Milestone birthdays and anniversaries are often an inflection point—an opportunity to reflect on both how we got here, and what the road ahead looks like. Mohit Aron, Cohesity’s founder, recently shared his thoughts on Cohesity’s early days and the journey we’ve been on, so I wanted to share just a few thoughts on our future plans as we strive to be the essential AI-powered modern data security and management partner to our customers.
The foundation of Cohesity is our platform, built to empower customers to secure, manage, and unlock endless possibilities with their data—all in one place. Cohesity set out to disrupt how organizations secure and manage data by combining multiple point solutions into a single, secure control plane. Our vision was to bring together data security, data management, data mobility, data access, and data insights into our industry-leading Cohesity Data Cloud. Today, Cohesity continues to push to further disrupt the industry with modern innovations to change how organizations harness the power of their data.
As we look forward, Cohesity is driving innovations through three primary areas: security, AI/ML, and multicloud. We believe the winning foundation of the last decade—with a highly differentiated, extremely innovative platform—gives us the right launch pad to continue that innovation for the next decade and beyond.
Security
Let’s start with security. Ransomware attacks continue to increase in frequency, with attacks coming every 20 seconds, and have an increasing impact on business, taking an average of 270 days to recover. Moving ahead, modern companies need both a proactive and reactive approach to data security that evolves as the threat landscape only increases in frequency and complexity. Our comprehensive platform addresses all the core elements of data management: data protection, data security, data mobility, data access, and data insights. These services have been traditionally fragmented amongst legacy players, often built on technology that makes it difficult to secure data across different places (cloud, on-prem, the edge), and at the same time making it difficult to glean meaningful insights from the same data estate.
The future is about integrating best-of-breed applications that are broad and deep and based within a timeless platform—something Cohesity offers today. With that as our foundation, our unified architecture has plenty of headroom on how this can expand to adapt as the attack landscape changes. We are also excited about our Security Advisory Council, led by Kevin Mandia, our Board member, who is one of the most renowned cyber-fighters in the world, and also the 15+ leading security companies in our Data Security Alliance, the only alliance of its kind in our industry, all dedicated as a village with us to fight cybercrime and to keep our customers’ data safe.
Watch our new video, A Decade of Securing and Managing the World’s Data
AI
Next, let’s cover AI. At Cohesity, we look at AI through a lens of how to protect data (security), and how to give insights into data (analytics, intelligence, eDiscovery, etc.). We recently announced Cohesity Turing at our Catalyst conference, a collection of AI/ML capabilities and technologies bringing the power of responsible AI to unlock a number of different use cases for customers. With Cohesity Turing, customers can drive more efficient operations, get deeper insights into data, improve efficiencies, and identify security risks.
Today, Cohesity Turing includes several integrated AI capabilities including ransomware anomaly detection, threat intelligence, data classification, and predictive planning. Cohesity also announced new innovations with our multiple patent-pending retrieval augmented generation (RAG) which includes:
- Conversational reporting to empower customers to search for data simply and quickly using everyday language;
- eDiscovery to leverage RAG to identify and deliver results on a customer’s entire data landscape;
- Autonomous monitoring and remediation to dynamically detect and remediate security risks across their data and ecosystem;
- Security incident reporting
The power of AI with Cohesity is predicated on our unique distributed file system and architecture, which enables customers to unlock endless capabilities with AI by bringing AI to their data. This ensures that customers can use AI securely and responsibly within the same Cohesity platform that organizations use and trust today. We see this as a game changer for customers. For example, AI-powered early threat detection and AI insights and machine learning create more value from backed up data, whether it sits in a data center, a public cloud, or private cloud. AI can help customers differentiate their business, driving growth and improving customer outcomes.
In addition, Cohesity is partnering with Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Google Cloud, and AWS to bring new AI capabilities to unlock how customers integrate AI, data, and cloud.
And as new AI needs emerge, we plan to continue to advance the portfolio of technologies offered and powered by Cohesity Turing, while enabling customers to use AI responsibly and securely.
Multicloud
Lastly, multicloud continues to be a major focus for Cohesity, as we bring all of the power and capabilities customers use today to the cloud providers they’re already using. Cohesity Cloud Services provides agility so organizations can focus on securing and managing their data, without the overhead and complexity of running infrastructure.
When we set out to bring Cohesity to the cloud, we initially partnered with AWS. Over the past year, we launched new capabilities on Azure, including FortKnox, providing customers with a multicloud strategy around protecting and securing their data. Cohesity recently announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud and AI, and we will look to bring Cohesity data security and protection and future capabilities to Google Cloud.
In addition to Cohesity Cloud Services, Cohesity also provides customers with Cohesity Cloud Edition, which allows customers and partners to run our most popular products on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMware, and more.
Moving forward, we will continue to prioritize both the user experience and the ability for enterprises to scale. We like to call this being Apple-simple and Google-scalable. In both vectors, Cohesity has a 10-year advantage which is why 40% of the Fortune 1000 choose Cohesity and why we continue to have the industry-leading customer Net Promoter Score, a measure of customer health and satisfaction.
The right tech at the right time with the best partners
Over the past year, we’ve been focused on taking the foundation that Mohit and the founders built in the first nine years to make this an undisputed great company and a multibillion-dollar franchise player. But, we’ve also done this with some incredible partners. Today our ecosystem is the envy of the data protection industry. As Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
HPE, Cisco, AWS, and Google Cloud are already investors and partners with us. But in the last year, we’ve done some pioneering work with the top security players—look no further than our Data Security Alliance. Furthermore, we’ve built an exclusive OEM relationship with IBM like the OEM relationships we have with HPE, Cisco, Lenovo, and others. Microsoft and Google Cloud have partnered with us, in work only we are doing with them in generative AI for a special use-case alluded to above (retrieval augmented generation) among many other use-cases of AI. And the top SIs and VARs are increasingly seeing Cohesity as the winner in our space. To top it all, our customers are the who’s who in the industry. One evidence of this was the incredible lineup of C-suite executives and other industry luminaries we had at Cohesity Catalyst, more than any other data protection vendor had at their user conferences, a sign of the obvious momentum that customers and partners see in Cohesity.
Given that we’re at the leading edge of data security, data management, multicloud, and AI-powered insights, it’s clear that for 10 years we’ve been building towards this moment. I’m so proud that our technology is perfectly positioned to meet the needs of our customers—both today and tomorrow.
A decade of tech, powered by people
Fundamentally, Cohesity’s success really starts with people. Great technology doesn’t exist if you don’t have great people selling, servicing, building, marketing, and supporting the company, our products, and our customers. Our employees are the ultimate ambassadors of our company.
In honor of our anniversary, we introduced a Cohesity Day of Service. Cohesians across our global sites volunteered in their local communities, contributing to a variety of nonprofits devoted to fighting hunger, cleaning up rivers and beaches, providing clothing for foster children and their families, helping houseless and at-risk youth, and providing charitable services for Veterans, Law Enforcement, Fire & Rescue, and EMS personnel. (And that’s just a partial list.) This worldwide effort was quite remarkable and a testament to the values we’ve built over the past 10 years. You are going to see a lot more about Cohesity For Good playing out in communities all over the world, in the coming months and years.
Jazz musician Miles Davis has a famous quote: “Always look ahead, but never look back.” At Cohesity, we made some incredible choices in our past 10 years that allow us to prioritize what’s coming—for us, for our customers, for our industry, and for our employees. I’m looking forward to stepping back a year from now to see the progress that we’ve all made individually and collectively.
