The main ideas we portray in the report are:

• Organizations are responsible for the integrity of their data in SaaS apps, because no one else is. Under the shared responsibility model of cloud use, cloud providers explicitly opt out of this responsibility.
• The nature of data loss events in the current era are different to the rare and infrequent catastrophic disasters of several decades ago. Potential data loss disasters are now much more frequent and are traced to different triggers.
• A solid data backup approach for all data—even data in SaaS applications—is required for meeting a growing body of data protection and other industry regulations, e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and FINRA.
• While some SaaS vendors offer native backup for their apps, using a third-party backup service that works in a unified, coherent, and consistent approach across multiple SaaS services has clear and compelling benefits.

With summer holidays drawing to a close in many parts of the world, it’s time for to hold a webinar to discuss the main findings in the report. That is being held later this week. Details and the link for registration are below:

• When: Thursday September 12, 2024
• Time: 1.00pm Pacific time, 4.00pm Eastern time
• Hosted by OpenText
• Register to attend

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.

The evolving nature of modern ransomware and other cyberattacks have transformed a once-upon-a-time IT maintenance process into the linchpin on which business recovery depends. Without a strong and enduring backup posture, ransomware and other cyberattacks will cripple or destroy an organization.

The white paper examines the transformation of the importance of backup strategies, profiles the modern cyberthreat landscape, and presents an updated list of essential requirements to enable a backup approach with business resilience and disaster recovery at its core. 

Key findings:

• Legacy and laissez-faire approaches to backup are no longer sufficient.
• Cyberthreat actors are continually probing for new ways to compromise organizations and weaponize security protections.
• Data backup is an essential strategy for security, business continuity, and organizational resilience.
• What makes sense as strategic best practice for backup and recovery to counteract ransomware in 2024 and beyond is very different to what was sufficient five years ago. 

Please download your copy of this white paper from our portfolio. Registration is required to snag a copy.