At Dell Technologies World 2026, the tech giant announced major changes to its portfolio and to the role security plays in enhancing it, ensuring partners and customers are well protected as cyber threats evolve.
Why partner alignment is crucial to customer success
Rob Emsley, Director at Dell Technologies, told Channel Insider that Dell Technologies World stands out as a major event because partners come prepared with a clear business purpose tied to new announcements, incentives, and portfolio opportunities.
“One of the things that we absolutely realize is that partners have choices. Many partners align themselves to not just Dell Technologies, and some of it comes down to servicing their customers and listening to what their customers and listening to what their customers ask them for,” said Emsley.
“But certainly what we find is that the portfolio breadth that Dell Technologies provides can be very much a one-stop shop for many customers around the world.”
Emsley added that this really aligns partners to offer more and allows them to drive themselves to different levels of partner accreditation and partner value, which opens up the ability for more retained margin and more support.
Cyber resilience as a cross-portfolio discipline
Emsley framed cyber resilience as a broader infrastructure and operational discipline that extends beyond backup and recovery.
“Cyber resilience is not simply a backup and recovery discipline. Many vendors in the market have attempted to position themselves that way,” said Emsley. “Some of it is, ‘Hey, we used to be a backup company, then we were a data protection company, then we were a cyber resilience company, now we’re security.’”
“I think if you think about cyber resilience more holistically, it’s a cross-portfolio discipline, from the PCs that you’re both using all the way to the racks of compute and GPU-enabled servers running in the data center. All of the infrastructure is part of the attack surface for bad actors, and from a cyber resilience perspective we have to realize that and work out how to bring cyber resilience and security across not only the Dell Technologies portfolio, but also beyond.”
Security from the beginning has been key to protecting customers and partners. Dell’s manufacturing and supply chain capabilities are increasingly important as enterprises prioritize secure infrastructure deployment.
How Dell positions itself as a secure supply chain
Emsley said that one of the best opportunities and benefits Dell can leverage is that it builds its own products. Dell doesn’t source them as many vendors do in cyberspace.
“All of our solutions are sourced from Dell manufacturing and delivered to the customer in a secure supply chain way,” said Emsley. “Whether it be clients, servers, or storage, it’s all secure by design. The ability to order, get shipped, and deploy – there are security capabilities built into every element of that process.”
AI hardware and endpoint security remain in high demand
Channel Insider also spoke to Charlie Walker, Head of Dell Pro Precision at Dell Technologies, and Marc Hammons, Senior Distinguished Engineer at Dell Technologies, about endpoint and AI hardware security.
“You think about a workstation-class product that’s got secure supply chain verification and BIOS validation, so that you have the confidence that when you order the product, it hasn’t been tampered with anywhere between manufacturing and delivery,” said Walker.
“It keeps that full end-to-end security story. We also have CrowdStrike Falcon available on the GB10 and the GB300. So even if you’re running local models and open-source tooling, now I’ve got device-level protection and operating system protection looking for malicious activity.”
In addition to built-in security throughout the supply chain, Dell’s integrated ecosystem simplifies deployment and creates operational advantages for partners.
Emsley says that when he speaks with partners, the breadth of product offerings available to customers gives Dell the ability to differentiate on cyber resilience.
“The ability to integrate the PowerProtect portfolio with Dell storage is a hell of a lot easier than integrating PowerProtect with a third-party storage provider,” explained Emsley. “There’s always a relationship question, access to APIs, access to how things work. It’s not always readily shared because there’s a level of competition that exists.”
AI, data sovereignty, and on-prem infrastructure
AI adoption has caused growing concerns around data sovereignty and cloud dependency. Enterprises are also evaluating local AI deployments to maintain tighter control over sensitive information.
“You can store data in the cloud, but we’re starting to see, especially in Europe, lots of questions about data sovereignty,” Emsley said. “That becomes tricky when you’re leveraging the public cloud for storing your backup data because in order to make that backup data more resilient in the cloud, you start looking at cloud-to-cloud replication and then the question comes, ‘Where’s my data?’”
He added, “We’ve had an incredible history of delivering on-premises backup and recovery storage solutions. Data Domain has literally been the foundational technology for cyber resilience for us for 20 years because it’s purpose-built for storing backup data for the outcome of recovery.”
Hammons mentioned the “tokenomics” side of AI use and how using local AI can help with budget savings.
There are a number of benefits in bringing the AI model closer to where your data is. Your IP stays with you under your own roof.
“One of the reasons people want local instances and on-prem deployments is because they’re in environments where pushing data into the cloud just is not an option,” said Hammons. “So, now you’ve got a portfolio that goes all the way from an endpoint device to larger infrastructure running local AI models. Frontier models are great, but you do have to give some things up in exchange for them.”
The importance of security and recovery in AI production
Additionally, security and recovery planning are becoming essential requirements as enterprises move AI into production environments. Security-sensitive workflows are also driving demand for local AI deployments.
Emsley says that there’s a much better understanding as organizations move into production that security and resilience of the AI infrastructure and AI outcomes are non-negotiable.
He says that Dell has a mantra: if you can’t protect it, don’t deploy it.
“Customers realize that AI can be used for good, but AI can also be used by bad actors,” Emsley said.
“I think there is much more of an understanding that security and resilience is as important today, if not more important, than it was over the last five-to-ten years. If you have confidence in recovery, then no matter what happens to you, you always have a plan to recover.”
Walker explained that there are situations where you can’t risk having information floating around, whether that’s information under NDA with partners or embargoed information. You can’t risk putting that information into tools that we don’t fully control, even if it’s a hosted instance.
“I absolutely have to have it on a machine where I know everything is sandboxed and stays only on that machine,” Walker said. “That’s what we’re hearing from a lot of customers right now – they still use the frontier models, but there are workloads where local AI becomes essential because of security and governance requirements.”
AI guardrails and governance take shape
Hammons builds on that by explaining how enterprises are beginning to implement AI-specific guardrails and governance controls around local AI deployments.
“NVIDIA Guardrails is actually a library that we use in our experiments, and it allows us to inject more guardrails into the stack. That helps protect against loss of IP, personally identifiable information, credit cards, personal phone numbers – you can create filters around all of those things,” said Hammons.
“Since it’s running locally, the only extension point is the running device itself, which is probably much cheaper and easier to manage than borrowing from a cloud instance. Those tools are available as part of the stack depending on what customers need from an API and governance standpoint.”
PowerProtect One is part of Dell’s push to simplify cyber resilience architectures for partners and customers.
From a partner perspective, PowerProtect One simplifies access to the PowerProtect portfolio, enabling a simpler path to achieving a cyber resilience architecture.
“PowerProtect One brings together our PowerProtect software and our PowerProtect appliances into an integrated architecture,” said Emsley. “But at the same time, rather than some alternative integrated architectures that are a close-box solution, we still continue to support the third-party landscape of backup and recovery applications.”
