Cohesity delivered its cloud-based data management-as-a-service (DMaaS) offering today, as promised, betting its money – and Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) – on enterprises that don’t want to manage their own data. And it’s a lot of money – the data management startup is backed by more than $650 million in venture capital.

The new offering builds on Cohesity’s 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. DataProtect delivered as a service leverages the Helios login and GUI to generate a global and searchable view of all data backed up with Cohesity, both on-premises and in the cloud, explained Douglas Ko, director of product marketing for Cohesity.

Cohesity DataProtect, But Make It SaaS-y

Modern enterprise data management operations are becoming as equally complex as they are costly, requiring a large IT staff and the use of multiple vendors for backups, disaster recovery, analytics, and storage. The Cohesity service model addresses enterprises struggling with mass data fragmentation and high operating expenses with a consumption-based, backup-as a service offering that consolidates vendors and data silos into a unified data management platform.

“We believe customers want the choice of deployment models and many will choose a hybrid solution where they can deploy a combination of self-managed data management infrastructure and a Cohesity-managed DMaaS based on their specific needs applications, business units, and the organization at large,” Ko explained.

Basically, the SaaS-based offering provides IT teams that don’t want to manage sprawling data volumes the option to have their data infrastructure managed by Cohesity and hosted on AWS.

But this is just a small piece of the DMaaS picture the two companies are trying to paint.

Cohesity announced a new strategic collaboration agreement with AWS in October that will see them jointly go to market with a “first-of-its-kind data management-as-a-service solution that provides a comprehensive set of data management offerings,” Ko explained.

The Cohesity platform currently supports backup of on-premises VMware and network attached storage (NAS), and additional support for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft SQL Server databases will be available in early 2021.

In tandem with the DataProtect announcement, Cohesity is also launching its SiteContinuity automated disaster recovery offering as a service. This will support failover of mission-critical applications and data to the cloud once it becomes available for preview in early 2021.

Cohesity DMaaS Market Study

“There is strong demand for flexibility and customers want a choice between a range of deployment models from on-premises, to cloud, to a managed DMaaS offering – or any combination thereof.

Results from Cohesity's recent DMaaS market study, which is based on a survey of 500 IT decision makers in the U.S., indicated that IT professionals overburdened with data management tasks are developing a strong appetite for DMaaS to the point that 89% of respondents said they are likely to consider deploying a DMaaS service to offset some of the challenges they are facing with reduced resources and budgets.

Ko said the survey confirmed that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is forcing companies to slash IT budgets as 70% of respondents reported plans to cut those costs in the next 12 months, with 33% citing the need to cut their budget by up to 25%, and 10% citing budget cut by as much as 50%.

“The current business environment is driving an increased appetite for cloud and ‘as-a-service’ offerings,” Ko said. “We expect that 2021 will continue to present challenges to organizations that will require simplified IT operations, increased efficiency, and doing more with data – all of which DMaaS can provide.”