Dell Technologies APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage AWS Account Connection Demo

Chad Gray of Dell Technologies presented APEX Navigator, a product designed to simplify the management of multicloud storage, particularly block storage for AWS. He discussed the product’s five focus areas: security, deployment, management, monitoring, and mobility. Gray emphasized the importance of secure access to customer AWS accounts and explained how APEX Navigator uses AWS roles and policies to access these accounts without the need for exchanging access keys.

During the presentation, Gray demonstrated how to connect an AWS account to APEX Navigator using a custom trust policy and permission policy generated by the platform. He also discussed federated login capabilities with identity providers such as Active Directory, allowing for single sign-on across Dell’s APEX and Cloud IQ services.

Gray mentioned that all the steps he demonstrated in the UI can be automated through APIs, and that Dell recently released a Terraform provider for APEX. He highlighted the availability of infrastructure as code examples for teams using tools like Terraform.

Lastly, Gray showed how to audit access and account management activities within APEX Navigator and within the AWS account using CloudTrail. He pointed out features like tagging sessions with job names and IDs, and passing the source identity of the user for better traceability of actions taken within the customer’s AWS environment.