IBM is continuing to demonstrate their commitment to being a leader in the cyber resilience market. On March 2, IBM and Cohesity officially announced a new partnership that will combine the strengths of both data protection and cybersecurity portfolios into a single integrated offering. The new solution, titled IBM Defender, will be a single unified offering containing the following products:

  • IBM Storage Protect backup software
  • IBM FlashSystem storage SafeGuarded Copy
  • IBM Storage Fusion container storage and data protection
  • Cohesity DataProtect multicloud data protection

Cohesity DataProtect Integration

Due to the strength of their security software portfolio, IBM's cyber resilience solutions are already very impressive. By using IBM QRadar to detect cyberattacks and automate the recovery plan via integration with FlashSystem Safeguarded Copy, customers are seeing a 10:1 reduction in recovery time. However, the solution was limited to specific areas of an enterprise environment which forced customers to maintain multiple solutions and recovery plans. By integrating Cohesity's DataProtect offering into their comprehensive protection platform, customers can now have a simplified licensing and support experience that will continue to evolve as demands change.

Defender will run across IBM's hardware and software storage offerings, enabling comprehensive data protection and cyber resiliency from a single management interface. In addition, IBM has stated that the storage management capabilities will extend to third-party vendors such as Pure, Dell and NetApp. This will allow customers to deploy an enterprise-wide solution without a massive re-investment in infrastructure. 

SaaS-Based Platform

IBM has seen good success with their existing Storage Insights cloud-based monitoring solution, which has proven to be much more popular than their on-prem monitoring offerings due to ease of use and low maintenance. Following that success, the control plane for IBM Defender will be offered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, which will allow customers a single pane of glass for cyber vault operations across both on-prem and in the cloud. IBM is not currently planning to offer an on-prem management option for Defender.

Some of the more exciting capabilities from this joint offering are not yet available; IBM and Cohesity are doing a phased deployment which will allow many customers to adopt the solution early and add capabilities as they are integrated. The primary Defender offering will be available starting in 2Q 2023, which includes the integration of the Cohesity DataProtect offering with IBM's Storage Protect solution. The ability to manage the hardware layer from the SaaS control plane will be added in 3Q. The last planned functionality addition is orchestration of data resilience across all workloads, which is expected to be available starting in 4Q. 

With Defender, IBM will enable clients to have full visibility to the data protection and resiliency of their entire environment, including traditional storage, container storage, hybrid cloud and multicloud with an easy-to-manage interface. By eliminating gaps in protection and monitoring, customers will achieve faster detection and recovery from cyberattacks and disasters.

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