Cohesity, the leader of hyperconverged secondary storage, today announced the release of Cohesity Helios, a SaaS-based management solution that empowers customers to see, manage, and take action on their secondary data and applications globally -- from a single dashboard -- while benefiting from powerful analytics and machine learning (ML) capabilities that generate valuable insights from untapped data.

Today, enterprise customers no longer have all of their secondary data and apps in one data center. Instead, they are spread across multiple silos in different locations globally, creating mass data fragmentation challenges. Cohesity DataPlatform created a new way for organizations to consolidate secondary data and apps -- like backup, test/dev, archives and analytics -- in a single hyperconverged solution. Helios builds on this foundation and furthers Cohesity's vision by giving customers unprecedented global access, visibility, and control of their secondary apps and data across all their Cohesity DataPlatform sites whether on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge.

"We are ushering in a new way to address mass data fragmentation challenges that are plaguing enterprises across virtually every industry," said Mohit Aron, CEO and founder of Cohesity. "With Helios, we now are providing businesses with a single, global unified platform for their secondary data and apps in a way that's smart, incredibly efficient and brings new insights to massive volumes of untapped data."

"Customers globally are grappling with how to easily manage skyrocketing volumes of secondary data and applications that are spread across silos on-premises and in the cloud," said Mark Peters, principal analyst and practice director, ESG. "Cohesity Helios gives customers innovative ways to view and manage their global secondary data and applications, making it much easier to accelerate IT productivity, simplify business planning, and derive insights from untapped data."

Accelerating IT Productivity

With Helios, enterprises have the ability to roll out policies or make upgrades across their entire Cohesity multi-cluster environment with a single click, drastically simplifying IT operations. Additional features make infrastructure management even more efficient:

• Access a smart assistant for IT: Administrators can define service-level agreements (SLAs) by job and workload and Cohesity SmartAssist will automatically evaluate required versus available resources (e.g., compute, storage) across all clusters to meet SLAs or suggest changes as needed.
• Utilize machine learning for operational insights: Helios evaluates how infrastructure is being used and utilizes ML to determine what adjustments or modifications may be necessary in the future. For example, based on current storage utilization and workload makeup, Helios will proactively recommend when additional resources might be needed to continue meeting business requirements.
• Benefit from peer comparisons: The SaaS solution not only evaluates customers' operational metadata sets but also analyzes operational metadata from Cohesity customers globally. Organizations can compare infrastructure utilization against anonymized benchmarks from their peers and uncover best practices.

Simplifying Business Planning and Improving Continuity

Businesses cannot afford downtime, but the complexity of modern IT infrastructure makes it increasingly difficult to prevent. Through ML, Helios helps organizations improve business continuity across their secondary infrastructure. Helios empowers organizations to:

• Benefit from proactive health checks: Based on global operational metadata collected from Cohesity, Helios looks at the actions taken by an IT administrator across their sites and alerts them, for example, of anomalies that don't follow best practices (e.g., if a financial services customer forgets to turn on encryption). Helios will then suggest a recommended path forward.
• Relax with automation: Customers get peace of mind in knowing Helios can automate corrective action for failure of non-critical system resources, including proactively notifying the Cohesity global support team to ensure that any issue is quickly addressed.
• Access a "crystal ball": Helios empowers administrators to test the impact of future changes across their clusters before rolling them out. Administrators can also evaluate alternative approaches with "what-if" analyses powered by machine learning.

Maximizing Agility and Probing Untapped Data for Meaningful Insights

Helios provides customers with new levels of agility. Because customers can see all of their Cohesity sites in one view, organizations can easily move data from one location to another, maximizing capacity and improving disaster recovery while optimizing costs. Organizations can also use the Cohesity Analytics Workbench (AWB) to drive meaningful insights from untapped data, starting with three applications:

• Detect patterns that help ensure compliance: With the Pattern Finder application, enterprises can search their secondary data for strings of characters that match the pattern of sensitive or personal data, for example, a Social Security number or a phone number. Organizations can then take corrective action to comply with stringent regulatory requirements.
• Pinpoint bad passwords to mitigate risks: The smart Password Detection application gives companies a way to improve security by searching across global data sets to uncover passwords that fail to meet best practices, such as those that include personal or company names, or are stored in plain text.
• Transcode videos to optimize for capacity: To help optimize resources, IT admins -- including those within the security, surveillance and healthcare industries -- can use the Video Compression application to reduce the size of large media files while optimizing space.

"Munson Healthcare is committed to providing top quality care to our patients through a dedicated team of 9,000 professionals who operate across nine hospitals," said Josh Humphrey, senior systems administrator, Munson Healthcare. "It is critical that we manage our secondary data and applications spread across multiple locations in the most efficient way possible while also ensuring we meet stringent compliance requirements by "lighting up" untapped secondary data. Helios can help us directly address these challenges while continuing to focus resources where they are needed most -- on our patients."