Cohesity announced at its inaugural user conference, Cohesity Connect, new security and governance offerings designed to keep customers a step ahead of bad actors launching incredibly sophisticated ransomware attacks. 

In the early days, cyber criminals initially focused on encrypting production data. Cohesity countered by enabling customers to rapidly restore from backup data. Then, criminals started to destroy or encrypt backups. Cohesity countered with immutability. Now, bad actors are exfiltrating the data and threatening to post it on the dark web. 

To help customers address the latest threats, Cohesity unveiled the following SaaS offerings, which will be housed under the company's Data Management as a Service portfolio of Cohesity-managed solutions: 

• Cohesity DataGovern: a data security and governance service that uses AI/ML to automate the discovery of sensitive data and detect anomalous access and usage patterns which could indicate a cyberattack in play - key to thwarting bad actors trying to exfiltrate data. 
• Project Fort Knox: a service that will allow customers to maintain an isolated copy of their data in a Cohesity-managed vault to improve data resiliency in the face of ransomware attacks. In addition to immutability, this gives customers another means to thwart attackers trying to encrypt data. 

These offerings will be key additions to the company's comprehensive Threat Defense architecture that showcases how Cohesity and a wide range of ecosystem partners help customers address the latest cyber threats, including ransomware.

"Cybercriminals are rapidly becoming more sophisticated and aggressive, and the damage ransomware attacks cause to organizations can be catastrophic in terms of costs and brand reputation," said Matt Waxman, vice president of product management, Cohesity. "Relying on legacy backup as an insurance policy no longer is sufficient. Customers need next-gen technology that makes it easy to identify sensitive data, detect anomalies, isolate data, and stay ahead of modern threats. That's what we're focused on providing via our solutions and our Threat Defense architecture."  

Cohesity DataGovern 

DataGovern, available now for early access preview, uniquely brings together data security and data governance in a single SaaS offering that enables customers to:

• Use AI/ML-based classification technology to identify sensitive data - including personally identifiable information (PII) - in backup and production data and determine who has access to it, helping to harden environments before attacks occur.
• Automate and simplify data classification with predefined policies for common regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA to meet compliance and governance mandates.
• Detect behavioral anomalies in near real time, such as when a user suddenly accesses large volumes of sensitive data - an activity that could be a precursor to a data exfiltration event.  
• Trigger remediation workflows as determined by policy through integration with leading security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms.
  

Project Fort Knox 

Cohesity is introducing Project Fort Knox, a SaaS offering planned for early access preview in the coming quarters, that will deliver Cohesity-managed data vaulting capabilities. Through this offering, customers will be able to easily achieve secure data isolation through a cloud-based repository to store a copy of their data that's designed to be tamper-resistant and always available. This service will offer the following benefits to customers: 

• Just connect, vault, and recover - no need to shuttle tapes around, attempt to construct a do-it-yourself (DIY) cloud-based data vault, build out additional storage infrastructure, or devise bespoke recovery processes to adhere to well-known "3-2-1" best practices. 
• In case of a ransomware attack, quickly identify a clean copy of data with confidence and rapidly recover safely to their desired location - on-premises or in the cloud. 
• Regularly test attack preparedness by running mock drills in an isolated environment. 
• Move from a CapEx intensive to an OpEx ‘as a service' funding model.
  

Threat Defense: An Architecture for an Ever-Evolving Threat Landscape
These new SaaS offerings both draw from and contribute to Cohesity's Threat Defense data security architecture. This multi-layered architecture brings together a range of products, services, and capabilities from Cohesity and ecosystem partners to help customers identify threats via AI and ML, protect their data, and easily recover in the event of a cyberattack. 

"Providing data security and a fast response to attacks are critical as we jointly help customers combat cybercrime," said Rishi Bhargava, vice president Product Strategy for Cortex XSOAR, Palo Alto Networks. "Through Cohesity's integration into the Cortex^TM XSOAR platform, we are helping our mutual customers combat ransomware attacks by quickly detecting and responding to critical data security alerts."

Cohesity has successfully helped numerous customers protect themselves from ransomware attacks, where no ransoms had to be paid.