Cohesity unveiled several new data security, governance, and vaulting capabilities housed under its data management-as-a-service (DMaaS) portfolio in this week’s Cohesity Connect event. The vendor claims the new services help customers fight sophisticated ransomware attacks. 

Cohesity's cloud-based DMaaS portfolio builds on its Helios multi-cloud data platform that provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based single management interface for backup and recovery of both control plane and data plane functionality. 

Specifically, it added two new SaaS products that “address the [data] exfiltration challenge around ransomware attacks,” Cohesity Head of Product Matt Waxman told SDxCentral. “They are really meant to help shift left, and accelerate the time to detection and the time to recovery, and ultimately, minimize that blast radius associated with what we're seeing as modern-day ransomware attacks.” 

He argued “the only way that you can actually detect a threat earlier ... is by actually identifying where sensitive data is in your infrastructure and who has access to that sensitive data.”

Because of this, the new Cohesity DataGovern service uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate and simplify data classification, as well as to detect anomalous access that could indicate a cyberattack in play.

It “will be a SaaS service that gives the customers the ability to identify sensitive information, address that compliance risk through creating those policies, and then have the detection and remediation capabilities both in the product and integrating into the rest of the ecosystem,” Waxman explained. 

The platform integrates with other commonly used security platforms including Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XSOAR and Cisco SecureX so it can remediate through customers’ existing governance structure, he added.

“Cohesity DataGovern is unique in the data protection software space,” Evaluator Group analyst Randy Kerns wrote in an email to SDxCentral, adding that some of its competitors have “added anomaly detection but most do not integrate the machine learning function.”

While the DataGovern service aims to identify threats before a backup is created, the other new product secures backups in the cloud.

Project Fort Knox enables customers to maintain an isolated copy of their data in a Cohesity-managed vault. And in the event of a ransomware attack, it also helps users to quickly identify the copy and recover to the desired location.

It is “a SaaS service that will deliver an isolated vault environment hosted by Cohesity run in our cloud environment,” Waxman noted. “We'll bring the ransomware detection capabilities that we have today, together with some advanced threat detection capabilities into what will become a sandbox environment for customers.”

In addition, customers can run attack mock drills in the sandbox since it's isolated from their core production environments, according to Waxman.

“Project Fort Knox is about creating a logical air gap for data in public clouds which complements their on-premise solution capabilities,” Kerns explained. “The logical air gap copy is isolated from host access to assure integrity of the data.”

Also at the Cohesity Connect event, the vendor announced its disaster recovery-as-a-service is now generally available. It is another product from the Cohesity’s DMaaS portfolio, which provides automated disaster recovery that helps minimize application downtime and data loss.

All three of these are additions to Cohesity’s threat defense data security architecture, which includes a range of data security products and services from Cohesity and its partners. This multi-layer architecture covers data resiliency, access control, threat detection, and analytics functionalities. 

“The threat defense architecture [is] built into our Helios platform,” Waxman said. “So we have a single platform today that customers can consume either as-a-service through us, through a partner, or manage themselves, and all of the product offerings exist on top of that platform.”