Osterman Research

We attended RSAC 2024 in San Francisco from May 6-8. Our days at the conference were packed with back-to-back briefings. 

Here’s some notes on our briefing with the Cohesity team: Frank Sessions (Head of Analyst Relations), Sheetal Venkatesh (Director of Product Management), and Chris Hoff (Product Marketing Lead). The briefing was organized by the analyst relations team at Cohesity. 

Key takeaways from the briefing and some subsequent explorations:

• Cohesity was founded 10 years ago. The company focuses on providing ways for organizations to manage, secure, and drive insights around their secondary data. This means data that is backed up, rather than primary / production data. Cohesity is highly focused on how organizations can drive insights off their secondary data – rather than it just ROTting over time.
• Cohesity has more than 4,000 customers and serves 42% of the Fortune 100. In February, the company announced a definitive agreement to merge with the data protection business part of Veritas, creating a joint company with deep strengths in data security and management. Once the merger closes, the combined entity will have more than 10,000 customers and 3,000 partners.
• Cohesity Data Cloud is a service for capturing, managing, securing, and protecting a customer’s secondary data. It includes capabilities for backup and archival, threat scanning, data masking, eDiscovery, and (much) more. Cohesity says that its offer of a unified platform for data management and security reduces costs for organizations by 50% and enables much faster recovery times in the case of a cyberattack. 

• Cohesity Gaia is a new AI agent that works across the data a customer stores in the Cohesity Data Cloud. It is the next generation of insight-driven capabilities that Cohesity has created. Gaia combines LLM technology with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology, the latter of which searches for customer-specific content in order to provide context to a prompt. Both the context and prompt are then passed to the LLM for generating an answer. The early use cases are around legal and compliance matters, e.g., what happened in case X?, but support for additional use cases is coming. For more on Gaia, see Cohesity’s white paper.
• Cohesity wrapped a bus and at least three taxis for the show. They seemed ever-present whenever we left the underground show floor.

For more, see Cohesity.