Cloud, mobile, artificial intelligence and the internet of things are the megatrends currently at the helm of tech’s digital renaissance, and big data is the oil that powers them all. With its value and high demand, data is not only transforming the marketplace, but also the cybersecurity efforts that ensure business confidence.

“Data is the lifeblood of all of these megatrends,” said Yanbing Li (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of storage and availability at VMware Inc. “We are excited to see how that’s going to drive storage consumption, new technology demand, and new requirements in storage.”

Li and Beth Phalen (pictured, left), president of the Data Protection Division at Dell Technologies Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed how Dell EMC and VMware are working together as data’s expansion shifts priorities in storage infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.)

An edge revolution

Explosions in enterprise adoption of multicloud, edge computing, and IoT require new methods of protection for secure data, and Li and Phalen are collaborating on solutions that overlay use cases for disaster recovery, backup, and data management to new deployment models and configurations.

“We’re taking vSAN hyperconverged infrastructure and not only putting it in the cloud, but deeply integrating it with technology in the cloud and leveraging the elasticity and massive scale,” Li said.

Multicloud was designed for seamlessness, and the engineers have been tasked with maintaining customer simplicity while reinventing data protection.

“If moving to the cloud required a lot of manual steps, it would lose benefits. You have to continue to engineer things for performance, simplicity and reliability, but now in a more diverse multicloud environment with more distribution,” Phalen said.

The development of these new environment solutions requires the joint efforts of Dell and VMware and also means internal transformations for both organizations. Through VMware’s transition from a software company to one that embraces cloud as its core DNA, Li has found fostering a cultural shift just as crucial as working through technical challenges.

“The experience of taking our entire software-defined data center software stack into the cloud was quite eye opening,” she said.

In addition to a technological and cultural transformation, Phalen and Li are working toward a greater inclusivity shift in the industry. Over the past year, VMware has seen a 100-percent increase in the participation of women in its hands-on technical lab.

“Dell technologies and VMware truly are putting an effort into this. There’s a recognition that having more women in all ranks of engineering gives more creative solutions, more perspectives,” Phalen said.

While their efforts show, both Phalen and Li affirm that it will take the work of the entire industry to realize true gender equity.

“I’m encouraged by the number of young women going into computer science, but it is definitely a required focus to really move the needle. It’s not going to happen without discipline,” Phalen concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. Dell, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE