From Privacy Breaches to Denial of Business
Last December Cohesity and Veritas merged, now 10 months on, the impact of this merger can be seen through the announcements at the Cohesity Catalyst.
These announcements could not be timelier. Recent cyber incidents at Marks & Spencer (M&S) and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) in 2025 illustrate the direct impact of cybersecurity failures on business operations, revenue, and reputation. These illustrate how cyber incidents are moving from privacy related data breaches to business disruption.
Figure 1: Cyber Hygiene is the Foundation of Digital Resilience
Cyber hygiene is the foundation for digital resilience, however it is not enough to protect and prevent, to be resilient your organization must be able to respond to and recover from cyber incidents. Since today’s digital business depends upon data, digital resilience is based on data resilience.
While delivering digital services ultimately requires physical infrastructure – resilience of the services involves more than just physical replication. Digital services depend upon the availability of the business data. In addition, applications and their Infrastructure as Code (IaC) services are defined by data. No data means no service, and service restoration needs more than recovering the database.
Cohesity’s Catalyst 2025 event highlights how its new capabilities address this need—moving beyond backup to provide an integrated platform for comprehensive cyber resilience.
Cohesity Catalyst announcements
Planning and Preparation
Digital resilience starts with planning and preparation. You need to know what data you have and identify the core systems that are essential to keep your business running.
Cohesity’s partnership with CYERA provides DSPM capabilities to help organizations to understand what data is at risk and how well it is protected. Cohesity CERT – provides cyber resilience consulting services to help prepare, as well as to respond when an incident occurs.
Disaster planning involves more than data backup. It includes team building and setting up out of band communications.
Extended range of Protected Data Sources
May organizations have a wide range of legacy data sources as well as the new ones used by GenAI. It is essential that an organization can protect all their data.
Cohesity, collaborating with their colleagues from Veritas, announced over 40 new and enhanced workload connectors. These cover data sources in AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Oracle, Nutanix and VMware.
Recovering legacy systems is often very complex, involving more than data restoration.
Secure and Uncorrupted Data
Cyber resilience depends upon Secure and uncorrupted data: Recovery depends on having trustworthy, immutable backups.
Cohesity’s Fort Knox vaulting provides isolation through immutability and air-gapping. Immutable backup storage and object lock ensure data cannot be tampered with, even during a ransomware attack. Cohesity announced a self-managed option for organizations that need physical control over their data.
While Cohesity’s Fort Knox is a strong solution it is not free and needs to be managed carefully in relation to compliance obligations such as the EU right to erasure.
Protecting the Protection
The backup data and processes are a prime target for threat actors and so it is essential to protect these.
Cohesity announced their intention to extend the threat monitoring of their backup services. These are anticipated to include hash-based threat hunting to find Indicators of Compromise (IoC) within your backup data, as well as integration with Google Threat Intelligence.
This is a statement of intention and customers should monitor its implementation.
Protecting the Identity Store
Your organization’s identity store is fundamental to all your business services, often including access to buildings.
Cohesity’s partnership with Semperis will help organizations to protect their Active Directory. It allows them to automate backup of the AD application to immutable storage, without needing to backup the whole host which may have been infected with malware. It also enables automated recovery.
Active Directory recovery often involves intricate dependencies with applications, networking, and hybrid cloud, it is important that customers rehearse to validate recovery scenarios.
Recovery and Restoration
Your organization’s cyber resilience depends upon being able to recover from a cyber incident and restore your business operation.
Cohesity announced the availability of the Cohesity Recovery Agent. This helps organizations to automate and orchestrate their recover processes using a combination of human and AI interactions. It supports testing and rehearsing the recovery and restoration processes and provides documentation in auditor ready form to assist with compliance.
Automated recovery orchestration promises speed, yet successful recovery still depends on disciplined testing and clear runbooks.
Virtual Backup Data Lake
Backup data is a potential source of data for use by GenAI
Cohesity GAIA can expose backup data as virtual data for exploitation by GenAI or other applications. Cohesity says it provides multi language query support as well as capabilities to redact sensitive information.
Exposing this data provides new opportunities but will need careful controls.
Opinion
The recent incidents at Marks and Spenser and Jaguar Land Rover show that cyber resilience is a business imperative. Investments in cyber resilience should be viewed as core to operational resilience as part of complete business strategy.
The union of Cohesity and Veritas was a transformative moment for the data protection and cyber resilience market. As the largest player in the market, the combined company has the power to set new standards, influence industry trends, and drive the next wave of innovation. For customers, this means access to unparalleled technology and expertise.
The announcements from Cohesity show welcome progress towards this vision through integration of products and engineering teams.
However, the proof or the pudding is always in the eating. Cohesity will need to show customer examples that illustrate the power of their solutions to recover not only the digital systems but also business operation following an incident.
Cohesity is not the only vendor in this market, you can find a detailed evaluation of this and other vendors in our Leadership Compass Cloud Backup for AI Enabled Cyber Resilience.
To explore best practices in data protection and compliance, join us at Identity-Centric Cybersecurity Impact Day 2025 in Frankfurt, on November 6, 2025.
