Partner POV | A guide for AI-powered data security: How to deliver breakthrough outcomes

This article was written by Jared Ruckle, Sr. Director - Product Marketing, Solutions & Industry at Cohesity, and the article was submitted for publication by our partner, Cohesity.

What keeps you up at night?

When we ask IT and InfoSec leaders this question, they usually respond with some combination of these three priorities:

• "My organization needs to be more resilient to cyberattacks."
• "We need to accelerate our cloud migration."
• "I need to find ways for AI to complement our business."

To complicate matters further, they need to show progress on these items while containing costs and reducing their technical debt.

The adoption of a modern platform is a tried-and-true way to address a multitude of business and technical challenges. As we've noted previously, cloud-native products can deliver superior business outcomes compared to incumbent systems that weren't designed for today's cyber threats, or the world of API-driven infrastructure.

As you embark on your resilience journey, we advise you to think about five business outcomes: speed, scale, security, simplicity, and smarts. To this end, we've published a new white paper to help you understand how Cohesity Data Cloud has helped thousands of organizations like yours deliver on these outcomes.

Let's look at each "S" outcome under the backdrop of what's happening in enterprise IT and InfoSec.

#1 Speed: Accelerate cyber recovery

In the event of a cyberattack or other unplanned disruption, it's crucial to quickly return to "business as usual." The longer you're offline, the greater the financial and reputational impact.

One of the inherent advantages of the Cohesity Data Cloud is its speed of recovery. Our speed of cyber recovery is 5 to 10x faster than other alternatives thanks to our platform architecture. We can also help you perform fast restores in a granular or a mass recovery fashion for many workloads, whether virtual machines, databases, or NAS files, and whether on-premises or in the cloud.

Cohesity Data Cloud always maintains an unlimited number of fully-hydrated backup snapshots that can be instantly mounted, making your data readily available (via direct mount) when you need it, while restoring data to production locations in the background. Additionally, our distributed architecture and MegaFile capabilities intelligently "chunk" any data larger than 256 GB, and then streams it across the entire Cohesity cluster for rapid restore.

Of course, when a cyberattack hits, the first thing you want to do is respond. That means setting up a clean room, and conducting a forensic analysis of the attack. Once you have diagnosed and remediated the issue, you can proceed to recover from the last known good state.

To track your progress, test your cyber recovery plans regularly, and see how your RTO improves over time.

#2 Scale: A foundational outcome of any modernization project

Your enterprise must secure and manage more data than ever. Compounding the problem, data volumes are growing exponentially and now sprawl across on-premises environments, public clouds, edge nodes, and SaaS applications.

Cohesity Data Cloud was the first hyperconverged system to offer superior "scale-out" performance as data volumes grow. We've continued to innovate here, as evidenced by adoption by the world's largest companies: 47 of the Fortune 100 rely on Cohesity for their data security. As your data estate grows in scope and complexity, Cohesity Data Cloud is uniquely positioned to secure and protect the data sources that matter.

That also includes support for cloud workloads on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud.

With the scale of Cohesity Data Cloud, organizations can rein in costs and pay down technical debt. You can safely retire yesterday's point solutions and phase out costly proprietary hardware.

Measure your progress here based on the volume of data under management on the Cohesity Data Cloud—the larger the volume, the greater your efficiency.

#3 Security: Reduce your risk

Bad actors often go after your secondary data in an attack. The reason is twofold. First, backup data is often not protected as robustly as production systems. Second, once the backups are gone, the enterprise has no restoration options.

Cohesity Data Cloud includes a number of "secure by default" capabilities you configure and enable quickly: zero trust design, encryption of data at rest and in transit, immutability (write-once, read-many), multifactor authentication, quorum, and much more. And because of the platform's scale (more on this below), you can apply these security controls across your entire data estate.

The white paper also includes a look at how Cohesity offers deep capabilities across the five pillars of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework: identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover. It's worth noting that product features and capabilities are necessary, but not sufficient for rapid response and recovery from an attack—you'll need to mature and refine your response plans and workflows as well.

Initially, you'll want to track your progress based on adherence to Cohesity Data Cloud Security Hardening Best Practices (customer login required). From there, you can move on to more sophisticated metrics used by your InfoSec teams.

#4 Simplicity: Unlock operator efficiency

The cognitive overhead—and operational cost—of running multiple data protection systems adds up quickly. That's why many CIOs seek to consolidate investments around a few strategic platforms, rather than a long-tail of specialized systems.

Cohesity Data Cloud offers remarkable operating leverage, whereby a small group of skilled operators can run your entire data protection estate across all your infrastructure. What's more, Cohesity's APIs enable them to automate platform operations, and bring data protection tasks into their existing SOC workflows. They can run their data estate and perform backup and recovery workflows from a unified control plane and set of APIs. It's common for leaders to tell us that their teams can "go deep," and use advanced features of Cohesity Data Cloud because they don't have to spend nearly as much time performing basic functions, like they did with their prior environments.

A recent survey noted that with Cohesity, some customers observed that each FTE managed 63% more VMs. Use ratios like this (VM / FTEs), or PB / FTE to measure your progress.

#5 Smarts: Combine generative AI with your own enterprise data

Finally, we turn to the challenge of "use AI to complement the business."

Enterprises now expect their modern systems to use embedded AI to continually improve performance and efficiency. We call this capability "AI-powered operational insights." Your infrastructure and InfoSec teams can use these features to run your data estate more intelligently, and use AI to investigate and remediate potential threats faster.

Modern data platforms offer even greater upside: to help leaders accelerate their AI
strategy by bringing large language models (LLMs) to their secondary data. We refer to this concept as "AI-powered business insights."

This is the big idea behind Cohesity Gaia—to "have a conversation with your data," based on popular LLMs and secondary data indexed on the platform. Ask Cohesity Gaia questions about your most pressing questions, and it will generate answers based on your data stored in Cohesity Data Cloud:

You will maximize the "smarts" in your Cohesity deployment if your metrics across the board improve over time.

Focus on the 5 S's and fix the cyber resilience confidence paradox

Our recent Global Cyber Resilience Report indicated a cyber resilience confidence-capability paradox: 78% of respondents had confidence in their company's cyber resilience strategy, yet only 2% of respondents said they could recover their data and business processes in less than 24 hours.

If this sounds familiar, make it a priority to closing the gap between strategy and execution. Keep the 5 S's outcomes in mind during your data modernization journey, and you'll be well-positioned to respond and recover when your business needs it the most.