Kyndryl kindles cyber incident recovery pact with Dell

Kyndryl, the former Global Technology Services unit of IBM, has formalised an expansion of an existing global partnership with Dell Technologies that will see it add cyber resilience capabilities to a menu that already includes data optimisation and infrastructure management services.

Under the terms of the agreement, it will provide cyber incident recovery services for customers using Dell’s storage, server and data protection systems, which will supposedly help “secure critical datasets and provide a verified process to recover data back into the business”.

Dell, for its part, will provide an air-gapped data vault service to store one copy of the data offline and hopefully out of trouble, helping customers to ensure the integrity and availability of their data assets, should the worst-case scenario – such as a ransomware attack – come to pass.

“We’re excited to expand our relationship with Dell and look forward to delivering solutions, services and support that customers need to store and protect their data and recover from cyber threats,” said Kris Lovejoy, Kyndryl’s global security and resiliency practice leader.

“Through this important alliance, we will work together to help companies improve performance and availability of critical data, predictive maintenance, non-disruptive upgrades and refreshes.”

Denise Millard, senior alliances senior vice-president at Dell Technologies, added: “It’s more important than ever for companies to have confidence in the protection of their critical data to ensure cyber resiliency.

“Dell and Kyndryl are well positioned to help our customers succeed in the multicloud and data era.”

The partners said that given effective cyber resilience is a high priority across their customer bases, the joint solution was designed to enhance and complement existing backup and disaster recover (DR) systems, minimise the impact of damaging security incidents, and enable victims to recover their day-to-day operations, and their data.

Meanwhile, Kyndryl was recently elevated to Titanium Black status in Dell’s strategic partner programme, which includes its “most strategic” collaborators, with an emphasis on data-centric and multicloud strategies.

Since its spin-out – supposedly on the basis that the legacy managed infrastructure business was drawing focus from IBM’s cloud growth and causing a conflict of interest within the firm – Kyndryl has announced multiple similar technology partnerships – all, predictably, in the service of accelerating digital transformation – across multiple sectors.

These include: a deal with Cloudera to focuse on enhancing data transformation projects across hybrid cloud environments, signed in March 2022; a global network and edge computing alliance with Finland’s Nokia, aimed at helping organisations speed their digital transformations with an “industrial-grade reliable and secure” LTE and 5G private wireless networking proposition, signed in February; and a multicloud services and integration pact with Google Cloud, signed in December 2021. It also has tie-ups with Microsoft, SAP and VMware.

To date, its revenues and profits have been down – Kyndryl cites various charges and transactions, many of them linked to its new-found independence from IBM, that have contributed to this. It hopes its alliances will begin to remedy this.

“Now that we are independent, today’s most important market trends have moved from being headwinds to being tailwinds for us,” Martin Schroeter, Kyndryl’s chairman and CEO, told analysts in March 2022.

“We are shifting beyond the constraints of being a captive unit inside IBM with its traditional offerings and free to expand the range of services we offer and the breadth of technologies we use.”