“Next-gen data management.” Cohesity has turned its tagline into a topic of discussion at Cohesity Connect 2021, their 2-day conference comprised of keynotes, sharing sessions and product releases surrounding innovations within the realm of data management. Catering to the Asia Pacific, EMEA and the Americas, Cohesity broadcasted their sessions based on the region of their participants. The sessions encompassed a range of topics focusing on cyber resilience, hybrid cloud, data protection and data management. 

Originally spanning 4 days, the first two days of the conference consisted of free certification sessions from Cohesity Academy to its participants. 

 
Much like the name suggests, Cohesity Connect was organised to create connections among IT professionals around the world in order to foster a global community for data management. Cohesity believes that data management plays a critical role in cyber resiliency as the convergence of data and security silos may be the key to overcoming the data management challenges of today. 

The first part of their opening keynote titled “The Key to Cyber Resiliency is Next-Gen Data Management” combined the expertise of Mohit Aron, founder and CEO of Cohesity alongside Kevin Mill, General Manager of Amazon S3, AWS. Their session discussed the less-than-ideal conditions of today’s world as organisations struggle against oncoming ransomware attacks and increasing data regulations. 

In his talk, Mohit discussed how Cohesity came upon the concept of next-gen data management expanding on the changes that the world has seen in the past few years and the deficits of legacy systems. “We realised that incremental improvements are not going to cut it. The limitations of legacy infrastructure are just too great. The new world requirements need to [be] built-in and not bolted on.”

With 4 main pillars of simplicity at scale, zero-trust security, powered by AI and third-party extensibility, Cohesity brings data management as a service for its customers. When asked about the last pillar, Kevin states, “I really like this pillar, I think that one of the tenants that I have kind of around modern storage architecture is avoiding these one-way doors with where do I put my data. Increasingly, customers, they may have data in a particular environment now and they are looking to optimise cost or migrate it so they’re not having to manage the underlying infrastructure but over-time, that data is increasingly valuable to do more with it.”

Accompanying the discussions, Cohesity made several announcements regarding new offerings to their already extensive solutions. The first unveiled by Mohit is another of Cohesity’s as a service offering with Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). This offering will add on the ability to use AWS as a recovery solution for failover and failback.

Second on the agenda for the Opening Keynote addressed “Minimising the Blast Radius of Ransomware” with two new SaaS Solutions from Cohesity. The trend of ransomware attacks has evolved throughout the years with an initial focus on production data, then backup data and now they have graduated to exfiltration and extortion. Cohesity representatives shared how during the first two stages, they had remedied the situations through backup and immutability. Now that the threat has evolved, Cohesity is working on its newest solutions in the form of ‘Cohesity DataGovern’ and ‘Project Fort Knox’. 

• Cohesity DataGovern
  Uses AI/ML to automate the detection of anomalous access and usage with regards to sensitive data to stop the exfiltration of data from bad actors.

• Project Fort Knox
  Allows customers to maintain isolated copies of their data in a Cohesity-managed vault. 

With Cohesity DataGovern available for early access preview and Project Fort Knox’s early access preview coming soon, Cohesity clients will be ready for the oncoming ransomware attacks that are headed their way.

The last session in the opening keynote for Cohesity Connect held a conversation between Nick Warner, COO at SentinelOne, and Rishi Bhargava, VP of Product Strategy at Palo Alto Networks, talking about the impacts of their partnerships with Cohesity.

Cohesity Connect 2021’s first day of talks also included some very interesting sessions from industry experts and even the creator of zero-trust, John Kindervag.