As AWS re:Invent 2024 approaches, Cohesity is preparing to showcase its cutting-edge AI-powered data security solutions.

In an exclusive interview with VMblog, Nikitha Omkar, Product Marketing Manager at Cohesity, reveals the company's latest innovations in cyber resilience, cloud data management, and AI-driven insights.

With a Diamond sponsorship and multiple speaking sessions planned, Cohesity is set to demonstrate how organizations can protect, manage, and derive value from their data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. 

VMblog:  Before we dive into AWS re:Invent specifics, can you give our readers a brief overview of your company and what sets you apart from others in the market?

Nikitha Omkar:  Cohesity provides AI-powered data security for cyber resilience. We make it easy to secure, protect, manage, and derive value from data - across the data center, edge, and cloud. Cohesity helps organizations defend against cybersecurity threats with comprehensive data security and management capabilities, including immutable backup snapshots, AI-based threat detection, monitoring for malicious behavior, and rapid recovery at scale.

VMblog:  How can attendees of the event find you?  What do you have planned at your booth this year?  What type of things will attendees be able to do at your booth? 

Omkar:  Every year, Cohesity goes bigger and better at re:Invent, and this year we are a Diamond sponsor. Please make sure to stop by our booth #526 and at AWS Marketplace Pavilion, kiosk #220, to learn more about our long-standing relationship with AWS and how together, we're rethinking data security and management.

We invite you to stop by our booth, #526, on the expo floor to chat with our IT experts and see firsthand  the latest Cohesity innovations, or test your luck and spin to win some awesome prizes. You can also schedule a meeting with our executives to discuss your specific data security needs.

Every day (Monday - Thursday), at our booth, you'll hear from Cohesity technology partners and system integrators about our joint solutions across AI-powered data security, data classification, and more in 15-minute informative sessions at the Cohesity mini-theater. We'll also pop up at our partner booths on the show floor to present technology innovations and demos co-created with partners like Cisco, Nutanix, Intel, and Wiz.

You can also find us in the AWS Marketplace Pavilion, kiosk #220, to see how you can easily procure Cohesity through the AWS Marketplace for an even better customer experience.

VMblog:  Have you sponsored AWS re:Invent in the past?  If so, what is it about this show that keeps you coming back as a sponsor?

Omkar:  Yes, Cohesity was a Platinum sponsor of AWS re:Invent 2023 and 2022. What brings us back are the relationships we build with attendees in-person. As a strategic AWS partner, we value this event and the opportunity to showcase our work together. Cohesity and AWS together, can help our joint customers simplify IT operations, enhance cyber resilience, and optimize IT costs with our AI-powered cloud data security and management solution. Organizations use Cohesity to manage and secure AWS workloads, SaaS applications, and on-prem data.

VMblog:  Do you have any speaking sessions during the event?  If so, can you give us the details?

Omkar:  This year, we have three insightful breakout sessions where you can hear from our top customers and partners on how Cohesity is taking the lead in securing the world's data.

Accelerate Business Decisions with RAG and AI

Tuesday, Dec 3 / 5:30-6:30 p.m. / Venetian Summit Showroom

Enterprises are leveraging Al to accelerate their business, but a common challenge they face is integrating diverse, siloed data into Al services. For Al models to deliver meaningful insights, they need to be trained on enterprise data, which is often spread across multiple environments. The solution-bring Al to the data wherever it resides. In this session, discover how NVIDIA, AWS, and Cohesity combined generative Al with a modern data platform to deliver instant, high-quality insights from secondary data, helping businesses address critical questions faster. Also learn about research to support legal discovery, building secure, team-specific knowledge discovery domains, and simplifying compliance-based investigative research.

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Real-world Defense Strategies to Enhance Cyber Resilience in the Cloud

Thursday, Dec 5 / 2-3 p.m. / Wynn, Bollinger Room

Learn how establishing a robust cyber resilience framework can help organizations respond and recover quickly from security events. Join data security experts from Cohesity, SimonMed Imaging, and the State of Missouri, to explore the most recent threats landscape developments, effective security strategies, and practical tips for securing your hybrid cloud environment. This session offers valuable insights and best practices to bolster your cyber defenses and ensure uninterrupted business operations amidst ever-changing digital threats.

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Security Breakfast with MongoDB, BigID, and Cohesity

December 3rd / 7:00-7:45 am / Venetian, Sugarcane Restaurant

Join MongoDB, BigID, and industry experts from Cohesity, and Natera, for an insightful panel on harnessing the power of AI while ensuring responsible and secure deployment. Our panelists will explore how AI can drive innovation, enhance data insights, and improve operational efficiencies, alongside strategies for safeguarding sensitive data to maintain trust in AI systems. Space is limited so RSVP here.

VMblog:  What are the most significant cloud-related challenges your customers are facing in 2024, and how does your solution address these pain points?

Omkar:  Ransomware continues to be a challenge for organizations worldwide, and unfortunately, many companies overestimate cyber resilience. A recent Cohesity report found that 78% of respondents have confidence in their company's cyber resilience strategy, but 83% said they would pay a ransom to recover data and restore business processes faster. As an AWS partner, Cohesity helps organizations protect, detect, and recover AWS and hybrid data from ransomware attacks.

VMblog:  How does your technology specifically complement or enhance AWS services, and what unique value proposition do you offer to AWS customers?

Omkar:  AWS is a strategic Cohesity partner and an early investor. Cohesity's solutions are co-created with AWS and deployed as-a-service on AWS. To simplify procurement and improve the customer experience, we are available for purchase on the AWS marketplace. 

Today, over 4,450 organizations around the world in various industries, rely on Cohesity to protect their organizations' AWS and hybrid data from ransomware attacks, insider threats, and natural disasters.

Cohesity is the leader in AI-powered data security with a unique, industry-first conversational AI assistant, Cohesity Gaia, that helps our customers derive valuable insights from backup data.

VMblog:  With AI and machine learning being hot topics, how is your company incorporating these technologies to improve cloud operations and management?

Omkar:  Cohesity is an AI-powered data security and management company. While we leverage AI to improve threat detection, monitoring malicious behavior, and rapid recovery at scale, we also announced a unique way to leverage it for improving the speed and quality of insights available for various use cases. Earlier this year, we launched Cohesity Gaia - its first-to-market AI-powered search assistant that allows you to have a "conversation" with all your unstructured data. Cohesity Gaia brings the power of generative AI to enterprise data, allowing you to have a conversation with your data and make smarter business decisions faster. Search, retrieve, cite, and create answers from your enterprise data in on-prem and cloud storage and inside various popular file formats, including emails, documents, PDFs, text files, spreadsheets, HTML, XML, and presentations.

VMblog:  What new product announcements or demonstrations can attendees expect to see at your booth during AWS re:Invent 2024?

Omkar:  Cohesity is trusted by customers and analysts alike, for protecting AWS workloads like Amazon S3, EC2, and RDS and hybrid workloads such as VMs, databases, NAS, and physical servers across on-premises, edge, and clouds. Here is a recap of some of the capabilities announced in the last year that advanced our AWS customers' cyber resilience journey.

Data protection: Cohesity customers running on AWS now have comprehensive coverage for more virtualization, physical, NAS, and database workloads running in the modern enterprise. Here is a detailed list of supported sources and workflows running on AWS. 

A new version of Cohesity Cloud Edition (CCE) is now generally available on AWS, helping customers strike the right balance of convenience, control, and cost. With this latest release, customers can achieve a lower TCO and better performance by offering multiple configurations, simplifying operations and reducing overall storage costs. Compared to prior versions of the cloud edition, the new version can help you realize over 100% ingest throughput, require up to 50% fewer nodes per cluster, and reduce costs by up to 66% per terabyte. This update helps customers retain the security of a self-managed single tenant, with the cost efficiency closer to a multi-tenant environment. 

Another new feature for AWS users: Cohesity Cloud Edition supports write once, read many (WORM) capabilities for cloud archives in AWS storage targets using incremental forever archival. The combination of Cohesity DataLock and support for AWS object lock provides end-to-end immutability from both the Cohesity and storage end. This approach delivers heightened security with simplified operations, faster data access, and TCO by eliminating the need for frequent full backups.

Organizations can recover PostgreSQL or Aurora databases to their original location, an alternative RDS instance, or a self-managed database server. This capability helps companies achieve their data protection goals, including making backups to Cohesity's immutable storage. Such backups can be retained long-term and protected against attacks.

Security: We recently expanded our Clean Room solution to include a digital jump bag^TM. The Cohesity Clean Room solution is a set of product capabilities and workflows that organizations can use to achieve cyber resilience in this age of destructive ransomware and wiper attacks. Our Clean Room solution provides a trusted foundation that speeds up incident recovery and augments investigations by SecOps teams while minimizing the risk of secondary attacks. Our modular design creates an isolated recovery environment in minutes (including in AWS VPCs), supporting the response and recovery process and allowing teams to mitigate threats faster.

We believe that data security is a team sport, and that's why we created the industry's largest alliance of DSPM vendors to reduce customer risks of cloud transformation and data democratization. These include security leaders like Wiz, BigID, Cyera, Normalyze, Tenable, Dasera, and many others. This enables our customers to easily integrate with these security vendors via open APIs, giving them an unprecedented view into which of their critical/sensitive AWS data is vulnerable to attacks, allowing them to back up that data and improve their defense against cyber threats.

AI: We recently announced new updates and functionality for our cyber recovery assistant, an AI-powered assistant for investigating and triaging items that have triggered alerts in the Cohesity Security Center. This capability is now supported on Cohesity data stored on Amazon EC2 instances. The AI-powered cyber recovery assistant allows the admin to converse with the Cohesity system to assess the impact of the anomaly-correlated event, get direction on the next steps of investigation, and perform any remediation that may be needed-all from within the wizard without needing specialized cyber response expertise.

Earlier this year, we announced a collaboration to integrate NVIDIA AI Enterprise with Cohesity Gaia, our AI conversational assistant. Shortly after, we adopted NVIDIA NIM to accelerate retrieval augmented generation apps for enterprises.

During the breakout session with NVIDIA and in our booth demonstrations, we'll share details of our NIM implementation, a set of inference microservices published by NVIDIA. NIM has helped deliver several important enhancements for Gaia, including greater accuracy of responses, faster model experimentation cycles, and increased compute efficiency. Join us to hear more about the improved outcomes we're delivering for customers with NVIDIA NIM.

Governance and compliance: In May, we announced that Cohesity Cloud Services for Government earned the FedRAMP® Moderate Authorization, a significant milestone underscoring our commitment to the public sector. Federal agencies can use Cohesity Cloud Services for Government atop AWS GovCloud to modernize data security and management practices.

VMblog:  Cost optimization in the cloud remains a crucial concern - how does your solution help organizations maximize their AWS investment?

Omkar:  Cohesity and AWS allow companies to simplify IT operations and enhance cyber resilience, all while reducing IT costs by reducing operational overhead, downtime, data loss, and data footprint with Cohesity's enterprise-class data security and management capabilities.

VMblog:  Security and compliance are top priorities for AWS users. How does your solution strengthen an organization's cloud security posture?

Omkar:  Cohesity provides multiple layers of protection, detection, and recovery, and leverages an organization's current investments in security operations and controls. Today, over 4,450 organizations around the world in various industries, rely on Cohesity to protect their organizations' AWS and hybrid data from ransomware attacks, insider threats, and natural disasters.

Furthermore, Cohesity provides data authenticity by leveraging zero trust security to tightly control access and privileges, and ML-driven analytics to monitor all critical production data for ransomware activity. All this ensures reliable recovery at scale measured in hours vs. days.

VMblog:  What hands-on experiences or interactive demonstrations will you be offering at your booth this year?

Omkar:  We will be showcasing many informative demos at re:Invent this year. Below is a list:

Live Demos:

• Backup and recover AWS workloads
• Elevate your data resilience strategy with DR replication and archiving to Amazon S3
• Create a cleanroom for incident response and recovery
• Respond and recover with Cohesity DataHawk
• Isolate and recover data with Cohesity FortKnox
• Recover critical workloads using Cohesity Instant Mass Restore (IMR)
• Running Cohesity Cloud Edition on AWS
  
• Understanding economic impacts using Cohesity Gaia  
  

Recorded Demos:

• Cohesity Gaia Horizontal Demo
• DSA Integrations - Microsoft Sentinel, Palo Alto XSOAR, Tenable/Cyberscan, Cisco XDR, Crowdstrike Falcon Log Scale and CyberArk
  

Interactive/Self Guided Demos:

• Protect and recover AWS workloads
• Respond and recover with Cohesity DataHawk
• Isolate and recover data with Cohesity FortKnox
• Recover critical workloads using Cohesity Instant Mass Restore (IMR)
• Research compliance issues with Cohesity Gaia
• Cohesity's Multilayer Security Architecture
• Instant and predictable NAS recovery
• Global Management and Search: Cohesity Helios
  

VMblog:  Many organizations are adopting multi-cloud strategies. How does your solution support customers who use AWS alongside other cloud providers?

Omkar:  Companies should adopt the best cloud-or even on-prem-strategies that work for them and their customers, and this shouldn't impact data security and management. With Cohesity, companies can simplify hybrid and multi-cloud data security and management with fully-managed services. We are integrated with leading cloud providers and security vendors to offer our customers a seamless experience with their existing investments.

VMblog:  What specific roles or job functions within an organization would benefit most from visiting your booth at re:Invent?

Omkar:  This event is valuable for many busy executives and practitioners-it's a chance to accomplish months of discussions with vendors in a week.

We encourage all to swing by our booth to benefit from live demos and discussions on how organizations can use Cohesity to manage and secure AWS workloads, SaaS applications, and on-prem data.

We also encourage attendees to schedule a meeting with our executives to discuss their specific data security needs.

VMblog:  Is your company sponsoring any type of party or get together during the event that you'd like to notify attendees about?

Omkar:  Yes! Join Cohesity, AWS, BigID, and Netskope for an exciting evening of Asian fare, cocktails, and conversation. Space is limited, so register here for an invite. Monday, Dec 2 / 7:30-10:30 p.m. / The Venetian, TAO Mezzanine

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