Who they are
Touting former leadership and senior engineering staff from Google, Cohesity, who terms themselves a “Next-Get Data Management” company, was named a Leader in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions.
Cohesity maintains relationships with large organizations such as Cisco, Siemens, the USDA and Novartis, as well as a host of other enterprises worldwide.
What they do
Cohesity’s main offering is the “Helios Multi Cloud Data Platform,” a product which promises to protect and manage users’ data. More specifically, Helios’ aim is to assist users in managing data across multiple data centers and public cloud environments, allowing their customers to hedge against ransomware and other attacks.
Cohesity brings Helios to their users via either self-managed or SaaS (Software as a Service) models, allowing customers to choose based on their unique needs.
Features
Helios customers gain access to a wide array of features designed to make managing and protecting their data as easy as clicking a few buttons.
Backups can be created as-a-service, using a secure and optimized data transfer. This serves to eliminate on site hardware requirements, thus reducing capital expenditures. Backup services span from core to edge sites, and include public clouds.
“Smartfiles,” a feature which allows users to define file and object services, is designed to be compatible with NFS, SMB, and S3, ensuring compatibility with many protocols. This, combined with a distributed file system, helps to eliminate downtime caused by updates.
Users can also automate disaster recovery and failover systems – providing insurance against ransomware attacks and outages. The Helios platform uniquely allows users to orchestrate failover across multiple cloud environments, giving users even greater flexibility and security in managing recovery processes.
Further securing your data against ransomware, Helios offers a “comprehensive data security architecture,” which includes immutable backups, and AI-assisted early detection. This allows users to reduce the blast radius of an attack by moving data and infrastructure onto a single platform with limited access points and policy-based data storage.
Apart from security, Helios offers a pipeline to assist with Agile development and testing, allowing developers to access data via clones which can be refreshed instantly on-demand. High quality data on demand also assists in creating Machine Learning models which can be continually tested and tuned.
Customer Feedback
While Cohesity’s products are largely well reviewed, with the majority of customer feedback being positive, some drawbacks to their platform have been identified. Backups of NAS devices prove to be tricky, sometimes requiring lengthy folder crawls that may never complete. Furthermore, some users have identified UI changes and a lack of visibility into backup snapshots as major issues when attempting to set up disaster recovery. Some users have also mentioned the tendency for Cohesity products to lag behind their competitors in implementing new reporting and analytics features, but Cohesity’s consistent update schedule shows that they are working to correct this.
Overall, customers can expect an excellent benefit-cost ratio, as well as a stable platform proven to be rich with user-friendly features. Customers seeking innovative solutions for data storage and protection will find that Cohesity stands out among competitors.
