Cohesity Catalyst is a three-day global online event from May 23 to 25 that I think is a must-attend for data security and management pros. Cohesity has assembled an impressive lineup of genuine thought leaders from companies such as Mandiant, VMware, NetApp, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Cisco, and HPE—a testament to Cohesity’s partnering prowess and its standing in the data security and management space.

This article dives into the announcements around AI and data security and my observations from the event.

Cohesity Turing: a growing collection of AI capabilities

Cohesity introduced Cohesity Turing, a collection of AI/ML capabilities and technologies integrated into Cohesity’s multi-cloud data platform designed to empower organizations to bring AI and their data together responsibly. Alan Turing was the inspiration for the product name. In 1947, Turing gave possibly the first lecture on computer intelligence; he was quoted as saying, “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience.” A prophetic statement, if ever there was one!

Many AI/ML capabilities with Turing exist in the company’s offerings today, but Cohesity expects to rapidly unveil new AI capabilities and integrations under the Cohesity Turing umbrella. Existing AI/ML capabilities in Turing include:

• Ransomware anomaly detection using advanced modeling and data entropy detection; can spot anomalies in ingested data to provide early warnings of hidden threats.
• Threat intelligence is based on machine learning models trained on large data samples; this provides highly curated and managed threat feeds to detect threats accurately and keep security teams updated automatically.
• Data classification, which helps ensure that organizations can identify and locate the most sensitive data.
• Predictive capacity planning to meet current and future business needs.
• SLAs enhanced with machine-driven recommendations, including a what-if simulator and forecasting for future capacity utilization.

Cohesity is also building what I consider a unique approach to retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and customer data. RAG combines the advances in generative AI and contextual search into a powerful new way to find and retrieve contextually relevant results. I think Cohesity’s multiple patent-pending technologies in this area have the potential to help customers unlock significant insights from their data across a host of areas, including eDiscovery and autonomous monitoring and remediation.

Bringing responsibility to AI

Another differentiator I see for Cohesity is its platform’s impact in enabling “responsible AI.” Through Cohesity’s platform and via Turing, customers can deploy strict role-based access controls and ensure that only the right people can access data. These same protocols extend to what Cohesity is doing with AI, including with partners. And, with Cohesity, customers can query the data –data already sitting on the company’s platform — to generate insights via AI versus having to move and store the data elsewhere. So, across the board, control is the name of the game where organizations can have trust and transparency that the right data is shared or restricted from AI models and the workforce leveraging them.

Embracing a multi-cloud approach in the AI world

About a month ago, I wrote about Cohesity’s expanded partnership with Microsoft and its plan to integrate with Azure OpenAI.

Cohesity now also has an expanded partnership with Google Cloud, intending to integrate with Vertex AI. Combining Cohesity’s data security and management capabilities with Google Cloud’s powerful generative AI and analytics capabilities will enable new insights into the same data managed on the Cohesity platform. I have written a lot about Google’s Vertex service here.

It takes a village to fight the bad guys

Six months ago, I also wrote about the launch of the Data Security Alliance. This alliance is focused on bringing together best-in-class solutions from industry-leading cybersecurity and services companies with exceptional data security and management expertise from Cohesity. Since November, Cohesity has been busy adding more partners to the ecosystem and advancing integrations with existing partners. Cohesity is unique in this space with this type of ecosystem.