Cohesity, a leading data security and data management provider, has strengthened its cyber resilience collaboration with IBM. The enhanced relationship will accelerate the development of essential cyber resilience capabilities to address organizations’ critical need for increased data security and resilience across hybrid cloud environments. With this announcement, Cohesity completes its Series F financing, with IBM joining NVIDIA as a strategic investor.
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What is Cyber Resilience?
Cyber resilience denotes an organization’s capacity to prevent, endure, and rebound from cybersecurity incidents. It integrates business continuity, information systems security, and organizational resilience, ensuring operations continuity despite challenging cyberattacks, natural disasters, or economic downturns. Proficiency and resilience in information security directly impact an organization’s ability to sustain business operations seamlessly, minimizing downtime.
Impact of Data Breaches
The latest Cost of a Data Breach report, sponsored by IBM Security, reveals that the global average data breach cost surged to $4.45 million in 2023, marking a 15% increase over the preceding three years. In response to this growing concern, IBM has integrated Cohesity capabilities into its comprehensive cyber resilience platform, IBM Storage Defender. This integration bolsters customers’ resilience against data breaches and cyber-attacks, empowering them to mitigate risks effectively.
Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President of Cohesity, commented, “IBM emerges as a formidable partner in the enterprise cloud and IT infrastructure domain. Their extensive expertise spanning decades, coupled with their investment in our business, fuels additional research and development efforts, bolstering our cyber resilience offerings for customers. We’re delighted with IBM’s collaboration as we strive to enable our joint customers to swiftly detect threats and maintain seamless operations, even during cyber attacks, thus preventing business interruptions.”
Improving Data Protection
Cohesity’s partnership with IBM combines Cohesity DataProtect with IBM’s Storage Defender Solution, empowering mutual customers to safeguard, monitor, manage, and recover their data effectively. Cohesity DataProtect is a robust backup and recovery solution that ensures high performance and security. It offers comprehensive policy-based protection for various data sources, including cloud-native, SaaS, and traditional platforms. DataProtect can be deployed on-premises or consumed as a service by consolidating multiple-point products into a single multi-cloud platform.
IBM Storage Defender utilizes AI and event monitoring across diverse storage platforms, providing organizations a unified view to mitigate risks such as ransomware, human error, and sabotage. Moreover, anticipated features of IBM Storage Defender, including a cyber vault and clean room, offer automated recovery functions, enabling companies to restore critical data within hours or minutes, significantly reducing downtime.
Importance of Cyber Resilience for Data Security Needs
Cyber resilience is crucial in ensuring business continuity and fortifying an enterprise’s security posture. Beyond safeguarding critical infrastructure, a robust cyber resilience strategy can mitigate financial losses and reputational damage while fostering trust among clients and customers. Cyber resilience certification further bolsters organizational credibility and enhances competitive advantage through streamlined operations.
Mitigating Financial Loss
Instances of cybersecurity incidents disrupting IT and business processes underscore the significance of cyber resilience. The staggering average data breach cost, as evidenced by Ponemon’s 2021 Cost of a Breach Study, emphasizes the financial risks organizations face. Such incidents result in financial losses and erode stakeholder confidence, including shareholders, investors, employees, and customers.
Gaining Customer Trust and Business
Adherence to international management standards like ISO/IEC 27001 and PCI-DSS demonstrates an organization’s commitment to information security. These certifications instill confidence in customers and pave the way for securing their business. Compliance with regulations and standards ensures the protection of sensitive data assets, fostering trust and credibility in the marketplace.
Increasing Competitive Advantage
Enterprises that implement management systems based on best practices, such as ITIL, bolster their operational efficiency. Similarly, integrating cyber resilience management systems enhances organizational effectiveness, delivering significant customer value. By prioritizing cyber resilience, organizations gain a competitive edge and differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
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Steps on How Cyber Resilience Works
In strategic planning, a fundamental aspect of cyber resilience entails a comprehensive understanding of risk. This involves integrating risk mitigation into the overarching strategy, extending beyond IT planning. To leverage the transition from cybersecurity to cyber resilience, businesses must allocate resources toward mitigating cyber risks with the highest potential impact and focus on relevant metrics for insights and predictive analysis.
A cyber resilience framework should adhere to the following steps outlined by NIST:
- Identify: Proactively seek indications of potential security exposures, including monitoring for software vulnerabilities and misconfigured devices.
- Protect: Strengthen infrastructure to withstand cyber threats and utilize cybersecurity tools to prevent harm to critical assets and data.
- Detect: Fine-tune security tools and processes for incident detection, identifying risks and anomalies within critical systems from both internal and external threats.
- Respond: Collect and analyze data from security incidents to facilitate informed decision-making.
- Recover: Implement systems for swift data restoration and recovery of mission-critical systems to minimize business interruption. This may include maintaining cloud backups of customer data in geographically disparate locations.
Ric Lewis, Senior Vice President of Infrastructure at IBM, remarked, “Data breaches persist as a significant threat to organizational progress. We are enthusiastic about enhancing our partnership with Cohesity to deliver innovative end-to-end software-defined solutions that elevate cyber resilience for our clients, mitigating the risk of business interruptions.
FAQs
1. What does the collaboration between Cohesity and IBM entail?
The collaboration between Cohesity and IBM strengthens cyber resilience capabilities to address organizations’ critical need for increased data security and resilience across hybrid cloud environments. This enhanced relationship accelerates the development of essential cyber resilience capabilities.
2. What is the significance of Cohesity completing its Series F financing with IBM joining NVIDIA as a strategic investor?
Cohesity’s completion of its Series F financing with IBM joining NVIDIA as a strategic investor underscores the industry’s recognition of the importance of cyber resilience. It also highlights the confidence of major players in Cohesity’s role in advancing data security and management solutions.
3. How does cyber resilience benefit organizations in today’s digital landscape?
In today’s digital landscape, cyber resilience is crucial for ensuring business continuity and minimizing the impact of cybersecurity incidents. It helps organizations prevent, endure, and rebound from cyber threats, ensuring the uninterrupted operation of critical systems and services.
4. What challenges do organizations face in mitigating cyber risks, and how does the collaboration address them?
Organizations face increasing cyber threats, evolving attack vectors, and complex hybrid cloud environments. The collaboration between Cohesity and IBM addresses these challenges by providing comprehensive cyber resilience solutions that safeguard data, monitor threats, and facilitate rapid recovery in the event of an incident.
5. What specific capabilities do Cohesity DataProtect and IBM Storage Defender offer to mutual customers?
Cohesity DataProtect is a high-performance backup and recovery solution that ensures comprehensive policy-based protection for various data sources across hybrid cloud environments. IBM Storage Defender leverages AI and event monitoring to detect and mitigate cyber threats, offering automated recovery functions to minimize downtime.
6. How does the partnership between Cohesity and IBM contribute to improving data protection and cybersecurity posture?
Cohesity and IBM’s partnership combines their expertise to deliver innovative solutions that enhance data protection and cybersecurity posture for mutual customers. By integrating Cohesity DataProtect with IBM Storage Defender, organizations can effectively safeguard, monitor, manage, and recover their data.
7. How does cyber resilience certification enhance organizational credibility and trust?
Cyber resilience certification demonstrates an organization’s commitment to implementing robust cybersecurity measures and mitigating cyber risks effectively. It enhances organizational credibility and instills trust among clients and customers, showcasing the organization’s readiness to handle cybersecurity incidents.
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