Better Together: How Cohesity's Combination with Veritas Reshapes Enterprise Data Protection

Cohesity's recent combination with Veritas' enterprise data protection business transforms how organizations approach data protection—moving from traditional backup to comprehensive data security and management. This evolution offers customers AI-powered insights, simplified multi-cloud operations, and enhanced cyber resilience while maintaining a "No customer left behind" commitment that protects customers' existing investments and ensures seamless transitions.

Unlocking Hidden Value in Your Data

For years, backup data was treated as a necessary insurance policy—something you hope you never need but can't afford to be without. Those days are over with the December 2024 combination of Cohesity and Veritas. The combined strengths of these industry titans has created breakthrough possibilities for organizations to discover untapped strategic value within their backup infrastructure—value that can drive business intelligence, enhance security posture, and support entirely new operational capabilities.

Consider these use cases: 

• A retail customer can now generate comprehensive loss prevention reports by analyzing data across all store locations, identifying patterns and trends that were previously invisible. Healthcare companies are now comparing current clinical trials with years of historical data, extracting insights that would have been impossible to correlate manually. 
• And Automotive manufacturers are now able to analyze contracts, recall filings, and audit data to create what amounts to a strategic time machine for decision-making.

These breakthroughs are possible because the new Cohesity. Backup data can now provide a "four-dimensional" view of your information. Unlike production data, backup systems capture multiple point-in-time copies, offering perspectives that simply aren't available elsewhere. Cohesity customers can now:

• Track how data changes over time across the entire infrastructure
• Identify where sensitive information resides across complex environments
• Detect if confidential project information has been shared with external parties

Having this historical data creates a groundbreaking advantage for customers with regard to their AI. AI systems fed with your organization's actual historical information produce genuine insights rather than the believable-sounding errors that plague generative AI (GenAI) today.

When Tesla meets Ford: Building the future of data protection

The new Cohesity creates the world's largest data protection software provider, now serving over 12,000 enterprise customers including 85% of Fortune 100 companies. But this combination represents something more significant than scale.

Imagine for a moment if Tesla bought Ford. Consider the vehicles they could build with Tesla's technology combined with Ford's institutional memory and market leadership. That's what happened when Cohesity brought together its innovative scale-out architecture and AI capabilities with Veritas' proven enterprise-grade workload support and global operational excellence.

The result isn't just a bigger company—it's a platform that gives organizations the freedom to run anywhere, protect everything, and recover instantly while extracting strategic value from their data. This powerful combination creates a fundamental shift from data protection being a necessary operational expense to becoming a strategic business capability. As a result, organizations are moving beyond asking "How do we back up our data?" to "How can our data protection infrastructure drive competitive advantage?"

Cohesity's "No customer left behind" commitment 

Cohesity's strategic transformation naturally raises questions for existing customers about their investments. Cohesity's "No customer left behind" mandate directly addresses these concerns by recognizing that combining two established platforms serving mission-critical data requires exceptional care and clear commitments.

Cohesity's approach is straightforward: maintain investment in both Cohesity and Veritas product portfolios while gradually introducing integrated capabilities that enhance rather than replace existing investments. Customers are retaining their support teams, keeping their choices during digital transformation, and gaining access to innovations from the combined platform.

This strategy was designed to provide stability and investment protection for existing customers. Rather than disrupting decades-long partnerships, the combination strengthens them by providing global "Follow the sun" support and maintaining the industry-leading satisfaction scores both platforms achieved independently. The goal isn't about managing a transition. Rather, it is about ensuring customers emerge with capabilities neither platform could offer alone.

AI-powered innovation: From backup to business intelligence

Perhaps the most transformative aspect of the Cohesity/Veritas combination is how it repositions backup data as a strategic business asset. Cohesity's Gaia platform's patent-pending AI capabilities, now enhanced by the combined expertise of both organizations, offer something unprecedented: the ability to turn passive backup data into active business intelligence.

Think of this as providing a blood sample that determines the health of your business. Your backup infrastructure captures data across your entire organization, creating a comprehensive view of information flows, changes, and patterns. The unified platform's AI can now analyze this data to detect anomalies, identify security threats, ensure compliance, and extract insights that drive strategic decision-making—capabilities that are possible because of the scale and expertise that comes from bringing together Cohesity and Veritas.

This comprehensive health check translates into practical applications across industries and use cases. Customers can now automatically identify and classify sensitive data across complex environments, track how information changes over time, and gain visibility into data governance that was previously impossible to achieve. For compliance-focused industries, this capability provides unprecedented visibility:

• Healthcare: Complete HIPAA information identification and management across all systems
• Defense: ITAR compliance and sensitive data tracking with historical context
• Financial Services: Regulatory data governance and comprehensive risk management

What makes this particularly powerful is how it brings different organizational functions together. Security teams, infrastructure teams, and business intelligence groups can now speak a common language around data, creating alignment that was difficult to achieve with traditional backup approaches. This cross-functional collaboration happens in ways that weren't possible before.

Furthermore, the shift influences both operational efficiency and strategic capability. For the first time, data protection infrastructure can help strategic projects succeed and drive top-line business outcomes rather than just managing operational costs.

Simplifying complex enterprise environments

Of course, realizing these strategic benefits requires navigating the operational complexity that defines modern enterprise IT. Organizations operate across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with hundreds of applications, diverse storage systems, and complex data flows. Managing data protection across this landscape has traditionally required multiple point solutions, each with its own management interface, policies, and operational procedures.

The Cohesity platform addresses this complexity by supporting over 800 data sources, 100 operating systems, and 1,400 storage targets through a unified management interface—breadth that's possible because of the combined expertise and technology assets from Cohesity and Veritas. More importantly, it standardizes around industry protocols such as SMB, NFS, and S3, providing flexibility without vendor lock-in.

This breadth of support provides the flexibility to adapt to changing business requirements. Organizations can embrace cloud-first strategies while protecting existing on premises investments, ensure seamless data mobility across environments, and maintain consistent protection policies regardless of where applications reside.

The unified approach also addresses a practical challenge: how to consolidate data protection operations without disrupting existing workflows. By supporting existing technologies while introducing modern capabilities, the platform enables gradual modernization at a pace that aligns with your business priorities and risk tolerances.

Strengthening cyber resilience

While this unified approach simplifies operations, it also creates new opportunities to strengthen security posture against evolving threats. The cybersecurity landscape demands more than traditional backup and recovery capabilities—organizations need comprehensive cyber resilience platforms that provide early detection, rapid response, and strategic intelligence about their security posture.

The platform addresses these requirements through multiple complementary approaches. Immutable backup snapshots provide a foundation of zero-trust data security that ensures data integrity even during advanced attacks, while AI-based threat detection analyzes backup data to identify anomalies and potential security incidents before they escalate.

This creates an early warning system that can detect unusual data ingestion patterns, identify files changed or deleted in unexpected locations, and provide immediate insights into potential security incidents. When security events occur, rapid recovery capabilities minimize business disruption while delivering detailed forensics about what happened and where.

Rather than backup happening in the background, the platform transforms it into an active participant in security operations. This integration with broader security ecosystems creates a comprehensive defense strategy that provides intelligence and capabilities to enhance overall organizational resilience.

WWT partnership: delivering customer success

Transforming backup infrastructure into an active security participant requires more than technology—it demands strategic partnership and implementation expertise. The complexity of modern enterprise requirements means success depends on partners who can navigate technical capabilities while keeping business objectives top of mind.

As an experienced systems integrator, WWT helps organizations understand how these capabilities align with their specific requirements and objectives. WWT's engagement model meets organizations wherever they are in their decision-making process. The company offers complimentary industry briefings that provide market context for audiences ranging from C-suite executives to technical teams. These sessions help organizations understand not just what's possible, but what makes sense for their specific situation.

For deeper exploration, WWT provides structured workshops that allow both leadership and technical teams to evaluate requirements, understand current capabilities, and develop improvement roadmaps. The approach focuses on three key areas:

• Priority Alignment: Ensuring high-functionality features match customer priorities
• Complexity Management: Avoiding unnecessary features in non-critical areas
• Real-World Validation: Moving beyond presentations to hands-on testing with customer data

This extends through proof-of-concept (POC) testing in WWT's Advanced Technology Center, where customers validate solutions with their own data and use cases. The progression ensures organizations make informed decisions based on actual performance rather than theoretical capabilities.

Practical implementation considerations

For those enterprise organizations considering how this kind of evolution affects their data protection strategies, WWT recommends four key focus areas:

1. Organizations should first evaluate their current posture against both traditional requirements (backup, recovery, compliance) and emerging opportunities (AI insights, security analytics, business intelligence).
2. The transformation timeline should align with business priorities and risk tolerance. Some organizations will want to move quickly to leverage new AI capabilities, while others will prioritize stability and gradual enhancement. The flexible approach to product support means there's no pressure to rush transitions.
3. Partnership selection becomes critical in this transformation. The complexity of modern enterprise environments requires a partner that understands both technology capabilities and business implications. Success depends on finding providers who can navigate technical requirements while maintaining focus on business outcomes through structured engagement models, from initial briefings through POC validation.
4. Organizations should also consider how data protection strategy aligns with broader digital transformation initiatives. Rather than treating data protection as an isolated function, the enhanced capabilities enable integration with security operations, business intelligence, and compliance programs. 

WWT's experience helping organizations navigate these interconnected requirements ensures that data protection investments support rather than complicate broader transformation goals.

Looking forward: the evolution continues

These implementation considerations become even more important when you consider where the industry is heading. The combination of proven enterprise capabilities with AI innovation creates a foundation for continued evolution in how organizations approach data management, extending beyond traditional data protection to encompass comprehensive data security, intelligence, and strategic value creation. 

This evolution reflects a broader transformation in how organizations are approaching data protection: data protection is evolving from a necessary cost center to a strategic capability that enables competitive advantage. Organizations that recognize and adapt to this shift will be positioned to extract maximum value from their data assets while maintaining the security and resilience that business operations require.

For organizations ready to embrace this evolution, success depends on understanding how enhanced data protection capabilities support broader business objectives. The technology provides the foundation, but real value comes from applying these capabilities to specific organizational challenges and opportunities.

The key is starting with clear business objectives rather than technology features. For example: questions to address could include: 

• What insights would be valuable for your organization? 
• How could better data governance support compliance and risk management? 
• Where might AI-powered analytics drive operational improvements or strategic decisions?

Ready to transform your data protection strategy?

The convergence of AI, security, and data management is reshaping what's possible with enterprise data protection. Organizations that act now will gain competitive advantages that extend far beyond traditional backup and recovery.

WWT's partnership with Cohesity provides a clear path forward. Start with a one-hour complimentary industry briefing to understand how these capabilities align with your specific business objectives. From there, structured workshops and POC testing in WWT's ATC ensure you make informed decisions based on real-world performance with your actual data.

Don't let your backup infrastructure remain a passive insurance policy when it could become your next competitive advantage. Contact WWT today to begin your transformation from traditional data protection to strategic data management.

About the Authors

Bharath Nagaraj is Senior Principal Field Technical Director at Cohesity, where he leads go-to-market strategies for artificial intelligence and data management solutions. He brings extensive experience in enterprise technology and focuses on helping organizations unlock strategic value from their data assets.

Michael Ambrusom is a Senior Solutions Architect at WWT, specializing in data protection and cyber resilience solutions. With over 16 years of experience in technical sales and enterprise architecture, he helps organizations align technology capabilities with business objectives.