Cohesity and Semperis team up to accelerate identity resilience

We have just made it easier for you to stay resilient against cyber threats, starting with securing your identity infrastructure.  

At Catalyst 1, we announced a strategic partnership between Cohesity and Semperis. We’ve united respective leaders in the AI-powered data security and the identity security spaces to deliver Cohesity Identity Resilience, powered by Semperis. This solution, sold by Cohesity and jointly supported by both Cohesity and Semperis, helps enterprise IT and security leaders improve resilience for one of today’s most crucial workloads: Active Directory (AD).

As we recently noted, AD remains one of the most prevalent and targeted systems in enterprise environments. A breach in AD can cripple operations, disrupt identity-dependent workloads, and open the door for repeated follow-on attacks. Attackers have already figured this out: identity is a gateway to your most valuable systems and data. Credentials, tokens, and access rights are crown jewels, and adversaries know that compromising them can bypass even the strongest defenses. Defenders need to wake up to this reality: protecting identity is not optional—ensuring resilient identity recovery is now the front line of modern security.

Why we partnered with Semperis

To address these challenges head-on, we chose to partner with Semperis, a market leader and experienced pure-play identity security vendor. Semperis was built from the ground up with one mission: to defend, detect, and recover identity environments at enterprise scale. By partnering with Semperis, Cohesity delivers a battle-tested solution already trusted by the world’s largest organizations to enable a comprehensive identity resilience strategy. Together, we provide organizations with advanced identity protection and recovery capabilities—ensuring resilience even in the face of sophisticated threats.

A closer look at this industry-leading identity resilience solution

Cohesity Identity Resilience empowers you to: 

• Prevent attacks on AD with proactive hardening.
• Recover AD to malware-free state with speed and confidence.
• Use post-breach forensics to close security gaps. 

This joint solution combines Semperis’ industry-leading, automated Active Directory Forest Recovery (ADFR) with Cohesity Data Cloud, delivering end-to-end cyber resilience for AD*. 

Here are the key use cases enabled as part of our new Identity Resilience solution:

1. Protect and secure immutable, trusted AD backups  

Every recovery plan should begin with one principle, you can’t recover what you can’t trust. At Cohesity, our goal is that every backup—for AD and every other workload—is: 

• Recent and readily available: Automated snapshots capture the current state of your environment at regular intervals. 
• Immutable and tamper-proof: Once created, snapshots cannot be altered or deleted by ransomware or malicious insiders. 
• Virtually air gapped: Critical data is isolated from the rest of your enterprise systems.
• Secure by design: End-to-end encryption and strict access controls ensure data integrity at every step. 

With these safeguards, you can be confident that you have a clean, verifiable foundation for rapid recovery—whether it’s restoring a single object or your entire AD forest.

2. Automate AD recovery to a clean environment

Speed is critical in an AD outage. Once your team has set up a clean recovery environment, Semperis' ADFR technology enables organizations to reduce their AD forest recovery times by up to 90%.

Key capabilities include: 

• Simplified cyber recovery planning: Easily set up a replica of the production AD environment to facilitate AD cyber recovery drills.
• Full-process automation: Automate the recovery process, including Global Catalog rebuilds and metadata cleanup, even in a multi-forest environment.
• Flexible OS provisioning: Get outstanding flexibility in OS provisioning for the AD restore, including the ability to upload IP address files and recover to any hardware, virtual or physical. Without this, you would be stuck waiting for uncompromised infrastructure to replace machines that might not be available post-incident.
• Built-in post-breach forensics: Identify the attack vector, detect and remove compromised objects, and eradicate malware from the environment—aiming to restore an environment that is free of malware.

With Semperis ADFR, your organization can prepare for the worst-case scenario and recover seamlessly when it matters most. 

3. Simplify how you prepare and practice for the worst-case scenario

Implementing timely AD cyber recovery drills using a production-level environment is a critical element in reducing downtime during an attack. Cohesity and Semperis have decade of experience in helping organizations recover from data breaches and AD compromises. Guided AD cyber recovery exercises help organizations assess their current AD and data recovery proficiency and set recovery benchmarks. Just as important, they can uncover gaps in technology and processes that prolong business disruptions. The AD recovery drill process includes:

• Recovery plan review to understand the business goals, SLA, disaster scenarios, and methods currently in place to recover data stores and AD in the case of a cyber incident.
• Planning workshop to define the SLA, recovery time objectives (RTO), at-risk data assets, and business applications required to support core business goals.
• AD disaster recovery exercise that includes a simulated encryption of the entire organization and the process of recovering and regaining control over AD.
• AD forensics exercise that includes practice determining the attack vector and how the bad actor breached your defenses.

*While the solution can run as a standalone offering, organizations can gain additional value from integrating with Cohesity Data Cloud. The combination provides additional benefits, such as secure, immutable AD backups, unified backup and recovery workflows, and extended cyber resilience across enterprise data.

Start by securing your most vulnerable identity infrastructure

Even in today’s hybrid identity environments, AD remains the backbone of a majority of enterprise access. It powers not only legacy apps and servers but also acts as the source of authority for synchronization with Entra ID. If AD is compromised or unavailable, that disruption cascades quickly: user synchronization breaks, stale or insecure identities emerge, and access to M365 or other SaaS apps can grind to a halt.  

This is where Cohesity Identity Resilience delivers impressive value: by making full AD forest recovery fast, automated, and malware-free, organizations can rapidly restore hybrid identity integrity. The result: organizations can start with protecting their most valuable (and vulnerable) identity environment today, while also extending protection to Entra ID as they mature their overall identity resilience strategy.

Bolster your cyber resilience strategy, and rethink your approach to identity  

Cohesity and Semperis deliver fast, malware-free AD recovery after a cyberattack with post-breach forensics and industry-leading, AI-powered multicloud data storage and management. Together, Cohesity and Semperis provide exceptional AD and data recovery expertise to help you prevent an attack on AD and data stores and recover from an incident. 

Do not wait for an attack to test your defenses. You can find us at Semperis’ Hybrid Identity Protection conference from October 7-9 in Charleston, South Carolina where you can attend our joint breakout session to learn how to extend cyber resilience across your entire organization—from protecting identity to safeguarding all your critical workloads.

More resources: 

• Identity Resilience Solution Brief
• AD & Entra ID Solution Page
• Get a free security assessment of your AD vulnerabilities
• Free attack path analysis tool to uncover the riskiest attack paths to your tier 0 assets