There’s no question that AI’s impacting cybersecurity and the nature of risk that businesses face, but responding once you’ve identified these shifts is far more challenging than acknowledging that they’re happening.
Cybersecurity has never ‘stood still’ but the breadth and scale of change AI is driving — and the speed at which those changes are taking place – is without precedent. There are new threats to contend with and new kinds of decisions organizations must make regarding their IT infrastructure and long-term resilience
In response to these growing threats, the leaders of the Five Eyes security partnership called for urgent action. In a joint letter, they encouraged businesses to adopt several new measures including secure-by-design and secure-by-default infrastructure.
Beyond standard measures that businesses have adopted to date – such as zero-trust, firewalls, and anti-malware systems — embracing embedded security is essential. While third-party systems lie on top of infrastructure, embedded security injects much-needed foundational protections at the very heart of the technology organizations rely on. Whether at the hardware, firmware, or operating system (OS) level, Dell PowerProtect gives IT leaders a comprehensive level of resilience that’s baked into the system from day one. For IT decision makers, embedded cybersecurity should complement — not replace — zero trust, endpoint, network, identity, and SOC controls.
Embracing embedded security
The dawn of the AI era has significantly changed what organizations should expect from their foundational cybersecurity layers. Static and manual defenses are no longer enough; threats enabled by AI mean more sophisticated systems, including automation and dynamic defenses, are needed to ward away a new order of threats. Some of these risks include cheaper, faster, and more frequent attacks, smarter AI-enabled social engineering, malicious autonomous AI agents working together with human orchestrators, and specific model-related threats like model poisoning and prompt injection.
Although AI can be net positive for the industry overall, businesses must make essential considerations when securing their IT infrastructure for the next generation. These decisions will challenge IT leaders to consider security in a new way and incorporate elements they may not have done so a decade ago.
Beyond security at the hardware level, businesses must also consider an evolution of managed detection and response (MDR) from endpoints to storage platforms, like Dell PowerScale. The next generation of infrastructure should also incorporate dynamic zero trust, which evaluates access requests in real time based on changing context (instead of relying on static signals). This should include continuous verification and smart behavioral baselines bolstering organizations’ level of protection.
“AI promises to transform operations, personalize customer experiences and drive competitive advantage,” writes Dell’s senior consultant, product marketing Colm Keegan in a blog. “Yet, the fear of sophisticated cyberattacks targeting your AI workloads can feel like a roadblock. How can you innovate boldly while ensuring your organization’s most critical assets remain resilient? The answer lies in building a cyber-resilient foundation to support your AI journey.”
Ultimately, organizations deserve the maximum possible chance of withstanding AI-driven cyberattacks. Embedded security, which is designed to protect components and software from production from the get go is the best way to secure that reality.
Bolstering defences in the new era
“Cyber threats are relentless, evolving to exploit vulnerabilities in AI-driven organizations. Data integrity isn’t just a compliance checkbox; it’s the foundation of trust, continuity and long-term success,” Keegan continues. “By integrating Dell PowerProtect solutions with your Dell AI Factory, you’re not just mitigating risks — you’re building a resilient foundation that unlocks the agility and confidence needed to stay ahead in a competitive landscape.”
The Dell PowerProtect suite of tools and systems is key to integrating the principles of embedded security into your organization’s IT infrastructure. Designed with simplicity and sophistication in mind, enterprises can adopt PowerProtect’s portfolio of backup and recovery capabilities, data protection safeguards, and hardware-level security to ensure that infrastructure benefits from inherent multi-layered and foundational architectures built directly into the core hardware, firmware and OS of Dell’s infrastructure portfolio.
For example, PowerProtect Data Domain appliances – purpose-built back-up-centric physical and virtual applications with restricted access to internal operations — run with embedded Data Domain Operating System (DDOS). This system means that additional software or agents cannot be installed or run, ensuring control and consistency of releases while providing additional security.
PowerProtect appliances also establish a secure boot sequence starting at the silicon level, with Dell hardening the embedded controller to verify firmware and BIOS security using digital signatures. This ensures that system code cannot be tampered with throughout the supply chain or via local exploits.
Another example of embedded security is the use of AI and anomaly detection built into PowerProtect platforms. These machine learning engines, like Cyber Detect, reside within storage layers and perform analytics on backup data to detect and flag any suspicious behavior. This includes unwanted changes or even ransomware signatures with 99.99% accuracy.
Modern infrastructure is the foundation of bridging intelligence to life, especially in the AI era, but any systems that organizations consider must incorporate security-by-design to allow them to flourish safely. Dell unifies several essential components in its suite of infrastructure solutions, with high-performance storage protected by embedded security in the form of its PowerProtect portfolio. This gives customers simplicity and sophistication in their private cloud and multi-cloud setups so they can move from ambitions around AI to serious outcomes. All of this is impossible without the resilience PowerProtect allows, with security measures implemented within appliances as early as on the factory floor.
If you’re interested in finding out more about how PowerProtect can add a much-needed level of resilience to the infrastructure in your business, find out more on the Dell website: US readers click here and CA readers here.
