In its most recent announcement, Cohesity introduced new capabilities that will help its customers go beyond just backup or data consolidation, crossing what I call the “Data Management” chasm.
The fundamental issue with data is that there’s just too much of it, making it expensive to store, manage and truly leverage. At the same time, from a business perspective, data (within compliance reason) should be your friend, not your enemy.
ESG research shows that for every TB of production data created, another 4.75 TB or so of “protection” data is created, plus another 5.29 TB of enablement data. There are minor variations by vertical. As one can imagine, this has created data silos, which is one of the fundamental issues Cohesity has historically focused on.
The other seminal issue is that protection data tends to be “dumb,” meaning it’s not really leveraged (or leverage-friendly) for anything else but recovery – which in itself yields great business value but is limited in scope. As far as existing enablement data (“secondary” data), while clearly not a new concept, ease of leverage has been one objection I have heard a lot in my career. Instrumentation has not really been where it needs to be to auto-magically get a non-disruptive cut of the most recent production data for running analytics on, or go test a new set of features (test/dev, QA…), or audit for compliance purposes for example. I explain this in the context of stages and maturity in this vlog.
This is where Cohesity’s announcement is particularly interesting in that it brings enablement applications to enablement data, versus having to piece-meal a solution. This is significant because the technology:
- Removes complexity from IT, one of the major issues ESG has identified in our most recent 2019 technology spending trends research, since it allows organizations to leverage data directly where it sits, generating business outcomes versus just storage or backup.
- Comes with a full set of already-enabled applications and an SDK and developer portal.
- Is consumed in a “store,” making it easy to use, expand, etc., without a PhD.
- Is about delivering returns on data assets: business insights, agility, or risk reduction.
In a perfect world, all data, structured, backup, unstructured, and IoT for good measure, should be leverage-able. It will take a while. One step at a time…
I expect that compliance-related use cases will be the first to flourish on this platform as customers start leveraging the backup and unstructured data that sits on it. Let’s see what other popular use cases get rolled out by customers as they adopt this new Cohesity technology.
