Cohesity has been focusing strongly on ‘as-a-service’, also towards the future. During the first edition of Cohesity Connect, the company underlines this once again. It introduces no fewer than three new services. DRaaS, or Disaster Recovery as a Service, stands out most, but there are also two new services focused on governance and vaulting of data respectively.
In June of this year, Cohesity DataProtect became available as a service in Europe. With this, Cohesity brought the functionality of the on-prem DataProtect solution to the cloud. It was the first service under the umbrella of Data Management-as-a-Service (DMaaS). The goal for Cohesity is to build out DMaaS to a full range of services that Cohesity manages for its customers. With this, Cohesity simplifies the products for customers and ensures a better position in the market. A move towards cloud services over on-prem products also increases the value of the company as a whole too.
In the article linked above, we already announced that more services would follow DataProtect as a Service. The next would be a DMaaS version of SiteContinuity. SiteContinuity is Cohesity’s DR product. By offering this as part of the DMaaS portfolio, customers can use the AWS cloud as a recovery location. Cohesity only offers DMaaS on AWS at the moment, as part of an exclusive partnership with AWS.
Cohesity DRaaS
A recovery location in the (AWS) cloud offers various advantages. For starters, organizations don’t have to build and maintain a second data center for DR. According to Cohesity, its DRaaS further ensures that there is minimal downtime and loss of data, thanks to the way backups are made and data is replicated. This should ensure that all your data is basically ready to be deployed in case of emergency or cyber attack. Furthermore, Cohesity promises simplicity in terms of SLAs. You can put these together in minutes. Finally, the pay-as-you-go nature of the cloud should ensure that it is also financially interesting. If you need more ‘space’ in the cloud for DR, you can also arrange that quickly.
At the end of the day, Cohesity DRaaS should make disaster recovery a lot easier. Everything you need is in a single offering: orchestration, snapshot-based backup, near-sync replication for near real-time replication of changed data, and actual failover to the cloud in the event of a disaster or cyber attack. Plus, you manage everything through the Helios platform, including any other DMaaS services you purchase.
Cohesity DataGovern and Project Fort Knox
In addition to DRaaS, Cohesity is also announcing several other SaaS solutions at its Connect event. The first of these is DataGovern. In our story earlier this year we already indicated that customers wanted to see a service focused on governance. So now there is one in the form of DataGovern. It makes it possible to use AI/ML to classify all the data you have, where it is located and who is allowed to access it. You can also see, for example, where your PII data is located and take steps to provide additional protection for that data. Should you wish to automate compliance to specific regulations, you can add policies for things like GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA.
Furthermore, DataGovern offers the ability to detect abnormal user behavior. If someone unexpectedly looks at a lot of sensitive data, then you can immediately respond. If something does go wrong, then DataGovern, via integrations with SOAR platforms, can immediately set those platforms to work.
The second SaaS solution we want to talk about here is Project Fort Knox. This makes it possible to create a copy of an organization’s data without anyone else being able to access it, but which is always available to the customer. Again, Cohesity manages all of this for its customers. Interestingly, Cohesity offers customers the opportunity to regularly test if everything works as it should. You can simulate an emergency situation in a protected environment.
With DRaaS, DataGovern and Project Fort Knox, Cohesity has made three new services available within its DMaaS offering in a relatively short time. No doubt Cohesity is already hard at work behind the scenes to make its software-defined storage and test/dev offerings available as well.
4 hours ago
