Dell Technologies and Continuity Partner to Secure Global Insurance Firm’s Storage & Backup Environment

Background – Identifying the Need for Security Control and Governance

In 2024, one of the world’s largest insurance firms suffered a data breach, which led to a rethink of their security strategy. With mounting pressure to ensure that critical infrastructure remained secure and compliant, the insurance firm needed a solution that could validate the configuration controls of these systems (including Dell Technologies, NetApp, and Brocade), and bridge the security visibility gap in their storage and data protection environment.

Laying the Groundwork: Dell Technologies and Continuity in Sync

The firm’s IT Infrastructure department was actively managing the configuration for their servers, but not for their storage & data protection systems.

While they had several processes for checking the configuration of their storage and data protection systems, they had no automated baselining mechanism in place, and no ability to scan the security configuration of these mission-critical systems.

The infrastructure team was concerned about the lack of a security baseline, and aligning their configurations to CIS Benchmarks.

Working with one of Dell’s Extended Technologies Complete (ETC) partners, Continuity – Dell offered StorageGuard, a solution that could help the insurance firm gain complete visibility into the security posture of their storage and data protection systems. This includes:

• Detecting when industry and vendor security configuration best practices are not implemented
• Validating adherence to various regulatory guidelines and industry standards, including CIS Benchmarks
• Continuous hardening of all storage and data protection systems

In September 2024, Dell and Continuity conducted a StorageGuard Proof of Concept (POC) for a subset of their PowerProtect DD (formerly Data Domain), PowerFlex, PowerScale (formerly Isilon), and Brocade SAN switches. This surfaced many security misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, along with remediation guidance.

Joint Execution: From Insight to Action

Following the POC, the firm purchased StorageGuard licenses and Professional Services – with deployment taking place in under four months.

The firm set 4-month goals to do the following:

• Establish a comprehensive baseline within StorageGuard for monitoring vulnerabilities, configuration best practices, and drift across their storage and data protection systems.
• Facilitate reporting against this baseline, prioritize the remediation of 25% of identified security findings, and create a documented framework for data integration into their IT Service Management platform, to include security reporting systems.

Results so far

• Enhanced security visibility across outsourced storage and data protection environments.
• Rapid detection and remediation of high-risk security misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. The infrastructure team remediated 30% of baseline configuration risks and vulnerabilities, surpassing the 25% target. And they want to keep the momentum going with another 25% of risks remediated in the next 3 months.
• Streamlined procurement and rollout, managed entirely through Dell.

Future Plans

Due to the success of the project, the firm’s infrastructure team plan on expanding StorageGuard across their APAC businesses. The deadline for this deployment set by customer is Q1 2026.

Why the Partnership Worked

The success of this engagement was rooted in how Dell and Continuity aligned their strengths:

• Continuity brought deep, purpose-built technology to uncover and mitigate risks in complex storage environments.
• Dell provided trusted delivery, procurement flexibility, and managed services capabilities to seamlessly embed the solution within the firm’s operating framework.

This customer project exemplifies the power of a well-aligned partnership. By combining StorageGuard with Dell’s enterprise delivery model, the insurance firm was able to take decisive action on storage & data protection risks – ensuring governance, visibility, and peace of mind across this mission-critical infrastructure.