Data management is changing fast.
Cohesity, a global data management company, is making a strong push in Australia and New Zealand, aiming to simplify and secure how organisations handle their data. In a recent interview, Derrick Cowan, Head of Systems Engineering, and Catherine Ramanatha, Channel and Distribution Manager, shared insights into Cohesity's approach and the rising importance of robust data management solutions.
Asked to summarise Cohesity's focus, Ramanatha chose two words: "data management." She explained that Cohesity aims to bring efficiency and clarity to a landscape in which data is typically spread across virtual, cloud, and on-premise environments. "Cohesity's data management focus covers virtual, cloud and on-premise workloads, backup and recovery, automation, databases, compliance, and many others," she said.
Cohesity's roots are in cutting-edge technology. Ramanatha pointed to the pedigree of the company's founder and CEO, Mohit Aron, highlighting that he was also a co-founder of Nutanix and formerly the lead engineer on the Google File System. She explained the vision: "If we think about what Google did for consumer data and consumer data services, they were able to consolidate the data on the internet and create services for that data. What Cohesity has been able to do is consolidate data management services for the enterprise."
The Cohesity platform consolidates what have traditionally been "very disparate and have multiple legacy systems within a data environment," she said. This process often made management "very inefficient, siloed and dark." With Cohesity's single, software-defined platform, "now manages modern backup, NAS, file and object, test and dev and also native cloud integration," Ramanatha added.
The company has also developed a SaaS management tool known as Helios, which provides an overview of data environments through a single user interface. Helios enables customers to "manage that data anywhere, anytime," opening up new possibilities for control and security. Cohesity has further expanded its services by launching a marketplace—an app store for data management. "We've got both third party and native Cohesity apps, so we've got a further layer of value that customers can start to derive from their enterprise data management services," Ramanatha said.
Turning to what makes an ideal data management solution, Cowan identified two perspectives: technical and commercial. He sees the technical side as revolving around four key priorities: simplified management, addressing exponential data growth, speed, and scalability. "We're seeing traditional systems today be very complex to manage, many moving parts, and really organisations want to simplify that management and operation aspect," he said.
Cohesity aims to provide a "smartphone-like user experience," Cowan said, allowing organisations to interact with their data intuitively. To address the explosion of data, Cowan emphasised techniques such as global deduplication and compression, which reduce storage costs and data footprints.
Speed and quick recovery capabilities are also crucial, he said, especially with the increasing threat of ransomware attacks. "We look at how we can quickly find data they want to recover—whether it be a file, folder, a database, an email—and we do that with our elastic search capability," Cowan explained.
Scalability is another cornerstone of Cohesity's offering. "A very scalable platform, module design that really lets our organisation start the right size and grow on incremental steps and really fit their business model, and we do that without any outages to add capacity or software upgrades," Cowan said.
On the commercial side, simplicity is again the watchword. "We have a very simplistic licensing model... Traditional models are very complex—whether it be per VM, per CPU, per mailbox. So it's very complex for organisations to consume. We have that very simple licensing model," Cowan said.
When asked about backup's role in security, Cowan did not mince words about the increasing sophistication of cyber threats. "We're seeing today the really increase of ransomware, organised attacks on organisations, even more so during these troubled times, which is obviously disappointing to say," he said.
Cybercriminals now routinely attack not only live production data but also backup systems. This means backups must be extremely secure. Cohesity's platform is designed to be resilient: "Our system is an immutable file system, it can't be modified, tampered and changed with," he said. Added protection comes from write-once read-many functionality, multi-factor authentication, and machine learning-assisted anomaly detection.
Cohesity also offers security-focused apps from its marketplace, such as CyberScan, which identifies software vulnerabilities. Cowan highlighted the importance of rapid recovery following an attack, enabled by their instant mass restore capability. "We really let those organisations quickly get back to operation and back to business," he said.
For businesses in Australia and New Zealand, Cohesity's approach is firmly channel-driven. "We are a 100% channel organisation, and our software is all about ease of use, and we've really taken that model to our partner ecosystem as well," Ramanatha explained.
Their partner network spans every Australian state and has "a really loyal partner network in New Zealand as well." She noted, "Our sole distributor for Cohesity appliances is Dicker Data in both Australia and New Zealand, and we also work very, very closely with our alliance partners."
Cohesity's reach is extended globally through high-profile relationships with other technology companies. "Both Cisco and HPE are investors in Cohesity," she added, also pointing to partnerships and validated platforms with the likes of Dell, Fujitsu, and Pure Storage.
When asked how new partners or end-users can get involved, Ramanatha said the company prides itself on "quality not quantity." She referenced the recent release of a new partner framework "to really support our partners at varying maturity models in their journey with Cohesity." For those interested, the message was clear: "If partners are interested in hearing about that and integrating Cohesity into their practice they can reach out to myself... For end users and if you're interested in reaching out, you can contact Derek or you can reach out to ANZ sales at Cohesity, and the whole team is represented on LinkedIn."
Ramanatha closed by reiterating the company's philosophy: "We have significant offerings and capability to really provide the right solution for customers through our partner network."
