As artificial intelligence and data become the center of every organization, it is essential that security leaders think differently about the evolving need for resilience and how to achieve that amidst today’s cybersecurity threat landscape.
NightDragon CEO Dave DeWalt sat down with Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen to discuss how companies can do just that, as well as Cohesity’s recent growth and go-forward vision, including its upcoming acquisition of Veritas’s data protection business in a recent NightVision event.
Here are some takeaways from their conversation. A full video can also be found below:
- We Need Better Resiliency and Data Security Management – 2024 has been one of the most interesting years in the history of cyber, with a new level of risk never before seen, said Dave DeWalt, citing examples like supply chain, third-party risk, ransomware, data breaches, and outages that have been on the rise. For example, in ransomware alone, there are more than 300 million attempts of ransomware a year and more than 5,000 successful ones. “I really believe having a data security fabric is going to be a part of every company’s resiliency strategy,” he said.
- An Immigrant Background – Poonen shared his journey to CEO of Cohesity. He grew up in Bangalore in a lower-middle-class family. He came to the USA as an undergrad to study computer science on scholarship at Dartmouth. He took early career roles at Apple and Microsoft before going to business school, where he learned to combine a deep engineering mindset with product, marketing, business and finance. Poonen went on to help lead SAP from $10 to $20 billion in revenue, then spent time at Veritas prior to its merger with Symantec. In 2013, he became COO of VMware and helped the company grow from $6 to $12 billion before joining Cohesity as CEO in August 2022.
- Cyber Meets Resiliency is Critical – As ransomware and other threats continue to rise, cyber and resiliency have become critically important, said DeWalt. Poonen said Cohesity has its roots in the cloud and hyper-converged systems, allowing it to be the first company to build a next-generation cloud-based architecture for data. Cohesity plays a leading role in applying this technology to increase cyber resiliency, he said, with deep integrations as part of a “Data Security Alliance”- a network of leading security vendors running scanners to look for malware through its large data pools.
- The 5 S’s for Success – Poonen said he attributes the success of Cohesity’s platform architecture in five ways: speed, scale, security, simplicity and smarts. Security has become an increasingly important fifth pillar in recent years for data companies, he said, especially as ransomware attacks have grown to new heights in terms of volume and sophistication. Vendors have increasingly added features like mutability, air gapping, encryption, threat detection, data scanning and more into platform architectures to account for this, he said.
- AI Allows for Getting Value Out of Data – The new AI Era has also allowed for an “even bigger opportunity to take large amounts of data and make sure it’s not in a bunker – that you’re actually getting value out of it. That’s the security piece,” Poonen said, citing examples like threat hunting in large amounts of data, training models, recovering systems and more. “This is going to be a big part our future [at Cohesity],” Poonen said, citing Gen AI products like Gaia. “Now there’s an AI-powered database at your fingertips to do a lot more than we’ve ever been able to do before, he said.”
- Patch Prioritization – Recent incidents like Crowdstrike (and others) show the importance of the need for speed in security and patch prioritization to enable speed where it matters. That’s a challenge for many companies, with thousands of vendors in the industry all issuing updates of various severity and importance on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. “We have to do a better job as an industry learning to risk quantify,” DeWalt said. “Then learn how to use that quantification to segment faster when the risk is higher… We have to learn to be more resilient.”
- Taking a Page from Healthcare – Poonen drew similarities between cybersecurity and the world of healthcare. For example, security teams look for digital diseases amongst large amounts of data and need a “brain trust” of talented and strong individuals on a team, just as healthcare needs phenomenal doctors. You then need tools to ingest large amounts of data to test and monitor metrics to find examples of sickness or early warnings of a potential problem. Having large amounts of data and AI capabilities help support this testing and detection. Then, isolate those threats using techniques such as air gapping and ultimately recover.
- Fast Growth at Cohesity – Poonen highlighted the Cohesity’s recent growth numbers, which included 26% revenue growth in the past fiscal year to $549 million in revenue. The company also turned free cash flow positive in Q4, he said. “Of the pure competitors, we’re the fastest growing,” he said.
- Veritas Acquisition Opportunity to Expand Data Protection Business – Cohesity announced in February that it intended to acquire the data protection business, Veritas. This acquisition combines two of the largest players in the data protection markets, with a combined Pro Forma annual revenues of $1.6 Billion and ARR of $1.3 Billion.Poonen said the acquisition will bring additional benefits to customers like increased engineering capacity, increased data, and more. “Our vision here is to try and create a $5 billion business,” he said, with line of sight to $2 billion next year. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year.
Watch the full interview here:
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