Taming Technology Chaos: Dell’s Innovative Recovery Solution

This blog is co-authored by Colin Sainsbury and Jeremiah Johnson.

This past summer a major global IT outage occurred when a faulty software update was released, leading to approximately 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems crashing worldwide. This incident had a profound impact across numerous sectors, including airlines, banks, hospitals, and government services, all predictably causing significant disruptions to daily life and business operations. The outage, notable for its scale, required extensive manual intervention to restore affected systems, prolonging the recovery process. The financial repercussions were substantial, with estimated losses reaching $10 billion, making it one of the largest IT failures in history¹.

Every organization, irrespective of scale, relies on the humble personal computer to drive employee productivity. As we enter the era of Artificial Intelligence this productivity proposition is being met with equal parts excitement and uncertainty. While many are eager to welcome exciting and disruptive A.I. tools into every facet of our workplace, companies will also find themselves struck with a different kind of disruptor. Device and user downtime. This unwelcome reality could be brought on by something as simple as a user clicking a link they ought not to - all the way to the unthinkable - a catastrophic, large-scale outage brought on by the very software products meant to protect and prevent against this.

Device outages, and subsequent user downtime, are a matter of when not if. How many organizations are prepared for this eventuality? Is the response measured in days rather than hours or even minutes? Fortunately, Dell has made remotely recovering devices as simple as the initial deployment and configuration event.

Dell has made provisioning a device, whether for the first or nth time, easy. Today, our customers can purchase their devices and have them factory imaged with Ready Image, our clean Windows image. Ready Image is designed as the ideal starting point for MDM and UEM solutions. Customers can further automate device configuration by requesting Dell register their devices with Windows Autopilot, leading to automatic enrollment into their UEM tools, typically Intune. This simple combination of services provided by Dell allows devices to automatically complete provisioning, including installation of applications like M365 and OneDrive for Business.

While this is certainly useful to know in terms of device deployment, how does this relate to recovering users from catastrophic device failures?

Just like the factory enabled provisioning services previously described; Ready Image can now also be recovered via the cloud using Dell's Self-Healing Image Recovery (SHIR) service. The recovery event is simultaneously user friendly and enterprise ready, with all key decisions controlled remotely by company IT professionals through a Dell provided control plane, rather than the end-user being asked to make complicated configuration or recovery decisions.

Using any available internet connection, a compromised device can be re-imaged (from bare metal) via the cloud using SHIR. The self-healing process will clear all partitions and completely re-image the device, leaving malware with no place to hide.

Once re-imaged, Microsoft Autopilot registered devices will automatically re-enter their workflow and re-provision. User data stored in OneDrive for Business will be accessible again once the user signs in. You are invited to watch this short video to see how everything unfolds from an end-user perspective. Devices can be completely rebuilt from cloud-hosted content, without ever needing to leave the home office, coffee shop, or other remote work locations.

¹ https://datacouch.medium.com/the-falcons-great-fall-the-2024-update-that-shook-crowdstrike-s-legacy-1d55c89e1ac1 and https://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/an-unmitigated-disaster-crowdstrike-update-initiates-global-microsoft-outage