Cohesity, Inc. is an American company specializing in data protection and management. Its software enables organizations to back up their information, restore it after an incident and make better use of retained copies. Operating across both on-premises and cloud infrastructures, it addresses a concern that has become central to IT departments: maintaining access to data despite outages, human error and cyberattacks.
From secondary data to the combination with Veritas
Cohesity was founded in 2013 by Mohit Aron, previously a co-founder of Nutanix. Its initial aim was to bring together so-called secondary data on a shared platform: backups, archives and copies used for testing. These datasets, often scattered across multiple tools and systems, consume significant resources without receiving the same attention as production applications.
The company gradually broadened its focus to include data security and resilience. Sanjay Poonen, a former VMware and SAP executive, became its chief executive officer in 2022. In December 2024, Cohesity completed its combination with Veritas’ enterprise data protection business. The transaction notably brought it NetBackup, a solution with a long-established presence in the IT systems of large organizations.
Backing up, securing and retrieving information
The offering centers on Cohesity Data Cloud, a platform designed to protect hybrid environments. It covers servers, virtual machines, databases and various cloud applications. Deployment options combine customer-operated software with cloud-managed services. DataProtect is one of its main backup and recovery solutions.
Cyber resilience builds on this core business. Cohesity offers mechanisms including immutability, access control and anomaly detection to reduce the risks facing backups. Its FortKnox service allows an isolated copy to be stored in the cloud, helping facilitate recovery after an attack. The challenge is not simply to store copies, but to identify a usable state and organize a controlled recovery.
The company also seeks to make protected data searchable. With Gaia, it applies generative artificial intelligence to information searches within backed-up data, taking access rights into account. This approach aims to turn some content retained for protection purposes into resources that business teams can consult.
What next?
The combination with Veritas puts portfolio integration and customer support at the forefront. Cohesity must bring its technologies together with NetBackup while preserving the investments of organizations already using these solutions. The proliferation of cloud environments and requirements for recovery after ransomware attacks should continue to drive demand for protection. Using AI to leverage backups opens up another area of development, subject to constraints around confidentiality, governance and the relevance of responses. The ability to reconcile these uses with reliable recovery will be decisive for what comes next.