Cohesity and Microsoft team up to harden data security

Cohesity has announced an expanded relationship with Microsoft that is focused on helping enterprises globally broaden and harden data security. According to the company, this is critical as cyber attacks are occurring every 39 seconds with 30,000 websites hacked daily and costing the global economy $6.9 billion in 2021.

There are two major elements to the expanded relationship between Cohesity and Microsoft: integrations designed to help IT and SecOpsleaders defend against cyber threats, and Cohesity Cloud Services are now available on Azure to empower Microsoft customers to easily protect and secure their data across hybrid environments.

Integrations to assist IT and SecOpsleaders:

• Microsoft Sentinel: Cohesity's DataProtect backup and recovery solution, both on-premises as well as its backup as a service offering, now integrates with Microsoft Sentinel - the cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) platform.   Through this integration, joint customers can benefit from streamlined access to incident reporting and ransomware alerts, the company states.
• Azure AD and Multi-factor Authentication: Azure Active Directory is a standard identity platform for Microsoft customers around the globe. Cohesity provides seamless integration with Azure AD and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to safely and securely manage and access Cohesity products, including Cohesity Data Cloud and Cohesity Cloud Services.
• Microsoft Purview via Cohesity's Partnership with BigID: Get actionable data intelligence for data discovery, privacy, security, and governance across your Microsoft environment with Cohesity data classification that is powered by BigID. BigID has built integration with Microsoft Purview that joint customers can benefit from.

Cohesity Cloud Services now available on Azure:

• Cohesity FortKnox, Cohesity's SaaS cyber vaulting service, provides another layer of protection with predictable data recovery. Live demos and product previews of Cohesity FortKnox on Azure are available now, with general availability planned in the coming months.
• Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service, an enterprise-grade backup as a service (BaaS) offering, now supports Microsoft 365. Customers can use Cohesity's BaaS offering, which protects critical SaaS, cloud-native, and on-premises data, to back up their Microsoft 365 data to a data plane hosted on Azure.

Cohesity has also announced that it will put forth its AI-ready data structure that, when combined with OpenAI, will advance generative AI initiatives around threat detection, classification, anomaly detection, and more. 

Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President, Cohesity, comments, "Cohesity is integrating with Microsoft's broad platforms across security, cloud and AI - all in order to help joint customers secure and protect their data against escalating cyber attacks.

"This expanded collaboration will make it simple for thousands of Microsoft customers and ecosystem partners to access Cohesity's award-winning platform, including its differentiated benefits of scalability, simplicity and security, in hybrid-cloud or multicloud scenarios."

Phil Goodwin, Research Vice President, IDC, says, "With so many organisations expanding their data footprints into hybrid and multicloud environments, attack vulnerabilities are increasing, and data security and protection is becoming more complex. Cohesity seeks to meet customers where they are, whether on-premises or across multiple cloud providers.

"Cohesity strives to help customers get more value from data through better data logistics, a key part of which is data security and protection. We think integrating with Microsoft Azure will help Cohesity and its customers to stay a step ahead of cyber criminals through more intelligent security now and with other interesting use cases to follow."