Dell bulks out zero trust services portfolio to help protect Microsoft users

Dell says it is providing Identity & Endpoint Protection with Microsoft Zero Trust services to protect Microsoft users.

It is now assumed that malware and other types of attack will sometimes break through perimeter security defences, like firewalls, and enter an organisation’s IT network. The appropriate strategy is to minimize the internal attack surface and provide fast and highly granular recovery services for data that has been encrypted by ransomware or otherwise corrupted. Zero trust ideas treat every user as a potential attacker and verifies their data accesses whilst granting them the least privileged access status they need, so limiting their blast radius.

Mustafa Hamid.

Mustafa Hamid, global discipline lead for the Modern Workforce in Dell Technologies Consulting Services said: “Since many of our customers rely heavily on Microsoft technologies for collaboration and Identity and Access Management, we are expanding our Zero Trust offerings by now introducing Identity & Endpoint Protection with Microsoft Zero Trust.”

An issue with zero trust approaches is that they need to be closely integrated with the IT environment that is being protected. Hence Dell is working with Microsoft to add zero trust principles in a service for identity and endpoint protection of its systems operating within the Microsoft environment. 

Earlier in October, Dell announced Zero Trust cybersecurity services along with a Zero Trust Center of Excellence that uses a US Department of Defense-approved architecture. Now Dell is adding to that by supplying a suite of services for Dell + Microsoft customers that provide:

  • Assessment of Active Directory and Azure Active Directory and other Microsoft items to discover existing cybersecurity status and generate recommendations.
  • Defence using Microsoft’s Defender suite, integration with Microsoft’s Sentinel SIEM product, ServiceNow and similar services, plus Dell services to secure endpoints, MS 365 and Active Directory.
  • User education to increase and sustain awareness of cybersecurity risks and adopt a better security posture.
  • Managed services to provide incident detection and response for customers wanting to outsource these functions.

An aspect of zero trust is that a customer’s IT system is spending an appreciable amount of its resources checking user and application resource requests. We can all remember anti-virus products that slowed our PCs down because of the continuous and lengthy checks they carried out on every data access and activity. 

Hamid points out that the path to Zero Trust looks different for every organization and involves a complex journey to implement this type of system architecture. If you take the attitude that, literally, data and resources are inaccessible by default, then every data and resource accessed by a user and applications they invoke needs verifying. In effect every user has a shadow security monitor, aka digital security guard, watching everything they do and checking to see if it’s permitted.