The News: IBM and Cohesity are combining their expertise in data protection, cyber resilience, and data management to offer IBM’s new IBM Storage Defender services that integrate Cohesity data protection. Built to provide increased data security and resiliency for hybrid cloud environments, IBM Storage Defender uses AI and event monitoring capabilities across multiple enterprise data storage systems to monitor and protect data from human error and cyber threats including ransomware and sabotage. Read the full Press Release on the IBM and Cohesity announcement on the IBM Newsroom web page.
IBM and Cohesity Partner to Battle Hybrid Cloud Cyberattacks
Analyst Take: IBM and Cohesity are making a great move here to help enterprise customers better protect their critical hybrid cloud assets using the combined benefits of IBM management and monitoring tools with Cohesity data protection and management components in the new IBM Storage Defender offering.
I believe that technology combinations like this one can be beneficial for enterprises that want to bring in trusted partners to help them with the critical tasks that are just too much for them to do on their own. IBM’s AI and event monitoring capabilities are notable examples of those kinds of tasks due to their added complexity and additional required skill sets to integrate and use them effectively.
In 2023, with cyberattacks happening to companies on a constant basis, any time that established, trusted vendors like IBM and Cohesity unveil innovative new data security tools, it is wise to make time to explore the offering to determine if they fit an enterprise’s growing security needs.
Adding to its broad value, IBM Storage Defender also includes cyber vault and clean room features that provide automated recovery capabilities that can restore a customer’s business-critical data in hours or minutes following a cyberattack. Such data recoveries used to take days using legacy applications in the past.
IBM Cohesity: The Engineering Behind IBM Storage Defender
One of the major benefits of IBM Storage Defender for enterprise customers is that it is built to make it easier to find their most recent clean copy of their data, whenever it is needed. This is IBM’s first product that brings together several IBM and third-party products to deliver complete primary replication, secondary replication, and backup management, easing these processes for customers.
The IBM Storage Defender offering will include data resilience application, IBM Storage Protect, which was formerly called IBM Spectrum Protect; the IBM Storage FlashSystem all-flash and hybrid storage platform; and IBM’s Storage Fusion container-native storage and data orchestration application for Red Hat OpenShift. Also included will be Cohesity DataProtect, an application that provides comprehensive protection for both traditional and modern data sources on a multicloud platform while providing instant recovery capabilities at scale across a customer’s environments. Services are also provided from IBM Storage FlashSystem Safeguarded Copy to provide logical air gap data separation, which helps customers recover mission-critical data quickly in the event of an attack. IBM Storage Defender is slated to be available in the spring of 2023.
IBM Cohesity Partnership Overview
This IBM Cohesity collaboration to bring some of their data security, management, and backup and restore capabilities together to deliver these needed services to enterprise customers is a smart and well-timed offering. Busy enterprises are oftentimes already swamped just keeping things operating and moving forward, so providing help with these kinds of specialized data processes can be incredibly helpful.
I believe that is why busy enterprises turn to established and trusted technology partners to secure these kinds of expert services that allow enterprises to instead focus on their core missions. This could well be the start of future service mashups from IBM and Cohesity, as well as other partners, as these companies continue to deliver the services that enterprise customers are demanding.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
