Cohesity disrupts data management

Loh explains the problems that Cohesity was created to solve.

Cohesity redefines data management in several ways. Its CEO and founder Dr Mohit Aron, who also co-founded Nutanix, was previously from Google and wanted to address corporate data sprawl with the same simplicity that Google has brought to the consumer space.

Marcus Loh, Cohesity CTO for Asia Pacific & Japan, said enterprises have three main problems with data, and are just throwing more hardware at the problem which only compounds them:
- Most organisations have no idea what information they have, what it is worth, or why they keep it.

"Nobody actually organises a meeting in an enterprise (asking) 'Hey, what should we delete today?'" he observed, instead backing up data which may be redundant or irrelevant.

- Most organisations have no idea where their sensitive, regulated, or most valuable information is

"It's impossible to secure if you do not know where your data is," he said.

- When organisations need to actually find information, it takes too long, costs too much, and usually is missing results or has too many results

This can be a problem is information is required for compliance."Where do I find all this? It's very very difficult to do." Loh said.

"The way we are describing this problem is that we have mass data fragmentation," he said. "Based on the research that we've done recently, 35% of customers say that they have six or more solutions...the fact that you have to maintain so many different types of solutions is a big problem."

The research also discovered that 63% of all organisations have between four and 15 copies of the same data, while 87% agree that in the long run, it is impossible to manage. "This is why I'm saying that this is a ticking time bomb waiting to happen. If you do not start somewhere, this bomb is going to explode on you," Loh said.

Cohesity's software-defined data management platform consolidates everything, presents it on a single pane of glass, and allows apps to make use of the data, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 70% or more. Ransomware becomes a thing of the past as backups are immutable, while full backups are made every time so that restores can occur very quickly.

Key solutions from Cohesity include the DataPlatform, which converges backup, files, dev/test and analytics; DataProtect, a backup and recovery application; Helios, a software-as-a-service application that provides visibility into and management of existing data; and MarketPlace, which offers apps that run on DataPlatform.

"I can search it. I can find it, I can manage it," summarised Loh. "(We) help to eliminate all the complexity, and give you the visibility. (We) help you to save costs right now because (you) don't have to pay multiple vendors to deploy multiple solutions...And because the data is ingested here...you can now run an application to extract value out of the backup data."


The concept has taken off. Cohesity doubled its customer base in the last 12 months, Loh shared. The company has financial and healthcare customers in Southeast Asia, among others. Referenceable global customers include fast food chain Wendy's, Cisco, Schneider Electric and real estate firm Colliers International.