IT professionals have seen countless “game-changing” announcements from tech companies. But after digging into Cohesity’s recent announcements, I have to admit, they’re not just throwing around buzzwords—they’re building cohesive solutions that directly address the security resilience needs facing enterprise support and security teams. Coming on the heels of the successful acquisition of Veritas, which positioned Cohesity as the world’s largest data protection company, these announcements feel like a genuine leap forward, not just another incremental update. Cohesity gave us a lot to digest. With deeper dives to come, let’s take a high level look at the announcements coming out of the Cohesity’s Catalyst 1 event.
1. The AI Assistant I Actually Want to Use: Cohesity Gaia
Let’s be real: we’ve all been pitched AI assistants that promise the world but simply deliver a glorified search bar. Cohesity Gaia, however, looks to be different. The idea of a generative AI assistant that works directly on enterprise backup data is a much needed next step in ensuring backup data integrity. Think about all that “dark data” sitting throughout the enterprise data landscape—old files, logs, and emails—that we know contains valuable information but is nearly impossible to sift through. Sensitive information redaction, integration with Slack and Google’s agent space, and on-prem deployment options are foundational innovations building on the original March 2024 release of Gaia.
Gaia’s use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the key. It means the assistant isn’t just making things up or leveraging 3rd party anonymized data; it’s providing answers grounded in private enterprise data. I can see this being a massive time-saver for security and compliance teams. Imagine a CISO asking, “Show me all files that contain PII from the last year on our European servers,” and getting a coherent, accurate report back in minutes, not days. The promise isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about unlocking the value of enterprise data without the security compromises that come from AI solutions based on a public cloud framework.
2. A New Front in the Cyber War: Active Directory Protection
The Cohesity/ Semperis partnership has been in place for just over a year. The news that the partnership is producing fruit in the Active Directory (AD) protection game is a welcome sight. We all know that AD contains the keys to the kingdom. If an attacker compromises it, it’s a game over scenario. The new Cohesity Identity Resilience solution looks to be a significant addition to the enterprise arsenal.
The Cohesity AD solution is not just about backing up AD—it’s about hardening it proactively, creating isolated and immutable backups, and providing a rapid, malware-free recovery path. The ability to conduct forensics and cleanse the system of attacker artifacts is a feature that gives a lot of confidence. In the event of a breach, the number one priority is a fast and clean recovery. This solution feels like it was designed with that single goal in mind.
3. The FortKnox Self-Managed Option: A Win for Data Sovereignty
For many in highly regulated industries, the idea of a virtual air-gapped vault is brilliant, but placing it in a third-party cloud isn’t always an option due to data sovereignty requirements. The new FortKnox Self-managed option is the answer. It provides all the benefits of a secure, isolated vault—a true last line of defense—while keeping data physically within private data centers. This shows that Cohesity understands the real-world constraints and regulations that many of us operate under.
The Bottom Line
The Cohesity Catalyst 1 announcements aren’t just about new features; they represent a cohesive strategy to simplify and secure the enterprise data landscape. By integrating AI into their platform to not only protect enterprise data but also to provide the ability to “talk” to it, Cohesity is changing the conversation from a reactive one (“How do we recover from this?”) to a proactive one (“How do we prevent this and get value from our data?”). This is the kind of innovation that actually helps the enterprise gatekeepers sleep better at night. Cohesity’s willingness to offer both cloud and on-premises options for critical security features demonstrates a strategic flexibility that makes their solutions applicable to a broad range of customers, from enterprises with strict data sovereignty needs to those embracing the public cloud.
These updates show that Cohesity is making good on the promise to advance the AI and data security tools they began introducing in 2024, such as Cohesity Gaia. By building on their established foundation, they are turning early innovations into powerful, fully integrated solutions that deliver tangible value to the customer.
