 patterns— to recognize known ransomware patterns. This method scans backup metadata to identify suspicious file names, paths, and extensions, prioritizing alerts based on severity.
- Behavioral Analysis takes a closer look at the backup file metadata, evaluating details like name, modified time, and created time. By applying a time-series model with moving averages, this approach helps detect anomalies that might signify a ransomware attack, even those not covered by pattern matching.
- System Configuration Analysis scans system settings during the backup process to pinpoint vulnerabilities that could be exploited. This is one of our competitive advantages because no other vendor has this feature in their anomaly detection functionality. It currently supports Windows systems, checking for common issues like disabled firewalls or User Account Control settings. Dell identifies 20 known configuration settings, alongside 4 specific ransomware configurations, to enhance your security framework.
These techniques provide fast detection and immediate responses, enabling your organization to address threats before they escalate. The lightweight nature of the software ensures it operates effectively without external dependencies or local resource consumption, maintaining operational consistency and enhancing the integrity of your digital infrastructure.
With PowerProtect Data Manager, you’re empowered to protect your valuable data seamlessly, fostering a resilient and secure business environment
With the introduction of our purpose-designed agent for Hyper-V protection in PowerProtect Data Manager, we’re delivering a tailored solution built from the ground up to meet the unique demands of Hyper-V environments. This agent is engineered to provide reliable, cyber-resilient data protection that you can trust. A highlight is the use of Hyper Resilient Change Tracking (RCT) technology, which enables incremental backups while maintaining synthetic full backups, ensuring high storage and performance efficiency.
Recovery capabilities are a top priority for us, offering full VM recovery at launch. The flexibility of these features means your customers can restore entire virtual machines quickly, enabling faster operational recovery. This is especially important for organizations that prioritize high availability and reduced downtime.
We’ve also extended support to Azure Local, previously known as Azure Stack HCI, seamlessly integrating on-premises environments into the protection suite. This ensures customers leveraging Azure Local’s Hyper-V backend are fully protected under the same robust configuration.
For IT professionals and partners, these enhancements mean a more scalable, versatile, and user-friendly experience. Additionally, capabilities like Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC) further enhance security.
The rollout of these features in PowerProtect Data Manager 19.19 is a significant milestone. It marks an important step in expanding beyond VMWare support, reaching customers who are diversifying toward non-VMWare hypervisors like Hyper-V, OpenShift Virtualization or Nutanix AHV. This evolution signifies our commitment to customer-centric innovation that keeps pace with industry demands while driving operational resilience to the next level.
PowerProtect Data Manager now extends its robust data protection to include OpenShift Virtualization powered by KubeVirt, allowing businesses to seamlessly integrate virtual machines into Kubernetes environments. Many customers are asking for this capability because it addresses a fundamental need — to protect applications that aren’t easily containerized but still demand robust management alongside their containerized counterparts.
KubeVirt serves as the core virtualization API for Kubernetes, ensuring support for VMs deployed within Kubernetes clusters. This means PowerProtect Data Manager users can now confidently protect both Linux and Windows VMs running within Kubernetes, using a standardized, open approach that avoids reliance on proprietary solutions while guaranteeing future compatibility.
From a business perspective, this feature is especially critical for industries, such as telecommunications, that already heavily leverage OpenShift virtualization and KVM infrastructure within their operations. This comprehensive solution aligns perfectly with the growing need for containerized and VM-based application management.
Additionally, it addresses a key market shift — customers seeking alternatives to traditional hypervisors due to rising costs and licensing changes. OpenShift Container Platform virtualization represents a cost-effective migration path, and many customers are already planning transitions to modernize their infrastructure while lowering expenses.
For users, this expansion delivers greater value by offering end-to-end Kubernetes data protection, which includes the ability to protect VMs that reside within Kubernetes clusters. Whether it’s OpenShift Virtualization or VMWare alternatives, PowerProtect Data Manager provides the tools needed to enable seamless management and protection of mixed workloads across hybrid environments.
With the new Multi-System Reporting capabilities, PowerProtect Data Manager is changing how customers manage their data protection infrastructure. This feature allows centralized monitoring and reporting for up to 150 PowerProtect Data Manager systems or appliances from a single, scalable interface. This means IT admins and businesses no longer need to juggle multiple dashboards or interfaces, significantly reducing complexity and saving valuable time.
One of the key highlights is the ability to access detailed resource analytics in one place—covering everything from job statuses and storage insights to alerts, system health, and more. It doesn’t stop there. Historic data retention is seamlessly managed for up to 18 months, ensuring comprehensive visibility without additional effort from the user.
What sets this apart is the customizable dashboard functionality. Out-of-the-box templates make it easy to get started, while advanced users can tailor dashboards to meet specific needs or even create brand-new ones. Add in Grafana’s robust feature set—like scheduled reporting, single sign-on, and multi-tenancy—and users gain a highly flexible, enterprise-grade solution with advanced reporting and monitoring capabilities.
This feature isn’t just about reporting—it’s about enabling better decision-making, reducing operational costs and offering customers the tools to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive space. And as a future-proof design, this collector framework allows easy integration of additional products, making it adaptable as their ecosystem grows.
Ultimately, Multi-System Reporting empowers organizations to simplify management, maximize efficiency and transform oversight of their data protection environments.
With this new feature in PowerProtect Data Manager, we’re introducing Archive to Object to significantly enhance backup and archival processes while meeting the demands of scalability, cost-efficiency and flexibility.
First, efficiency is key. The platform enables policy-driven archiving to object storage, streamlining backups and making long-term retention seamless. Customers can now leverage automated, policy-based workflows to reduce manual oversight and eliminate redundancies in operations.
Next, Archive to Object offers unparalleled flexibility. One of the standout benefits is the ability to perform direct restores from object storage without needing to route through Data Domain. This means no more dependency on migration to Data Domain for recoveries, offering faster recovery times and simpler workflows.
Scalability is another essential advantage. Archive to Object supports substantial data workloads, handling up to 200TB daily and up to 1PB weekly. This feature ensures customers can confidently scale their backup operations as their business grows, without worrying about hitting data archival limits.
And finally, Archive to Object is cost-effective. Unlike other solutions requiring additional license costs, Archive to Object comes at no extra charge to PowerProtect Data Manager users. Customers are only responsible for the cost of the cloud storage they select — whether it’s on-premises with Dell ObjectScale (formerly ECS) or in the cloud.
This combination of efficient archiving, flexible restores, scalability and cost-effectiveness not only modernizes backup strategies but also delivers an innovative, cyber-resilient solution for the enterprise.
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