Cohesity partners with Google Cloud to empower organizations with generative AI and data capabilities

Data security and management platform Cohesity today announced a significant expansion of its partnership with Google Cloud. This collaboration aims to empower organizations in harnessing the full potential of generative AI and data. Cohesity also unveiled Cohesity Turing, a comprehensive suite of AI capabilities designed to deliver profound AI-driven insights for customers across diverse industries and geographies.

The company said that with this strategic partnership with Google Cloud and the introduction of Cohesity Turing, organizations can confidently make use of their complete data ecosystem thanks to a secure and unified workflow that seamlessly integrates on-premises, multicloud and edge environments.

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Cohesity will utilize Google’s recent advancements in AI technology to enhance its “AI-ready” data security and management platform, Cohesity Data Cloud. This expansion involves establishing closer integrations with top-tier cloud services like Vertex AI. Vertex AI is a fully managed machine learning (ML) platform explicitly created to streamline ML and AI model deployment processes for companies.

“A month after announcing an expanded partnership with Microsoft that includes our intent to integrate with Azure OpenAI, we’re now announcing an expanded partnership with Google Cloud and our intent to integrate with Vertex AI,” Sanjay Poonen, Cohesity’s CEO, told VentureBeat. “We believe Cohesity’s leading data security and management capabilities, combined with Google Cloud’s powerful generative AI and analytics capabilities, will be a win-win for customers, as they can gain new insights into the same data they are already securing and managing on Cohesity’s platform.”

With the integration of Cohesity’s data security and management capabilities with Google Vertex, joint customers can gain fresh insights from the data they already secure and manage on the Cohesity platform. Using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI large language models (LLMs), they can quickly search through vast amounts of data, revealing data patterns, detecting anomalies, locating precise answers and facilitating prompt data recovery through contextual searches.

“Turing is a collection of rapidly evolving AI/ML capabilities and technologies that are integrated into Cohesity’s multicloud data platform and solutions and empower organizations to responsibly bring AI and their data together,” said Poonen. “With Turing, and through Cohesity’s platform, organizations have access to a vast array of modern AI/ML-powered capabilities to derive exceptional insights from their data.”

The company emphasized that with Turing, customers retain full control over their data, much as they currently do through its Cohesity’s multicloud data platform. In addition, by employing comprehensive role-based access control models, the company guarantees that data access is limited to authorized users and that context-aware responses to user queries align with a user’s designated access level.

Enterprises will also be able to exercise control and ensure the security of their data, regardless of the AI technologies they employ.

Enhancing data security and management through AI

The company anticipates significant advantages for joint customers through tight integration between Cohesity and Vertex AI. By harnessing the potential of generative AI and large language models, both companies aim to collaboratively assist customers in substantially enhancing data security.

“With so many potential attack vectors and rapidly growing data estates, in the event of a breach, AI could easily allow joint customers to ask natural questions, quickly search across exabytes [of data] and receive responses that are actionable and human-readable almost instantly, so that IT and security staff can assess risks quickly, and operators can streamline their response protocols,” Poonen told VentureBeat. “With AI-enabled eDiscovery, we aim to help customers quickly analyze historical data and assist in answering critical questions.”

Poonen said that Cohesity indexes backup data, including specific metadata that enables the use of that data in LLMs.

“In the same way that backup data on Cohesity is stored and able to be searched for threat analysis, it is also AI-ready so that when a person asks questions about the data through the LLM, responses are designed to be human-readable and actionable,” he said. “Leveraging authoritative data sources backed up on Cohesity can help to ensure more accurate responses to user or machine queries.”

The company said that Turing provides organizations with cutting-edge AI capabilities to enhance operational efficiency, obtain deeper insights into security risks and unlock greater value from data. These capabilities encompass advanced modeling and data entropy detection, machine learning models trained on millions of samples for threat intelligence, the classification of sensitive data, and machine-driven recommendations for predictive capacity planning.

“With Cohesity Turing’s capabilities in our Cohesity DataHawk SaaS offering, enterprises can detect threats and discover sensitive data. They can simplify threat detection with one-click scanning and automated threat feeds updated daily,” said Poonen. “ML-based data classification helps discover and accurately classify sensitive data so customers can determine if there was unauthorized use or access and assess the impact of an attack. User activity log analysis helps identify suspicious behaviors and activities that may be signs of tampering or theft.”

Cohesity’s ML-based engine handles classifying sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) and PCI- and HIPAA-protected data. This will empower enterprises to quickly evaluate the implications of ransomware attacks or other cyber-incidents.

Poonen highlighted that his company surpasses regex pattern matching by using BigID’s ML-based classification engine, which incorporates named entity recognition and natural language processing techniques.

Additionally, it harnesses established and validated patterns for comprehensive global search capabilities, featuring a large collection of more than 235 pre-built patterns that encompass commonly found personal, health and financial data. Enterprises can combine these patterns into custom policies, facilitating the identification of sensitive data and ensuring compliance with regulatory and privacy requirements.

A future of opportunities for AI-driven security infrastructure

Poonen emphasized that Cohesity’s state-of-the-art data security and management platform stands out for its “AI-ready” architecture, and that it is designed to enable seamless searchability and maintain a comprehensive database of files across various workloads and timeframes.

He said that such a design enables AI and LLMs to swiftly provide answers to vital business inquiries while ensuring that only authorized individuals receive responses pertaining to the data they have access to.

“The development of Cohesity’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models, for which we have pending patents, signifies a remarkable advancement in the domain of knowledge-grounded conversations,” he added. “By using the power of multiple documents and incorporating both the topic and local context of a conversation, these models can generate knowledgeable, diverse and relevant responses.”

He elaborated on the increasing importance for organizations to streamline business processes and operations, emphasizing that AI naturally becomes an integral part of this endeavor. However, the company acknowledges the substantial risks associated with exposing sensitive data and intellectual property.

“AI is sort of akin to the gold rush. Everyone is talking about the ‘gold,’ but no one is focusing on the tools and safety,” said Poonen. “Cohesity is focused on building the tools and safety to maximize the ‘gold’ organizations seek. Cohesity Turing will bring together RAG, responsible AI and governance to unlock the power of AI and data securely and responsibly.”