Cohesity, AWS Collaborate On Data Management-As-A-Service Offering
The new strategic relationship between Cohesity and AWS to develop a Data-Management-as-a- Service offering using Cohesity’s data management and protection technology with AWS’ services comes after Amazon made an equity investment in Cohesity earlier this year.
Cohesity, a data protection and data management technology developer, Wednesday unveiled a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services aimed at bringing Data Management as a Service to joint customers.
The two companies also revealed that Amazon was a strategic investor, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Investments, in Cohesity’s $250 million Series E funding round that was announced in April. AWS and Cohesity declined to say how much was invested in Cohesity.
The collaboration on Data Management as a Service by Cohesity and AWS is a first-of-its-kind of partnership, said Chris Wiborg, vice president of product marketing for San Jose, Calif.-based Cohesity.
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“The news is about taking the value that we bring today to a consumption model with AWS to bring Data Management as a Service,” Wiborg told CRN.
The new Data-Management-as-a-Service offering is aimed at bringing midsize businesses and enterprises new ways to back up, secure, analyze and govern data using Cohesity’s data management technologies with AWS’ hosted services, Wiborg said.
The offering comes as businesses struggle to manage the cost and the management of their existing data center infrastructures even as they move quickly to migrate part of those infrastructures to the cloud and look for ways to get more value from the data they collect, he said.
To that end, Cohesity has built seamless connectivity between its existing offering, in which the customer maintains, owns, and operates the entire infrastructure, and the new multitenant cloud service that allows businesses to use Cohesity’s data management capabilities natively on AWS, Wiborg said.
Cohesity and AWS currently have over 400 joint customers that together have sent hundreds of petabytes to the AWS cloud using Cohesity’s data management technology, he said.
While many vendors promise to provide Data Management as a Service, they really mean Backup as a Service, Wiborg said.
Under the new Cohesity-AWS collaboration, Backup as a Service will be the starting point. However, he said, the two will work together to provider Disaster Recovery as a Service and enterprise-grade file services with a low total cost of ownership, he said.
The relationship will go even further, said Sabina Joseph, general manager at AWS Americas for ISV relationships.
Joseph told CRN that AWS will be working to eventually offer new services to data managed by Cohesity such as Compliance as a Service using AWS Macie, Analytics as a Service using data lakes with AWS Glue and data warehousing with Amazon Redshift, and Machine Learning as a Service.
“This really opens up these services to the channel,” she said. “Channel partners can layer these value-added services onto their own services.”
Because those services are provided via Cohesity Helios, they come with Cohesity’s security and ransomware technologies and offer policy-based management across on-premises and cloud environments, Wiborg said.
The Data-Management-as-a-Service offering will be available via the AWS marketplace via a private listing for solution providers, he said. There will also be a public market offering, but that will be aimed more at SMB customers and will have less of an emphasis, he said.
Cohesity already has a number of strategic relationships including with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco and Pure Storage. Wiborg said the market will show if there are any conflicts.
“Everybody understands we will have multiple relationships to help customers,” he said. “We want to give customers options. This is a rising tide for all boats.”
Early access to the Cohesity and AWS joint Data-Management-as-a-Service offering will be previewed some time this month, with general availability slated to start in December around the AWS re:Invent 2020 conference, which runs from Nov. 30 to Dec. 18.