Cohesity-Veritas makes its pitch: Real-time cyberattack data recovery, AI analysis without the data lake

Cohesity, a data protection company, held its first press conference in Korea since its merger with Veritas and began to make full-fledged inroads into the domestic market.

At an April 15 press conference in Seoul, data protection company Cohesity introduced its growth strategy after its merger with Veritas, outlining its AI-based data security solution and plans to make inroads into the Korean market.

Its pitch? “Solving the concerns of both CIOs and CISOs” with “recovery, security, and AI in one.”

Cohesity was founded in 2013 by Mohit Aron, who worked on the development of Google File System (GFS) at Google. The company has since grown to focus on data security and management, and last year, it acquired backup solution company Veritas to further strengthen its recovery capabilities.

Cohesity claims about 20% of the global backup software market share, managing approximately 100 exabytes of data. Its total revenue in 2024 is expected to be about $1.7 billion. At the press conference, Cohesity Chief Product Officer Vasu Murthy introduced the company’s technology as a data platform that provides both security and insight, rather than a simple backup solution.

Cohesity Korea was established in December of last year after the Veritas acquisition was completed. Most of Veritas’ existing domestic workforce was absorbed into Cohesity Korea. “When a company is first established in the US, it usually pursues growth first, so the expansion period tends to be relatively delayed,” said Murthy. “After the merger was completed in December of last year, we were able to enter the Korean market in earnest.”

Cohesity’s Murthy expressed confidence that the company can increase its market influence after its merger, citing the belief that customers are looking for data protection solutions that go beyond simple backups and have security response capabilities. To address this, Cohesity is enhancing Veritas’ existing backup solution, NetBackup, while expanding and applying capabilities such as AI, security, and integrated control to the Cohesity platform.

Lee Sang-hoon, CEO of Cohesity Korea, explained, “Existing backup solutions worked by increasing the performance of a single device by adding computing power or disks, but with the rapid increase in data growth and cyber threats such as ransomware, flexible scalability and fast recovery capabilities are now emerging as key requirements for backup solutions.”

In the same vein, Murthy said, “When a cyberattack occurs, many CEOs first ask how long it will take to recover.” He added: “There are more and more situations in companies where CIOs and CISOs need to work together to devise response measures, and Cohesity technology will be effective in solving these problems.”

Murthy also explained, “Unlike general data recovery, recovery after a cyberattack requires checking the integrity of the data and whether malware is reintroduced.”

“Cohesity can check the safety of backup data in real-time through ransomware detection and track scanning,” CEO Lee Sang-hoon added. “While existing solutions required merging full and incremental backups, Cohesity omits this process, enabling immediate recovery, and provides recovery speeds up to 10 times faster.”

Generative AI on backup

Cohesity’s Murthy also highlighted the company’s generative AI solution as a key differentiator for analyzing backup data — unstructured data, such as emails, PDFs, and documents, in particular.

“We can effectively operate AI projects by utilizing unstructured data accumulated in backup solutions to supplement the deficiencies of the data lake,” Murthy said. “By limiting AI to generate answers based on backup data, we can prevent the hallucination phenomenon that creates unfounded information. In addition, we can enhance security by blocking sensitive information from flowing into the data lake through the data classification function.”

CEO Lee Sang-hoon said, “Customers will be able to achieve cost savings by creating an AI analysis environment with backup data without building a data lake.”

Last year, Cohesity released Gaia, a generative AI-based enterprise search assistant that combines RAG retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology and LLM based on backup data.

With Gaia, customers can ask questions in natural language and receive contextual answers by searching and analyzing related information from backup data. According to Murthy, Gaia can be used to analyze whether emails between specific employees contain confidential information related to corporate M&A, or for in-house lawyers to easily find out how many contracts that they have written include early termination penalty clauses, for example.