The News: Cohesity’s introduction of Cohesity Data Cloud 7.0 provides enhanced and new capabilities that provide strengthened privileged access controls, extended support for platforms and workloads, and enhanced cyber resiliency for file and object workloads. See the full press release from Cohesity.
Analyst Take: Cohesity’s introduction of Cohesity Data Cloud 7.0 is timely as cyber resiliency requirements are increasingly influencing the capabilities that IT Operations is looking for in their data protection implementation. In fact, I recently fielded a primary research study that found that, for more than 50% of respondents, the cybersecurity team influences data protection purchase requirements, and that cyber-resiliency topped the reasons that respondents would change their primary data protection vendor. Cohesity Data Cloud Version 7.0 addresses a number of data protection-related capabilities for cyber resiliency that regularly come up in our conversations with customers.
One featured capability of Cohesity Data Cloud 7.0 is strengthened access control. Specifically, Cohesity has added the ability for split key access for privileged actions on self-managed Cohesity clusters. This makes the approval of a secondary admin, specifically one from the Cohesity support team, necessary for actions such as deleting backup copies. This type of two-person concurrence is increasingly becoming a table stakes requirement, so that a malicious actor cannot single-handedly wreak havoc within the backup environment.
Additionally, Cohesity added the ability to apply custom security policies with its SmartFiles solution for software-defined file and object services, which further inhibits the ability of bad actors to access data. The addition of policy-based retention for SmartFiles data is notable because it can help IT Operations to ensure they are storing data only for as long as they need to, potentially reducing security vulnerabilities and ensuring compliance. AWS GovCloud is also now supported, which can help U.S. government agencies dealing with strict data privacy regulations and sensitive data to meet compliance requirements and further ensure the security of the data they are working with.
Another feature of Cohesity’s Data Cloud 7.0 that I find appealing is enhanced granularity of file and folder restores for SmartFiles, because ransomware attacks require calculated and more precise recoveries than other disaster events, in order to avoid recovering compromised files back into production, and to preserve any good data changes. Along a similar vein, in place file recovery can accelerate malware scanning and testing, potentially helping to reduce business downtime.
Though largely a feature-driven update, the umbrella 7.0 release for Cohesity Data Cloud is remarkable in that it reflects the ongoing evolution of Cohesity as a company, and the data protection market as a whole, to a more significant role in the cyber-security stack.
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Disclosure: Evaluator Group, wholly owned by The Futurum Group, is a research and analyst firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article. Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually.
