Cohesity Catalyst is a three-day global online event from May 23 to 25 that I think is a must-see for data security and management professionals. Cohesity has assembled an impressive lineup of true thought leaders from companies such as Mandiant, VMware, NetApp, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Cisco and HPE – a testament to Cohesity’s participatory capability and its position in the data security and management space .
This article dives into the announcements around AI and data security and my observations from the event.
Cohesity Catalyst 2023
Cohesity Turing: A Growing Collection of AI Capabilities
Cohesity introduces Cohesity Turing, a collection of AI/ML capabilities and technologies integrated into Cohesity’s Multi-Cloud Data Platform, designed to empower organizations to bring AI and their data together responsibly is designed for. Alan Turing was the inspiration for the product name. In 1947, Turing gave what is possibly the first lecture on computer intelligence; He was quoted as saying, “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience.” A prophetic statement if there ever was one!
Many AI/ML capabilities with Turing are present in the company’s offerings today, but Cohesity is expected to rapidly unveil new AI capabilities and integrations under the Cohesity Turing umbrella. Current AI/ML capabilities in Turing include:
- Ransomware anomaly detection using advanced modeling and data entropy detection; Can detect anomalies in ingested data to provide early warning of hidden threats.
- threat intelligence iis based on machine learning models trained on large data samples; It provides highly curated and managed threat feeds to accurately detect threats and automatically keep security teams updated.
- data classificationWhich helps to ensure that organizations can identify and trace the most sensitive data.
- predictive capability planning To meet current and future business needs.
- SLAs boosted with machine-driven recommendationsIncluding a what if simulator and forecast for future capacity utilization.
Cohesity is also building what I consider to be Recovery Augmented Generation (RAG) and a unique approach to customer data. RAG combines advances in generative AI and contextual search in a powerful new way to discover and retrieve relevant results efficiently. I think that many of Cohesity’s patent-pending technologies in this area have the potential to help customers unlock important insights from their data in a number of areas, including eDiscovery and autonomous monitoring and treatment.
Bringing Responsibility to AI
Another difference I see for Cohesity is the impact of its platform in enabling “responsible AI”. Through Cohesity’s platform and through Turing, customers can deploy strict role-based access controls and ensure that only the right people can access data. These protocols extend to what Cohesity is doing with AI, including partners. And, with Cohesity, customers can query data — data already present on the company’s platform — to generate insights through AI versus having to move and store the data elsewhere. So, across the board, control is the name of the game where organizations can have the confidence and transparency that the right data is shared or restricted from AI models and the employees who leverage them.
Adopting a multi-cloud approach in the AI world
About a month ago, I wrote about Cohesity’s expanded partnership with Microsoft and plans to integrate with Azure OpenAI.
Cohesity also now has an expanded partnership with Google Cloud, which it intends to integrate with Vertex AI. Cohesity’s data protection and management capabilities combined with the powerful generative AI and analytics capabilities of Google Cloud will enable new insights into the same data managed on the Cohesity platform. I’ve written a lot about Google’s vertex service here.
it takes a village to fight the bad guys
Six months ago, I also wrote about the launch of the Data Protection Alliance. This alliance is focused on bringing best-in-class solutions from industry-leading cyber security and services companies with exceptional data security and management expertise from Cohesity. Since November, Cohesity has been busy adding more partners to the ecosystem and furthering integration with existing partners. The harmony in this place with this type of ecosystem is unique.
The Data Security Alliance has three new members: ServiceNow, Zscaler, and Netskope. These new members join already existing alliance members: Mandiant, Tenable, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, BigID, Cisco, CyberArk, Okta, PwC UK, Qualys, Securonics and Splunk. It’s the “who’s who” in security. Enterprises are tired of fragmented security solutions that aren’t interrelated, and I love these continued steps to make companies secure.
Cohesity also announced new integrations with CrowdStrike and Service Now. Thanks to these integrations, CrowdStrike or ServiceNow Security can communicate with Event Detection Cohesity and receive event detection alerts from Cohesity to initiate response and remediation workflows.
Cohesity is also unveiling enhanced integration with Tenable, which includes improved vulnerability scanning functionality. Cohesity also partners with Mandiant on response and treatment. The goal is to achieve integration within the Cohesity platform for all alliance partners in various aspects of data protection. It aims to result in a collaborative, harmonized workflow where data security and cyber security ultimately become a team sport, whether in prevention, detection, response or remediation. This approach enables United customers to get the most value from their existing infrastructure investments.
wrapping up
As the AI hype grows, I hear a growing call for responsible AI from many vendors, including Cohesity. “We agree with Google that AI must be handled securely and responsibly,” Cohesity CEO and President Sanjay Poonan said in a recent press release. With our unique platform, Cohesity customers can protect their data at every turn. Provides unprecedented search through our built-in indexing capabilities and robust security protocols to help maintain control and privacy.
With responsible AI, a governance framework must be in place to document how the organization addresses the ethical and legal challenges surrounding AI. I love the built-in security and accessibility provided by Cohesity’s platform, and just as importantly, I’m pleased to hear that responsible AI will continue to be a key focus of Cohesity, from the CEO down, to ensure that customers can safely use AI. Maintain data controls that can be enforced. The future is an “AI spy vs AI spy” world; Therefore, integrating AI into the data flow is of paramount importance.
The second element of this announcement I find exciting is that Cohesity is taking the lead to form new data protection alliance partnerships and is moving quickly to build integrations. With integrations already in place for Tenable, Palo Alto, BigID and others, Cohesity is now moving quickly to bring new alliance members like ServiceNow and Zscaler on board.
I have said many times that it takes a village to fight the bad guys; The great benefit of the partnership between Cohesity and all of these vendors is helping customers enhance and improve their security posture, and that’s great news for all of us.
On a final note, I noticed that the pace of partner alliances and product announcements from Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonan is surprising but expected and customers and of course competitors are watching the company’s every move very closely. I can’t wait to see what happens next and with whom.
