I’ve known Theresa Miller, Director of Technology Advocacy Group at Cohesity, for many years now and just met David Jayanathan (DJ), Cohesity Solutions Architect during the podcast. Theresa could easily qualify as an old timer, if she wished and DJ was very knowledgeable about traditional file and object storage.

We had a wide ranging discussion covering many of the challenges present in today’s file and object storage solutions. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

IT is becoming more distributed. Partly due to moving to the cloud, but now it’s moving to multiple clouds and on prem has never really gone away. Further, the need for IT to support a remote work force, is forcing data and systems that use them, to move as well.

Customers need storage that can reside anywhere. Their data must be migrate-able from on prem to cloud(s) and back again. Traditional storage may be able to migrate from one location to a select few others or replicate to another location (with the same storage systems present), but migration to and from the cloud is just not easy enough.

Moreover, traditional storage management has not kept up with this widely disbursed data world we live in. With traditional storage, customers may require different products to manage their storage depending on where data resides.

Yes, having storage that performs, provides data access, resilience and integrity is important, but that alone is just not enough anymore.

And to top that all off, the issues surrounding data security today have become just too complex for traditional storage to solve alone, anymore. One needs storage, data protection and ransomware scanning/detection/protection that operates together, as one solution to deal with IT security in today’s world

Ransomware has rapidly become the critical piece of this storage puzzle needing to be addressed. It’s a significant burden on every IT organization today. Some groups are getting hit each day, while others even more frequently. Traditional storage has very limited capabilities, outside of snapshots and replication, to deal with this ever increasing threat.

To defeat ransomware, data needs to be vaulted, to an immutable, air gapped repository, whether that be in the cloud or elsewhere. Such vaulting needs to be policy driven and integrated with data protection cycles to be recoverable.

Furthermore, any ransomware recovery needs to be quick, easy, AND securely controlled. RBAC (role-based, access control) can help but may not suffice for some organizations. For these environments, multiple admins may need to approve ransomware recovery, which will wipe out all current data by restoring a good, vaulted copy of the organizations data.

Edge and IoT systems also need data storage. How much may depend on where the data is being processed/pre-processed in the IoT system. But, as these systems mature, they will have their own storage requirements which is yet another data location to be managed, protected, and secured.

Theresa and DJ had mentioned Cohesity SmartFiles during our talk which I hadn’t heard about. Turns out that SmartFiles is Cohesity’s file and object storage solution that uses the Cohesity storage cluster. Cohesity data protection and other data management solutions also use the cluster to store their data. Adding SmartFiles to the mix, brings a more complete storage solution to support customer data needs. .

We also discussed Helios, Cohesity’s, next generation, data platform that provides a control and management plane for all Cohesity products and services,.

Theresa Miller is the Director, Technology Advocacy Group at Cohesity.  She is an IT professional that has worked as a technical expert in IT for over 25 years and has her MBA.

She is uniquely industry recognized as a Microsoft MVP, Citrix CTP, and VMware vExpert.  Her areas of expertise include Cloud, Hybrid-cloud, Microsoft 365, VMware, and Citrix.

David Jayanathan is a Solutions Architect at Cohesity, currently working on SmartFiles. 

DJ is an IT professional that has specialized in all things related to enterprise storage and data protection for over 15 years.