On the occasion of Reconnectthe event organized annually by Cohesity to confront customers and partners, we have met Albert Zammar, Director Southern Europe of the company. It was an opportunity to take stock of the security situation, but above all to meet Mauro Cacciafani, CTO of Publiacquaa Tuscan multi-utilitywho told us how they inserted Cohesity solutions into their IT infrastructure.
– What did Reconnect focus on this year?
Zammar – Reconnect has always been an event with which we aim to be close to our customers and partners, telling Cohesity news both in terms of organization and solution development. In addition to illustrating where we are going the intent is also to listen to the needs of our customers, their main objectives, their strategic plans. Above all, understand if we are proceeding in the right direction, trying to gather the necessary inputs to better direct our commercial and development strategies.
The main theme this year was the security in general. We are a data security and management company, therefore we place data at the center of all strategies to make it as secure as possible. One of the themes of the event was to tell how the Cohesity solution is based on Api to also allow third parties to make it more and more secure and increasingly open to hosting cutting-edge technologies in the field of information security. In this sense, there was also talk of the development of Cyber Security Alliance of which Cohesity is a part together with some market players and which allows you to extend the scope of safety and security with solutions that make access to data increasingly secure. But that also allow you to make the data available for classification, management and privilege management operations of access so as to be able to guarantee that even the people of the company who access this data do so with the highest levels of security possible.
– Is there an awareness in companies that companies themselves are responsible for data security in the cloud?
Zammar – The CISOs obviously understand that the data is the responsibility of the company and therefore they must guarantee its security. What is sometimes missing is the correct declination of this type of responsibility because, for example, when relying on a cloud provider for email management it is assumed that the data problem is delegated to someone else. In reality, meeting certain SLAs or the responsibility for what happens always rests with the company. Usually the cloud provider guarantees a retention of a certain type, but then obviously it has SLAs imposed.
There is another important aspect: the provider guarantees the possibility of recovering data, but does not guarantee that if those data are deleted they can be recovered. It’s always up to the business to ensure that there is a consistent backup and also to keep track of what happened to that data to make sure they haven’t violated any regulations. When you outsource data, an organization must protect itself from any actions by both internal employees and third parties.
– One aspect on which Cohesity focuses a lot is the data recovery time…
Zammar – The platform Cohesity integrates the Instant Mass Restore functionalitywhich allows you to recover data instantly. This is thanks tohyperconvergence, which avoids delegating data archiving to a third-party infrastructure. It is the same Cohesity platform that carries them inside and, therefore, with the same operating system, it is possible to immediately put the application or information back into operation. This functionality turns out particularly interesting in the case of NAS backup: all storage snapshots are practically already within the Cohesity platform and therefore data and files can be reconstructed very quickly.
– Which sectors are most sensitive to a proposal like yours?
Zammar – The platform Cohesity is aimed at all companies, there is no more receptive segment. Clearly, the companies that have the greatest need to archive, and that above all must have a fast restore of considerable amounts of data, are the largest companies. It goes without saying, therefore, that the majority of our clients are located in the field high-end commercial o grande impresaespecially in the banking and insurance sectors. Also multiutilities are very interesting prospects because they need to store large amounts of data and they need to make this data secure. They don’t just turn to Cohesity for backup, but also for file object storage and also for data visibility and protection operations from a safety perspective.
Cohesity is a channel companyi.e. a company that does not sell directly but operates across the channel. We have technology partners, like Cisco and Palo Alto Network, but we also work a lot with hyperscalers, like for example AWS on which we have backed our SaaS solutions. We still have partnerships even with Microsoft and Google.
We work in a go to market mode of the type meeting the channel. Therefore, our channel is both the traditional one certificate that resells our solution and has a direct partnership with us, and of course all our technological partners who can resell our solutions. We recently have signed an important agreement with IBM which has included Cohesity among the data management solutions to be offered to its customers. We obviously expect a strong push towards enterprise customers.
At the Italian level, Cohesity has invested heavily in the last two years. We doubled the number of customers and we are seeing a very relevant receptivity from the market.
I am proud to have you here today Mauro Cacciafani, the CTO of Pubbliacqua who will be able to tell us why an important multi-utility has chosen Cohesity.
– Can you draw a profile of Pubbliacqua?
Cacciafani – Publiacqua is a company based in Florence which manages the integrated water service in four provinces: Florence, Prato, Pistoia and a part of Arezzo. Serve circa 1,300,000 inhabitants, ha 400,000 active contracts and numbers approx 630 employeesthe. We have faced the digital transformation in various steps. The first concerned the adoption of the Sap reference platform. The next most relevant step dates back to 2011-2012 and concerns the integration of workforce management. This then led to having technologies at the service of all industrial areas, not just the classic administrative workstation. The evolution has strengthened the management of the relationship with the customer and also other industrial areas such as those of operational technology o dell’edge computing. All these evolutions have given rise to the need to ensure data protection and system availability. Basically, of ensure business continuity.
– How did you discover Cohesity?
Cacciafani – We have met Cohesity in 2018just as we were thinking about how to ensure flexibility and scalability in data protection through platforms that were decoupled from the front end and responded more quickly to data growth compared to the IBM Spectrum Protect backup system we used.
We carried out the implementation of the Cohesity platform in 2019. The primary function was to a scalable, robust and reliable infrastructure to ensure effective business continuity. Pubbliacqua has chosen a disaster recovery that relied on the cloud, therefore, that would open up towards virtualization solutions. At that point it was natural to also think of grow with the IT infrastructure we had thinking about it also resilient and positioned in the cloud in order to be sure of the availability of the data.
Cohesity brought as a dowry an important feature: being able to benefit natively not only from data protection, therefore from replication, but also the possibility of activating services, such as file sharing. So we ended up at have the third copy of the data and, in the event of a disaster, to be able to make the data immediately available to all users.
In 2022, the evolution of software has allowed us to abandon IBM Spectrum as a front end and of certify the possibility of making backups of SAP Hana and traditional SAP environments with Cohesity clients. Also, we could have the native backup of all environments with Cohesity.
– What advantages did choosing Cohesity bring you?
Cacciafani – In addition to savings on fees since we no longer had two backup solutions, the added value of our choice was be able to make the most of the features. As an example, deduplicates it because a native backup with Cohesity front end that collects data, organizes them and manages them with its technologies and algorithms is certainly more efficient. This has allowed us not only to make the most of speed and performance, but also save the amount of data to be stored. Basically, greater efficiency has been achieved.
Meanwhile, we also faced a partial evolution of cloud services by reorganizing all data flows. We also took advantage of geographic proximity to make backups and restores faster. This has allowed us to further increase efficiency.
The last step, which was tackled with Cohesity engineers, our technicians, partners and system integrators, allowed us to close all detected gaps one after the other, as not completely separate networks, the strengthening of access measures, the method of updating patches and also of all the components that contribute to the protection and immutability of the data.
We then did a proof of concept for Fort Knox functionality, which makes a secure copy within a public cloud and isolates it from your existing infrastructure. We have choosen where to geographically place the data and studied the backup retention policies that go into occupying space on Fort Knox itself. At the moment, we have completed the first alignment of the data.