How Cohesity Empowers IT Leaders to Reimagine Data Management

Those of us in technology have always known how important IT is to business success. With the pandemic accelerating digital work and moving many of our in-person experiences online, there is already anecdotal evidence to suggest perceptions are rising about how much more IT can contribute. 

In short, a more cost efficient IT organization can drive engagement and broader capabilities across the enterprise.

What I believe that means for IT leaders in the months and years ahead is greater confidence in decision making. And IT modernization initiatives provide just the opening needed to show how you can lead efforts to both ensure business continuity and drive competitive advantage.

WWT was first a value-added reseller, then a services provider. Now we marry the two by helping IT leaders strategize and securely experiment with the latest and greatest solutions in our Advanced Technology Center (ATC). 

With digital transformation accelerating, we are focused on helping IT leaders:

• Build digital strategies that improve experiences.
• Modernize data centers.
• Adopt multicloud architectures.
• Automate and orchestrate workloads and apps.
• Leverage data analytics and AI.
• And more.

Doing this important work has allowed us to see and experience many different solutions — and we're careful to choose the ones we anticipate will have the greatest impact on your digital transformation journey. 

In the data management category, this has led us to a strategic relationship with Cohesity, a company modernizing data management, and already our partnership is resulting in customer successes. Here's why.

Modernization is a journey, and architecture matters.

When it comes to IT architecture, bolt-on is less optimal than built-in. Gateways are more cumbersome than integrated. Forklift upgrades are less efficient than zero-downtime updates.

Google figured this out early, disrupting the search market by creating a single platform that combined manageability with the running of apps and services.

More recently, Cohesity has advanced web-scale principles to reimagine data management — simplifying operations with a radically different approach — all in an effort to solve mass data fragmentation. Because data has grown exponentially, it is now fragmented across different locations (think clouds, data centers and edge locations). And it is trapped in infrastructure silos that don't share data between them, making them highly inefficient. Siloed data is largely invisible which creates enormous risk, as well as limiting its value.

Legacy, siloed approaches to data management weren't designed for today's data-driven, multicloud world. They require a patchwork of disparate point products and management interfaces to run. They don't support the running of applications and services on top. Their forklift upgrades and regular failures require downtime that negatively impacts your business. And ever-increasing renewal and support costs make budgeting more challenging.

In contrast, Cohesity's modern architecture for data management features:

• One platform that spans across locations, is software-defined, cloud-native and powered by the SpanFS distributed file system.
• One UI for unified global management of all data and workloads — from legacy to modern including NoSQL and containers — across locations with central control.
• A way to run apps co-resident on the same platform for richer access to all underlying data — without separate systems — and to gain insights (e.g. from analytics, compliance apps).

Today, when IT leaders come looking for modern data solutions, we are well positioned to help them leverage Cohesity's secret sauce. Our cloud and data center experts, aided by our high-powered ATC, work closely with organizations to design, test and prove out concepts using Cohesity data management capabilities and solutions. If an organization is already a Cisco customer, we can also show them a consolidated, hyper-converged solution.

Boost agility and lower TCO.

In the face of an uncertain global economy, organizations need more innovative and affordable ways to keep essential operations functioning remotely without increasing risk exposure. And because business leaders will be looking to IT leaders and trusting those decisions more, choosing to modernize your data management is a good digital transformation step that will deliver benefits across your organization for years to come.

By strategizing and modernizing data management with WWT and Cohesity, you can boost agility and lower TCO:

• Reduce CapEx – Consolidating all data and workloads onto a single software-defined platform that collapses silos and removes legacy hardware.
• Lower OpEx – Transitioning previously fragmented data to instantly searchable, manageable and shareable data in one logical place for the first time for greater productivity that saves time for innovation. Applying software-defined solutions for data protection, file/object storage and cloud integration across all data under policy control.
• Strengthen Security Without Added Investment – Reducing data center footprints to ensure smaller attack surfaces.

We look forward to you joining the ATC platform experience!