In an age where cyber threats evolve faster than ever, resilience isn’t defined by how well an organisation can defend itself, but by how quickly it can recover.

That distinction is at the heart centre of Andy Blackham’s work as Technical Partner Manager at Synapse. For him, resilience is not an abstract concept. It’s an operational reality that depends on collaboration, precision, and trust between technology partners.

“Cyber resilience begins with the assumption that at some point, something will fail,” Andy explains. “The question is: can you recover cleanly, confidently, and fast enough to keep your business moving?”

That’s why Synapse partners with Dell Technologies — a name synonymous with proven backup, recovery, and infrastructure reliability. Together, they help organisations shift from reactive response to proactive recovery readiness through cyber recovery-as-a-service (CRaaS) — a managed, modular approach tailored to each customer’s critical workloads.

The Foundation of a Strong Partnership

Dell’s heritage in backup and disaster recovery stretches back decades, underpinned by its deep expertise in networking, storage, and data protection. This foundation has evolved into an architecture purpose-built for modern cyber resilience.

“Dell has laid the foundation” says Andy. “They’ve spent years perfecting the fundamentals — how to store, move, and protect data reliably at scale. That history gives them an unmatched advantage in building cyber recovery solutions that genuinely hold up when things go wrong.”

This partnership isn’t about buzzwords or one-off tools. It’s about engineering dependability into every layer of the recovery stack, from immutable storage to air-gapped architecture.

Inside the Vault: What Makes Dell Different

At the core of Dell’s approach lies PowerProtect Data Domain (PPDD) — the backbone of the Dell Cyber Recovery Vault. For Andy, it’s one of the most mature and secure data protection platforms available to enterprise and mid-market organisations today.

“PowerProtect is the quiet powerhouse in many of our customers’ environments,” he notes. “Its architecture is deliberately built for resilience.”

Key features include:

• Immutability: Backup data is locked and tamper-proof, even against ransomware.

• Air-Gapped Vault: Critical data is physically and logically isolated from production systems.

• Clean Recovery: streamlines compliance reporting and clean recovery to reduce risk and reinfection.

• Hardened Security: Role-based access controls (RBAC) and reverse path filtering reduce risk exposure.

• Scalability: Designed for fast, reliable backup and restore in complex I.T. estates.

Each of these layers contributes to a defence-in-depth model that ensures clean, verified data recovery even after a major cyber incident — the true mark of resilience.

“Resilience isn’t a feature you buy. It’s an outcome you design, test, and manage continuously.”

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The Synapse Difference: Turning Technology into Confidence

While Dell provides the technological foundation, Synapse delivers the operational strategy that makes it work day-to-day.

“Technology alone doesn’t recover a business,” Andy explains. “People, process, and preparation do.”

Synapse’s managed cyber recovery service guides customers through every stage of readiness:

1. Identify: Determining which workloads are business-critical and should be protected within the vault.

2. Design: Architecting recovery runbooks aligned with compliance requirements and recovery time objectives.

3. Deploy: Implementing secure vault environments and validated restore processes.

4. Maintain: Running ongoing readiness reviews and testing to ensure recovery remains reliable.

This hands-on, pragmatic approach gives businesses control, visibility, and predictability — qualities often lost in the chaos of a cyber incident.

It also reflects Synapse’s broader philosophy: start where it matters most, fix what’s urgent, grow what’s next.

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Resilience Proven: When Theory Meets Reality

For Andy, the most powerful proof of resilience comes from lived experience. He recalls one customer story vividly — a UK-based division of a European home improvement group.

“When a ransomware attack hit, their European systems — using another vendor — couldn’t restore despite full vendor support,” Andy says. “But the UK division, which had implemented Dell’s Cyber Recovery Vault with Synapse, recovered within hours. Their clean, air-gapped vault meant they could restore safely, while the rest of the organisation was still locked down.”

That outcome wasn’t luck. It was the result of foresight, design, and disciplined testing a direct reflection of how Synapse and Dell’s joint recovery model works in practice.

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Layered Defence, Cleaner Recovery

Dell’s Cyber Recovery Vault doesn’t just protect against ransomware — it validates recovery integrity. Through immutability, air-gapping, and data scanning, it ensures that restoration only happens from known-clean copies.

When combined with tools such as Index Engines, it is able to detect stealthy ransomware techniques like partial encryption, header corruption, and slow-acting variants that traditional tools miss.

“The goal,” Andy says, “isn’t just to bring systems back online quickly — it’s to bring them back cleanly. That’s what separates a good recovery from a great one.”

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Looking Forward: A Partnership Built for Change

As threats evolve, so too does the partnership between Dell and Synapse.

“We’re moving beyond technology alignment into true strategic collaboration,” Andy explains. “We’re sharing intelligence, refining best practice, and co-developing services that make recovery faster and simpler.”

Future innovations, like multi-domain management and Dell’s Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service (developed with CrowdStrike), are extending the boundaries of protection automating threat detection and integrating recovery processes across hybrid environments.

“It’s about building a connected ecosystem where prevention, detection, and recovery all work together,” Andy adds. “That’s the next frontier of cyber resilience.”

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Start Where It Matters Most. Your Defence

For organisations across the UK, Synapse’s collaboration with Dell represents more than technology integration it’s a blueprint for sustainable resilience.

By combining Dell’s proven infrastructure with Synapse’s managed expertise, businesses gain a complete cyber recovery-as-a-service solution: secure, modular, and resilient by design.

Book your Cyber Recovery Audit today and see how Synapse can help you build lasting resilience.

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