Backup specialist Cohesity has launched its backup product Cohesity DataProtect as an as-a-service option in Europe. The service will run on AWS and allow customers to protect data on-premise and in the cloud, with cloud-to-cloud backup a particular focus.
The Cohesity DataProtect service will launch on AWS but will possibly be extended to the other major public cloud providers (Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud).
The move comes in the context of an increased move towards cloud working during the pandemic as well as the growing recognition that native protection of cloud applications is largely inadequate for most customers, especially with regard to compliance needs.
The Cohesity DataProtect as-a-service offering will allow customers to protect data sources on-premise, in other cloud providers, in Equinix colo locations and in applications that run on AWS, with the Cohesity service on that provider as the backup target.
The customer runs the Cohesity SaaS connector as a virtual machine on-site, which allows traffic to traverse the firewall with only deltas moved to the cloud after initial full backups. Management and administration is via the Cohesity Helios interface.
There is also automated workload discovery and options to recover to customer datacentres or the cloud. Data security can be enhanced – particularly against ransomware – by keeping a snapshot in an alternate “air-gapped” location.
Why is cloud-to-cloud backup a particular focus for Cohesity and more widely when cloud application apparently provide their own protection?
Key drivers are the quality of native protection – or lack of it – performance and ease of use, said Cohesity product marketing vice-president Chris Wiborg.
“Many native data protection tools don’t meet customer needs, such as Microsoft 365, which only has a 30-day retention period,” said Wiborg. “And there is no guarantee of how quickly restores can be carried out. A number of customers describe native backup restores as ‘clunky’, ‘complex’, and ‘taking a while’.”
“Also, many customers want a single view of things and not to have to go digging into different applications when something goes wrong.”
Cohesity Backup-as-a-service will initially be available from the Frankfurt AWS location, with London added at the end of June, and Paris in September.
Why has Cohesity settled on solely AWS?
“Well, we had to get started somewhere, so who would you pick? AWS has market leadership globally and brings real strengths,” said Wiborg. “That’s part of the answer. Also, AWS’s parent company Amazon has made an investment in Cohesity, so that’s another part of the answer.”
“But we may move towards adding Azure, Google, but that would depend on demand from our customers,” he added.
Later this year – during this summer sometime – Cohesity plans to add DR as-a-service, with the ability for customers to failover between sites or to the cloud.
This is called Cohesity SiteContinuity and is part of the company’s Data Management-as-a-service portfolio alongside DataProtect.
Cohesity was among the pioneers of marrying backup functionality with scale-out hardware reminiscent of hyper-converged infrastructure to provide an integrated and tested backup and secondary data environment that can be grown in grid-like fashion by adding compute and storage nodes.