The announcements, which also include the appointment of a new member to the Cohesity Advisory Council, were made at Cohesity’s virtual ReConnect event.
Amith Nair, SVP and GM of the Cloud Business Unit at Cohesity
Today, data management and security vendor Cohesity is making several announcements at their virtual ReConnect event. They unveiled Cohesity DataHawk, a data security Saas solution that helps customers and recover from cyber and ransomware attacks. They announced the Data Security Alliance, which involves multiple security vendors, with an initial focus on the better-known ones. The Security Alliance technology is an important element of the DataHawk solution. Finally, Kelly Bissell, CVP of Microsoft Security Services, was named to the Cohesity Security Advisory Council.
“At our customer advisory board meeting last month, we talked about the extremely dynamic environment of security today,” said Amith Nair, SVP and GM of the Cloud Business Unit at Cohesity. “There has been a shift in focus from perimeter centres to data centres, and an emphasis on recovering really fast if data is stolen. As a result, we are now focusing on data-centric security.”
DataHawk combines three critical security capabilities into one SaaS solution. One is threat protection using scans for attack indicators and malware. A second is data classification using machine learning based technology that provides high accuracy in identifying and detecting sensitive or critical data, and determines which is most relevant if recovery is needed, so you can recover it first. The third component is cyber vaulting through Cohesity FortKnox, an existing offering which provides airgapped protection against ransomware.
“These three components make up DataHawk,” Nair said. It reflects Cohesity’s view that security needs to be closely integrated with data management, and that IT and SecOps haven’t collaborated to the extent they should.
Many companies are now in this space because of its growing importance in the market, but Nair thinks that DataHawk is differentiated from its competition.
“The part that is crowded is generally scanning and detection,” he said. “They tend to stay on the perimeter of the network while we are more on the data-centric side of things. That’s also where the Alliance comes in.”
The Data Security Alliance combines best-in-class solutions from industry leading cybersecurity and services companies with Cohesity’s data security and management expertise. Partners in the ecosystem include: BigID, Cisco, CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Palo Alto Networks, Securonix, Splunk, and Tenable, with new security advisory relationships with Mandiant and PWC.
“We have taken a quality over quantity approach with our Alliance partners,” Nair said. “If it matters to a customer we will go after other vendors, but at the start, we have focused on big names that customers know, with the objective of strongly aligning with them.
This includes the sales motion, which will be a joint one between Cohesity and each partner.
“We feed into the partner platforms, although we do OEM BigID and we also use Blue Hexagon, recently acquired by Qualys, for scanning,” Nair indicated. It’s a very symbiotic relationship.”
Some additional partners have not yet been announced.
“The ones who have been announced have over 100 billion dollars in market capital, but there are some that are not public yet,” Nair noted.
Finally, Cohesity announced the addition of Kelly Bissell, CVP of Microsoft Security Services, to the Cohesity Security Advisory Council. He becomes the council’s seventh member. Bissell brings nearly 30 years of experience in IT and cybersecurity with former security leadership roles at Accenture and Deloitte.
“We announced our Security Advisory Council a few months ago, and it has been instrumental in letting us know where the security market is going,” Nair said. “It has helped us considerably from a roadmap perspective. Kelly is the person who runs the services wing for Microsoft from a security standpoint. His team helps customers who go through an event, and also sets up a security architecture before things happen. It’s a big global team that helps customers with big security issues.”
