Cohesity, the pioneer of hyperconverged secondary storage, today announced its hybrid cloud strategy that empowers customers to leverage the cost efficiency and agility of cloud infrastructure. Cohesity's unified, intelligent storage platform was designed from day one to integrate seamlessly with public and private cloud services, and enables organizations to take a comprehensive approach to cloud adoption with its CloudArchive, CloudTier, and CloudReplicate features.

Cloud computing services have become a top focus for today's companies, both as a foundation for innovation and a way to realize cost savings. In fact, a new report from ESG showed that the number of organizations using the cloud as a means to control IT spending has more than doubled (going from 13 percent in 2009 to 32 percent this year). During that same time span, cloud computing went from the least to the most commonly selected cost mitigation strategy for IT decision-makers.

"The continuous increase in the usage of cloud services [to control costs] suggests that not only are net-new organizations leveraging cloud computing every year, but also those that have already gone down this path have derived tangible benefits from this approach and continue to pursue alternative application and infrastructure deployment models for this purpose alone," the ESG report stated.

Mid- to large-scale enterprises today are searching for a way to harness the benefits of the cloud's cost efficiency and agility. However, unlike smaller organizations, they likely already own significant on-premises data and infrastructure, making a complete migration to the cloud highly disruptive, as well as needlessly expensive. These organizations face additional challenges as a result of having data for different use cases spread across multiple silos. This storage fragmentation makes it difficult to get a complete picture of data usage and overall capacity, making it nearly impossible to evaluate what can or should be moved to the cloud.

To tackle this challenge, Cohesity consolidates all this data on a unified, intelligent platform that provides complete storage visibility. Cohesity's cloud strategy delivers the tools to easily identify the right workloads and data for cloud migration to achieve maximum effectiveness at the lowest cost.

"As our research shows, companies of all sizes are focused on the benefits of cloud computing, but for many larger organizations making the switch can be an incredibly difficult and complex task," said ESG Senior Analyst Scott Sinclair. "Cohesity's hyperconverged secondary storage platform eliminates data fragmentation and offers an array of public and private cloud integrations that make it easy to shift resources to the cloud in cases where's it's most efficient."

"Leveraging cloud services to help our team be more agile and efficient is a key initiative for us, which is why we're excited about Cohesity's cloud strategy," said Peter Cho, core infrastructure architect at the event management technology company Cvent, Inc., a current Cohesity customer. "Their solution offers us an on-premises, hyperconverged platform for our private cloud with a complete set of public cloud integration points, including cloud archiving, tiering and remote replication, to span a range of use cases from backup to test/dev."

Cohesity's hybrid cloud strategy delivers a complete approach that allows enterprises to continue to realize benefits as they gradually migrate more operations and data to the cloud, through three main features:

• Cohesity CloudArchive: Made available in Cohesity's latest platform upgrade, CloudArchive gives customers the option to seamlessly archive datasets for extended retention from the Cohesity Data Platform through pre-built integrations with Google Nearline, Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3, Glacier. Cohesity CloudArchive is a more cost-effective archiving alternative than copying data to local media and then transporting it to a secure, remote location for long-term retention.
• Cohesity CloudTier: Also available now, CloudTier gives customers the power to use public cloud as an extension of their on-premises storage. It dynamically increases local storage capacity, by moving seldom-accessed data blocks into the cloud. The policy-based waterfall model delivers transparent cloud tiering managed from the Cohesity Data Platform console so that end users no longer have to worry about exceeding on-premises capacity during temporary or seasonal demand spikes.
• Cohestiy CloudReplicate: With the CloudReplicate feature, customers can replicate local storage instances to remote public or private cloud services. Businesses benefit by obtaining a low-cost disaster recovery solution for their on-premises installations. This feature will be released for production use later this year.

Learn about Cohesity's hybrid cloud solutions in this short demo video, and for a more detailed overview, watch Cohesity's recent presentation at Storage Field Day 9.