In this article

This article was written by SanJay Poonen, CEO and President at Cohesity, and was submitted for publication by Cohesity.

A hundred days into my role as CEO & President of Cohesity, I continue to be impressed by:

  • The engagement of our incredible employees
  • The power and innovation of our product platform at the junction of data security and data management
  • Our incredible list of customers including some of the best Fortune 500 and Global 2000 brands
  • The throng of ecosystem partners that want to engage strategically with us

I have had the privilege to meet with over 200 customers and over 50 partners in the last quarter since I joined Cohesity. I am struck by the business value customers tell me they are getting out of our platform—some remarkable TCO and ROI stories abound. I have also been struck by how many customers have entrusted us to keep their businesses resilient, especially at a time of such rapid data growth where the rise in global ransomware attacks is unprecedented. Our customers trust that we'll keep their data security top of mind while also finding new ways to keep their businesses resilient.

And they're right. We will.

That's why I'm so excited by our announcements at ReConnect today, where we proudly introduced the newly formed Data Security Alliance. This industry alliance is a partnership of  'who's who' in cybersecurity and gives customers more ways to win the war against cyberattacks. We also unveiled Cohesity DataHawk, our new data security solution that provides protection, detection, and recovery against cyberattacks all in a single SaaS offering and runs on the Cohesity Data Cloud. Both announcements highlight our strong commitment to leading the new era of data security and management.

What I'm hearing from customers

But let me step back for a moment to reflect on my first 100 days at Cohesity and the conversations I've had with our customers and partners. Two themes stand out: ransomware and resiliency.

When you think about the current landscape and the challenges facing our customers, the numbers are staggering:

  • A ransomware attack happens every 11 seconds
  • 47% of organizations have been hit by a ransomware attack in the past six months
  • It takes 270+ days to identify and recover from a data breach

But these numbers only tell part of the story. Customers are also struggling with the sheer quantity of data that exists (and that is growing exponentially)—in data centers, in multicloud environments, and at the edge. Plus, they need to access that data from anywhere and from any device. This creates a twofold problem where the data is vulnerable to breaches while also being too complex to manage. Essentially it's a data security AND a data management problem, and each one feeds off the other. Think chicken and the egg:

  • How can you secure data if you can't manage it?
  • How can you manage data if you can't secure it?

Fortunately, we can solve both issues at once. And how we do that is the foundation of our announcements today.

Introducing the Cohesity Data Cloud

The Cohesity Data Cloud is our platform that combines data security and data management in a single unified environment that frees data from silos, securely, and makes it available and accessible in support of the business.

We believe the Cohesity Data Cloud truly conveys what our platform does. It helps ensure that your data is protected, resilient, available, movable, compliant, searchable for insights, and efficiently stored at scale across the modern multicloud distributed world. And, it applies the same design principles used today by the world's leading cloud hyperscalers.

However, the customer benefits of the Cohesity Data Cloud don't stop there. This truly unique platform offers five key capabilities every organization needs that can be deployed separately or together as shared services across your data estate:

  • Data Protection—Immutable backup and recovery at scale
  • Data Security—Cyber vaulting and intelligent threat detection
  • Data Mobility—Safe, easy multicloud mobility
  • Data Access—Intelligent file and object access, copy data management
  • Data Insight—Global search, classification, and analytics

Your data is valuable. Get value from it.

Once you've secured your data, you can manage and extract insights from it. Doing this in one environment allows you to get value from your data, no matter where it sits. You'll also enjoy space efficiency and a lower TCO as formerly siloed data is consolidated, deduplicated, and compressed into a single environment. Because it's available as self-managed software or SaaS, the choice of deployment is yours.

It takes a village

We are continuing to extend the power of this platform to a broad ecosystem of partners. To that end, we've also just announced the formation of the Data Security Alliance, an industry coalition combining best-in-class solutions from leading cybersecurity and services companies with exceptional data security and management expertise from Cohesity. Partners include: Palo Alto Networks, Tenable, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Splunk, CyberArk, Okta, BigID, Securonix, with new security advisory relationships with Mandiant (now part of Google Cloud Security) and PWC. These are not the only ones—we are continuing to work with AWS in the Cloud, and we announced that Kelly Bissell, Corporate VP at Microsoft for Security Services, will be joining our now 7-person Security Advisory Council, led by Kevin Mandia.

When ransomware attacks happen, companies want to detect and stop the attack as soon as possible, avoid paying the ransom, and when necessary, recover core business operations quickly. Achieving these goals requires close collaboration and integration of security and data management solutions and services.

So this new Data Security Alliance brings together the boldest solutions and the brightest minds to give customers an end-to-end security strategy that integrates data protection and resilience into a comprehensive whole. This strategy starts at prevention, extends to early detection and protection, and also includes rapid recovery—critical in the event of a cyberattack.

Together, our announcements display our commitment to leading data security and management into a new era with a collaborative "village" approach. We're all in this fight together, and by bringing the industry's premier security players under one alliance, we'll all be in a stronger position to keep our businesses resilient.

To learn more about our bold new vision for the next era of data security and management, watch my ReConnect keynote.

Technologies