Cisco and Cohesity Join Forces Again to Unlock Value of Data in Hybrid and Multicloud Environments

Simplifying how customers purchase, deploy, and realize benefits of data protection and management

Benjamin Franklin wrote that nothing is certain “except death and taxes.” If he were alive today, he might have added growth of data to that list. Generating data—and the sheer volume of data we create every minute—is unavoidable in a digital world. What we actually do with all this data will define the future of the enterprise, given all the buzz surrounding artificial intelligence and machine learning today. 

However, more than 60 percent of enterprise data is considered secondary, and with traditional backup systems, the ability to use and access that data may be inefficient and difficult. This limits the ability to unlock the full potential of that data. Additionally, this means that a lot of data is merely taking up space, energy, and power, creating a sizeable impact on an organization’s environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) goals without providing much value. As more applications move between cloud and on premises, the costs and complexity of owning, securing, and managing data across multiple environments are growing. It’s hard to scale, and should a cyberattack occur, recovery is slow and painful. 

This was the challenge and market opportunity that Cisco and Cohesity looked to tackle for our customers when we first joined forces a few years ago. Since then, Cisco and Cohesity have produced five Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) and multiple open-source contributions in GitHub repositories. These prebuilt integrations, reference architectures, and solution guides cover a number of use cases for simplifying data management and strengthening data security, including backup, archiving, disaster recovery, ransomware protection and recovery, file and object services, dev/test, and analytics. 

By protecting data with Cohesity software integrated with Cisco UCS platforms, our customers can keep their data safe and their businesses resilient while achieving impressive security, compliance, and business results. This includes reducing operational costs, generating more data insights, improving deployment flexibility, and accelerating application development and delivery. Indeed, the Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) that Cisco and Cohesity commissioned revealed that customers could expect a total return on investment exceeding 150 percent when running Cohesity data management and protection systems on Cisco UCS servers. 

But wait, it gets better

Today, we announced that Cisco will be selling Cohesity Cloud Services (CCS), a portfolio of fully managed, cloud-native, as-a-service (aaS) offerings that provide backup and recovery, threat detection and data classification, and cyber vaulting services.  

Against the backdrop of an unpredictable economic and threat landscape, Cisco and Cohesity are offering more efficient, resilient data management and security for companies operating hybrid and multicloud environments. That’s a lot of companies if you consider that hybrid and multicloud are essentially the de facto operating model in IT today, with more than 80 percent of companies operating in the hybrid cloud and almost 50 percent relying on at least two to three public cloud services.  

With this announcement, we’re making it easier and faster for these organizations to purchase, deploy, and realize the benefits of our joint solutions.  

Of course, none of this matters if these benefits and outcomes don’t materialize in the real world. Thankfully, Cisco and Cohesity have a well-documented track record of customer success that we can point to.  

Customer success example: Pearl River Community College

With an enrollment of more than 5,500 students, Pearl River Community College (PRCC) in Mississippi turned to Cisco and Cohesity to better protect and manage more than 15 terabytes of data. This data included sensitive information like student records, data from IT systems like virtual machines, file shares, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and document management.  

The goal for PRCC’s IT team was to protect this data from natural disasters like hurricanes or tornadoes and cybersecurity threats like ransomware attacks. According to CSO Magazine, universities and colleges are favored targets for ransomware attacks.  

By migrating to a data backup and recovery solution with UCS servers on premises and Cohesity FortKnox cyber vaulting for public cloud, PRCC was able to improve both security and operations with results such as:  

• 91 percent faster backups up to 1 terabyte per hour 
• 94 percent faster full file share restores that takes 7 minutes vs 120 minutes with previous solutions 
• Improved business continuity with the ability of virtual machines to run on backup servers
• Better visibility of security threats through Cisco SecureX integration

Looking specifically at recovery scenarios, Cohesity and Cisco UCS X-Series with Cisco Intersight are an incredibly powerful combination. Customers taking advantage of this joint solution benefit from industry-leading performance to support data-intensive applications with twice the required backup performance and twice the required restore performance at an unprecedented speed. In the context of a disaster or security incident, that’s precious time. More importantly, those results stand at any scale.  

With more apps and workloads generating more data than ever before, there is a historic demand to derive value from this data. But that also means there are more points of complexity and vulnerability than ever before for companies who need to manage and secure all that data across multiple environments.  

As long as this is the reality, Cisco will continue to work closely with strategic partners like Cohesity to ensure that our customers can protect and manage their data better so that they can unlock real value from what is likely to be their most important asset. 

For more information, please read the Cohesity press release. 

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