The News: IBM announced a collaboration with Cohesity and its new IBM Storage Defender cyber resiliency solution, the first iteration of which will become available in the second calendar quarter of 2023, with additional developments to follow. Read the full press release from IBM here.
Analyst Take: IBM’s news of its collaboration with Cohesity and the launch of its new IBM Storage Defender solution, which will incorporate some Cohesity technologies, is well-timed in, designed to address the pressing needs of data security and resiliency in hybrid cloud environments. IBM Storage Defender will aim to bridge the silos of primary and secondary storage (on-array data copies for shorter-term retention and faster recovery, and off-array data copies for longer-term retention and longer recovery times) for cyber resiliency.
Specific solution components of IBM’s Storage Defender solution include:
The IBM Storage Defender offering will be sold and supported by IBM as well as through authorized IBM Business Partners.
The IBM Storage Defender solution represents a well-rounded take on cyber resiliency, spanning not only backup, recovery, and replication, but also capabilities such as event monitoring and operational air-gapping, which play an important role in identifying and recovering from attacks.
I view IBM Storage Defender as a long-term go-to-market play for IBM, moving the company toward partners in areas of the cyber resiliency stack that complement its own capabilities. For example, as it is initially brought to market, IBM Storage Defender solution will play to IBM’s long-standing capabilities in protecting physical systems and enterprise apps via IBM Storage Protect, and its close integration with Red Hat on the OpenShift Kubernetes front, while tapping complementary strengths and unique capabilities from Cohesity, including its scale-out architecture and Instant Mass Recovery of VMs. Moving forward, IBM Storage Defender will tie in further collaboration with a variety of players in the cyber resilience landscape, in areas such as data scanning and classification. I believe the ecosystem-supported approach will be an important theme for both IBM and Cohesity moving forward.
IBM Storage Defender will include an IBM-developed single-pane-of-glass dashboard that utilizes APIs for integration with partner software, including Cohesity’s Helios SaaS-delivered backup control plane. This will help IBM to maintain a flexible, Lego-like plug-and-play architecture, while also simplifying day-to-day use and administration for customers. The pricing model is still being sorted out by IBM, but it will possibly be complex, due to the range of licensing options in use with the various software components.
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.
