Cohesity Protection Capabilities Via DataProtect Delivered as-a-Service Offering for Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Teams

At a time when more organizations are adopting Microsoft 365, Cohesity, Inc. announced protection capabilities – via its DataProtect delivered as-a-aervice offering – for Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Teams.

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This Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) offering provides data protection and retention that goes well beyond the default 30-day native backup capabilities included with a Microsoft 365 subscription.

It gives organizations more choice in how they can backup and recover Microsoft 365 application data.

With the firm, customers can choose to:

• Take advantage of this BaaS offering where the infrastructure is managed by Cohesity, allowing IT teams to spend more time on other business critical tasks.

• Rely on a traditional on-premises Cohesity cluster to backup Microsoft 365.

• Protect their data with a firm’s cluster running on other clouds.

• Utilize a combination of these options in a hybrid model.

Research suggests there is a critical need for this type of simplicity and choice when backing up and recovering Microsoft 365 data. Recent ESG research ^(*) queried IT professionals on Microsoft 365 and found that 78% of respondents reported using Microsoft 365.

Of those respondents:

• 74% stated they rely on native Microsoft 365 services for backup.

• 81% reported having to recover Microsoft 365 data.

• Only 15% were able to recover 100% of that data.

This data also pinpoints why it is essential that customers utilizing Microsoft 365 applications consider third-party options to help ensure data can easily be backed up and recovered. While cloud providers commit to offering service availability, it is customers’ responsibility to make sure their data is appropriately protected.

“Our research shows there is a growing need for robust backup and protection for SaaS data,” said Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst, ESG Research. “The native, default backup features provided by cloud vendors are typically not sufficient, especially given the increased threat to data security, data deletion risks, and rapidly evolving compliance requirements. We believe giving customers an ‘as a Service’ option to backup and recover this data makes complete sense, as it gives organizations more flexibility, improves operational efficiency of IT teams, and helps ensure data is protected.“

“Simplicity and flexibility are why we chose Cohesity DataProtect delivered as-a-service to protect our Microsoft 365 data,” said John Sroka, CIO, Duane Morris LLP. “We use Cohesity to backup our on-premises databases and extending protection to Microsoft 365 through the DataProtect service is simple and easy. With Cohesity we have a single backup solution that covers hybrid and multicloud workloads.“

“Cohesity’s support for Microsoft 365 is phenomenal. We currently backup our Microsoft 365 data to our on-premises Cohesity cluster, the addition of a backup-as-service option that protects cloud-to-cloud gives us the hybrid flexibility we need to store Microsoft 365 backups and offload infrastructure management,” said Ken Watt, senior infrastructure specialist, Ridgeback Resources, Inc. “With Cohesity’s constant innovation, we are getting a solution that’s simple yet more robust with each update.“

Protection for Amazon EC2 cloud compute and Amazon RDS cloud databases
In addition to protecting Microsoft 365, the company‘s BaaS offering also includes support for Amazon EC2 Virtual Instances and Compute Infrastructure, and Amazon RDS Cloud Databases. ^(**)

Building on the company‘s strategic collaboration with AWS (Amazon Web Services), SaaS backup support for these workloads helps to protect both homegrown cloud-native applications and refactored legacy applications built on these cloud compute and database services. Customers get unified protection across multiple AWS accounts and services, providing better visibility on cloud data utilization while making it easier to meet their enterprise-grade SLAs.

Cohesity difference: Simplifying data management through single, unified experience
Customers want flexibility to manage data their way. Some want the company to operate underlying infrastructure for them via an ‘as a service’ offering while others want to manage their own environments directly – or a combination of both in true hybrid fashion. The firm’s Helios multicloud data platform makes that easier.

With Helios, customers can manage everything from a single user interface. This reduces complexity, can lower costs, and helps eliminate mass data fragmentation. And as customers wish to expand utilization to file and object services, DR and more, they can use the same platform with the same simple interface whether consuming from the cloud or deploying into their own self-managed environments.

“Gone are the days of needing to be an expert at operating 10 different tools and user interfaces while trying to manage tedious procurement processes and keep up with constant hardware and software upgrades just to attempt to manage your data,” said Matt Waxman, VP, product management. “With Cohesity, that’s all a thing of the past. It’s one user interface and one unified experience regardless of the model you choose. That’s modern data management.“

“Offering DataProtect-as-a-service is a welcome and exciting evolution in data management to help our clients better meet the demands of their hybrid-cloud and multicloud challenges,” said David Olzak, SVP, Stratascale LLC. “With more and more of our clients using SaaS applications, they are realizing how important it is to have enterprise data protection flexibility with an attractive consumption model; this is a welcome addition to our cloud ascension approach.“

DataProtect delivered as-a-ervice is the first offering from the company’s Data Management as a Service portfolio. Additional service offerings will be made available in the coming months.

In addition to this news, the company also announced the global expansion of the Data Management as-a-service portfolio with a launch in Australia and New Zealand.

^(*) ESG conducted a comprehensive online survey of IT professionals from private- and public-sector organizations in North America (United States and Canada) between January 22, 2021 and January 30, 2021. Respondents’ organizations were required to be using a cloud-based data protection service and/or protecting public cloud-resident applications or data. The final total sample included 381 IT professionals. The Evolution of Data Protection Cloud Strategies, Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst, April 2021
^(**) Support for Amazon RDS workloads will be available in Summer 2021.