Cohesity SmartFiles

Although most common unstructured data consists of text, it can also feature numbers, images, and audio. Unstructured data is used within every function in business. Examples include: Finance (invoices, forms), Healthcare (medical records and images), Public Sector (documents, research data), Manufacturing (design files), Marketing (photos), IT (IoT data), Sales (emails with customers), Customer Service (social media), and more.

Although it’s changing and accumulating rapidly, much of the unstructured data that’s collected and stored is processed manually, if at all. For example, email is mostly processed by a human reading it, extracting what’s important (sometimes by copying and pasting into another email, or into an application), and taking action based on its contents.

But with advancing AI technologies such as machine learning, machine vision, and natural language processing, more of this unstructured information can be harnessed and analyzed automatically, driving faster business insight.

Structured data is data that’s stored in a fixed place within a file or record. It’s typically stored in a relational database (RDBMS) but can also be found in NoSQL databases, for example. Structured data can be text, dates, or numbers.

Unstructured data comprises file and object data and has not been defined or stored in a predefined way.

SmartFiles is a software-defined, massively scalable, and highly secure solution for unified management of files and objects.

SmartFiles enables organizations to eliminate data silos with native support for file and object protocols, including SMB, NFS, and S3, to consolidate data from:

• Files from applications and NAS environments
• Traditional archives, compliance, and backup datasets
• Enterprise and custom applications that leverage S3 as a target
• Modern IoT and analytics workloads

When you consolidate unstructured data on SmartFiles, it can be managed efficiently and securely with policy-driven actions. With simplified management via our global Helios UI, you can apply security and data protection policies to meet compliance requirements, create data lifecycle management policies to expire data, and automate data movement and placement across the datacenter and public clouds.

Reference Information

• SmartFiles data sheet
• SmartFiles solution brief
• Why SmartFiles is unparalleled for unstructured data management

Integrated security, protection, and compliance

SmartFiles provides security and data protection levels that meet the high standards of government agencies, financial services, and healthcare organizations.

Consolidate data on a secure platform with SmartFiles

• Protect your unstructured data from cyber threats like ransomware with unlimited immutable snapshots.
• Detect ransomware threats with machine learning- based anomaly detection that can identify sudden changes to data over time, and analyze suspicious changes to files from encryption, renames, deletion operations, and more.
• Recover quickly from ransomware attacks and other outages from any point in time.
• Secure your data with the highest levels of encryption, both at-rest and in-flight.

SmartFiles controls and restricts access to data

• Secure access and management of critical data with multifactor authentication, quorum authentication, and role-based access controls.
• Audit trails to with proactive alerting and simplified analysis of user file behaviors

Integrated Cohesity services for threat detection, data vaulting, and more

Add-on integrated Cohesity services offer additional protection against cyberattacks.

• Cohesity DataHawk: A Cohesity data security SaaS solution for threat intelligence and scanning, cyber vaulting, and ML-powered data classification. DataHawk protects enterprise organizations against ransomware and other threats with powerful ML-based detection of suspicious files and other behaviors that could be indicators of a malicious attack.
• Cohesity FortKnox: A SaaS data isolation and recovery solution managed by Cohesity that securely vaults your data to the cloud for immutable protection and fast recovery.
• Cohesity Marketplace Apps: Integrate an entire data management ecosystem on Cohesity Data Cloud for anti-virus protection, file audit, content search, and more.

You can download Cohesity-developed and third-party apps from the Cohesity App Marketplace. They allow you to integrate an entire data management ecosystem on a single Cohesity platform.

• Spotlight App: Search audit logs to determine who is creating, modifying, accessing, or deleting files. Spotlight also flags anomalous users and entities.
• Insight App: Perform easy and interactive text searches to gain insights for business and compliance purposes.
• Data Insights: Scan 3rd party NAS systems, classify data as hot, warm, and cold, and analyze file information such as name, size, type, access patterns, and more. Create intelligent data lifecycle policies to seamlessly tier or move data to SmartFiles for cost-effective and secure long-term retention.

Reference Information

• Cohesity app ecosystem

Our customers use SmartFiles across a broad range of use cases. Popular use cases include content management and secure digital repositories. SmartFiles can be used for managing corporate audio and video, video surveillance datasets, and machine data. It can also be used as a modern target for archive and backup data sets, replacing legacy solutions along with their associated high costs and scalability limitations. You can support multiple workloads with a single SmartFiles solution. Generally, the more data that’s managed by SmartFiles, the better your analytics-based insights will be.

The supported use cases cover a wide range of vertical markets and industries, including stringently regulated markets like Financial Services, Healthcare, Public Sector, and Manufacturing/Technology.

Reference Information:

• Backup target solution brief
• Archive and tiering solution brief
• Data Domain replacement solution brief
• SmartFiles for financial services
• SmartFiles for healthcare
• SmartFiles for public sector
• SmartFiles for manufacturing