Technology Reseller - v17 2019

01732 759725 INTERVIEW 24 Then, there is scalability. Scaling with silos is a big, big problem, but with Cohesity, enterprises can scale out very, very easily. If they need more capacity, more compute power, they just add another node into their rack without any disruption during their main business hours. That’s the principle of the hyperconverged approach, and it is still what customers are looking for. There was a lot of hype around hyperconvergence for primary storage, with companies like Nutanix, and we are now seeing it in secondary storage, too, because a lot of people understand what the advantages of a hyperconverged solution are. tape; data in the cloud. There is tons of this data on different platforms in big enterprises and it is a nightmare for big companies to manage. TR: In what ways does Cohesity help enterprises manage their secondary storage? JK: First, we offer a very easy, simple way to manage data. We have one platform to manage all those things I have just mentioned. With that, we can reduce costs dramatically – we have TCO calculations showing that we can reduce costs by around 50%. TR: Who are your customers? JK: That is very easy to answer, because there’s a certain amount of terabytes at which it makes sense for our customers to work with us. This is mainly in the enterprise space. In Europe, we have very big customers in the financial sector and in healthcare, insurance and manufacturing. In some countries, there is also a nice mid-market. The UK and France are mainly enterprise but in Germany and the Nordic countries, there are high mid-size organisations with 1,000 people or more, and we are also targeting them. We can start small with a three-node cluster and around 40 terabytes, but we are definitely not serving the SMB market. TR: How do you attract customers? What is your route to market? JK: As a start-up, you have to find ways to reach out and get your first one, two, three, four customers. That phase is far behind us. Today, we put a lot of marketing dollars into branding to make us more visible. We attend the big trade shows, so that people understand what we are doing, and we are increasing the number of sales people we have. The partner landscape is also very important for us. We run a two-tier model and do every transaction through a partner. The strategic relationship we have Cohesity launches integrated, multi-layer ransomware protection Cohesity is expanding its product portfolio with an anti- ransomware solution for the latest version of Cohesity DataPlatform. The Cohesity Anti-Ransomware Solution is claimed to be the first product to tackle ransomware through a multi-layer approach that includes the ability to prevent, detect and, if necessary, respond to attacks. Raj Rajamani, Cohesity Vice President of Product Management, argues that such an approach is vital if organisations are to counter sophisticated ransomware attacks that are increasingly being targeted at weaknesses in legacy back-up infrastructures. He said: “Legacy backup solutions are ineffective against today’s ransomware attacks, which have become a top concern for almost every organisation. Real protection requires an integrated approach that combines proactive defence measures, intelligent monitoring and the power to restore massive amounts of data immediately.” The Cohesity Anti-Ransomware Solution does this by keeping backup jobs in an immutable view, by detecting anomalies through its SaaS-based secondary data and application management solution and by responding to any successful attack by quickly recovering any compromised data and hundreds of virtual machines. n Prevent: Cohesity’s immutable file system, SpanFS, serves as the core defence against ransomware by keeping backup jobs in an immutable view. If an attacker tries to modify the backup, Cohesity DataPlatform will write the data to a new instance, keeping the original snapshot intact and preserved. Additional protection is provided by multi-factor authentication and Cohesity DataLock, a new feature that allows security officers to ‘lock’ a backup snapshot so that even someone with the highest level of access cannot modify or delete it. n Detect: Cohesity Helios, a SaaS-based secondary data and application management solution, provides anomaly detection that alerts the customer’s IT admin and Cohesity’s support team when the backup data changes or ingest rates fall outside the norm based on historical trends. In addition, Cohesity is offering the industry’s only integrated detection and alerts for file- level anomalies within unstructured files and object data. This detects a ransomware attack by analysing the frequency files are accessed and the number of files being modified, added or deleted by a specific user or application. n Respond: Cohesity’s instant mass restore enables IT admins to recover files and hundreds of virtual machines instantly, at scale, to any point in time – a process that can take other backup solutions days or weeks. Cohesity also gives customers the ability to locate and delete infected files across their global data footprint, including in the public cloud. There has been a rapid increase in secondary data volumes over the last 18 months (source: Cohesity, Secondary Data Market Study). ...continued... As a company, we are growing at a rate of about 300% year-on-year, with all the pros and cons this brings 75-100% 50-75% 25-50% 1-25% Secondary storage increase 29% 26% 10% 33%