Dell’s ‘Most Exciting’ Apex Launch: Cyber Recovery Services

At Dell Technologies World 2022 today, Dell introduced its new Dell Apex Cyber Recovery Services offering to help customers recovery from cyberattacks. Here’s what Dell channel partners need to know.

Dell Technologies is doubling down on helping customers recover from cyberattacks and driving cyber recovery as-a-service sales with the launch of its newest Apex offering: Cyber Recovery Services, now available for channel partners to sell.

“This cyber recovery is the most exciting [Apex] offer yet because cyber threats are in every discussion we’re having with customers” said Dan O’Brien, senior vice president of Solution Engineering for Presidio, a Dell Titanium Black partner.

“Dell is saying, ‘We’re going to solve for some of the people issues that become a challenge for customers who don’t have the in-house expertise. We’re giving you the capacity skills to manage this environment and go through testing cycles to make sure that the recovery is actually going to work in the event of cyberattack,’” said O’Brien. “Dell’s also helping customers have a consumption-based model that can even be in the cloud, to say, ‘In the event that something happens, you don’t have to worry about procuring and building another environment. We’ve got that covered for you.’ To me, with the supply chain challenges and the people issues in our industry right now, this is really solving those two things.”

At Dell Technologies World 2022 today in Las Vegas, Dell introduced its newest Apex portfolio offering with Dell Apex Cyber Recovery Services.

Dell Apex Cyber Recovery Services is the first in a series of new Apex full stack solutions that deliver a cloud experience to simplify recovery from cyberattacks. Dell manages the daily cyber recovery vault operations and assists with data recovery.

[Related: Dell Technologies World 2022 coverage]

Dell delivers the Apex as-a-service experience with standardized configurations, simplified Dell-assisted recovery options and expertise from nearly 2,000 isolated vault solutions deployed globally.

Puts Channel Partners ‘In The Prime Seat’

Channel partners can now sell the cybersecurity solution in the United States, according to Dell, with plans for broader availability in other geographies later this year.

Sam Grocott, senior vice president of product marketing for Dell Technologies, told CRN that the Round Rock, Texas-based company is continuing to extend its “market leading compensation plans” for partners around Apex with the new Cyber Recovery Services.

“There is no boardroom conversation going on in any company that isn’t concerned about what they’re doing about cyber and cyber protection. So that puts channel partners right in the prime seat to be able to consult, advise, and of course sell their services,” said Grocott. “Partners typically make a lot better money and more money on services than products. They can come over the top and sell their integration services, or application services, and they certainly can handle the migrations. The more that they can build out the expertise around all things cyber—and we’re partnering with them to do that—is going to create just a tremendous amount of opportunities for all of us to help our customers protect their data.”

Customers who buy Dell’s new Apex Cyber Recovery Services can protect their most important data, dynamically detect anomalies, and predict business recovery, to name a few features.

Chad Dunn, vice president of product management for Dell’s HCI, CI and software-defined storage, said the new Apex offering enables partners to provide a cloud-like experience to customers with confidence when recovering from a cyberattack and achieve more agility by offloading the day-to-day management of cyber data protection.

“Customers also get more resiliency through recovery operations from an isolated, immutable and intelligent data vault. Cyber Recovery Services streamline the deployment of cyber recovery solutions through standardized configurations, and recovery service options will give customers more control with templated recovery, runbooks and procedures,” Dunn said. “We provide the expert guidance at every step, helping customers optimize the selection of applications and data to protect in the vault, while one point of contact communicates the status of the vault operations throughout the subscription.”

Apex’s One-Year Anniversary; ‘Partner-Friendly’ Now

Officially launched in May 2021, Dell Apex is the company’s flagship as-a-service portfolio that aims to change the way channel partners manage and sell Dell products and services. Apex allows businesses to scale on demand, provision quickly and pay-as-you-go across multi-cloud environments.

The Apex portfolio includes Data Storage Services and Backup Services for data protection and storage; Cloud Services With VMware Cloud, Hybrid Cloud and Private Cloud offerings for compute; and Flex-on-Demand and Data Center Utility for custom infrastructure as-a-service and pay-per-use deployments.

Overall, New York-based Presidio has closed on a handful of Apex deals with “significantly more” waiting in the pipeline.

“Dell’s gone a long way to make it a more partner-friendly offering. It’s helping us because we don’t have to manufacture this for our customers. We don’t have to go out and leverage our managed services and leverage our financial people,” said O’Brien. “We can bring this value to our customers, thanks to Dell, without all the sweat-equity behind the scenes.”

Dell Apex is helping Presidio’s mission to transform their customers’ business, rewrite applications and focus more on data.

“If we can simplify the things that have to be there to run a customer’s business, which Apex does, and get them out of the technical debt of applying people to manage it and make sure it’s deployed and it works appropriately—it completely changed that for us,” he said. “For a partner model, it’s really enabling us to be able to drive forward now.”