Four resilience conversations to have with Cohesity at Microsoft Ignite 2026

At this year’s Microsoft Ignite, the conversation will focus on what organizations can build with AI, Copilot, data, and cloud platforms. There is plenty to be excited about—but innovation also depends on a resilient foundation. 

Behind those AI experiences are systems organizations rely on every day: Microsoft 365 data, Azure workloads, Active Directory (AD), and Microsoft Entra ID.

Alongside “How can AI differentiate my business?” ask another question: “How resilient is the foundation my business depends on?”

Start with these four practical resilience conversations at Ignite.

1: Can you restore trusted identity?

Recovering applications and data only helps if people and systems can securely access them.

AD and Entra ID provide access to the applications, devices, data, and services employees use daily. If that identity foundation becomes unavailable or untrusted, recovery must include a plan to re-establish trusted access.

That is where Minimum Viable Company (MVC) planning can help. It identifies what must come back first after an attack so the business can perform its most essential functions. For many organizations, recovery starts with trusted identity, followed by the applications, data, and supporting services employees need to work.

Recent Cohesity Identity Resilience enhancements address practical recovery challenges across hybrid identity environments, including:

• Recovering cloud attributes associated with restored, synced AD objects.
• Providing password reset options during Entra ID user recovery.
• Protecting and recovering Microsoft Intune configuration objects alongside Entra ID.

2: Can you recover to a trusted state—not just a clean one?

A backup gives you a way to restore data, but it does not automatically tell you whether that data can be trusted. After an attack, the most recent recovery point may not be the right one. Teams need more insight before returning data to production.

Cohesity Microsoft 365 Threat Scanning lets teams scan protected Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive data for malware threats. That adds insight when deciding which recovery point to trust. 

3: How often do you test your resilience plan?

Azure environments are dynamic. New applications, repositories, pipelines, and data sources become part of the business, but recovery plans do not always evolve with them. A plan tested six months ago may not reflect the environment you have today.

At Ignite, we’ll be discussing resilience across Azure workloads and modern development environments, including protection for Azure DevOps and GitHub repositories and pipelines (available to select customers), together with cyber vaulting through Cohesity FortKnox on Azure. FortKnox provides an isolated, immutable recovery copy outside backup access paths. For the applications and data most important to the business, that creates another recovery source when your primary backup environment is unavailable or cannot be trusted.

Which Azure workloads, repositories, pipelines, and data would have to come back first for your business to operate?

4: How do you give AI the enterprise context it needs?

AI doesn't become useful to the enterprise simply because a model is available. It needs access to the right enterprise context: relevant information from across the business, prepared and governed so AI applications and users can put it to work. As organizations expand their use of AI, the challenge increasingly becomes making that enterprise knowledge accessible, meaningful, and trusted.

Cohesity Gaia helps turn enterprise data into a useful context for AI. Cohesity Gaia Catalog is designed to help organizations discover, curate, and prepare enterprise data for downstream AI and analytics workflows, including Microsoft Azure Databricks. Curated data can be made available to Azure Databricks while remaining in Cohesity, helping reduce the need to move data or build new data pipelines from scratch.

Gaia also brings relevant enterprise context into AI experiences such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, allowing users to ask questions grounded in proprietary enterprise data while respecting supported role-based and file-level permissions. Together, these capabilities extend Gaia’s role as an enterprise context data layer, helping organizations turn proprietary enterprise data into trusted context for the AI applications, agents, and data platforms they already use today.

Build your recovery plan around what the business needs first

Every organization’s Minimum Viable Company will look different. Start with the business services you simply cannot operate without, then work backward to identify what those services depend on.

Trusted identity is a critical part of that foundation because access to applications, systems, and services depends on it. Make sure you have a plan to restore trusted access, then prioritize the applications, Microsoft 365 data, Azure workloads, repositories, and other services your business needs to operate.

These are important decisions worth making before an incident, not during one.

Let's continue the conversation at Ignite

Come see us at Booth #5215 to:

• Explore threat detection and malware-free recovery across Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID.
• See how Microsoft 365 Threat Scanning can inform recovery decisions.
• Talk with our experts about protection for Azure DevOps and GitHub repositories and pipelines.
• Learn how FortKnox on Azure provides an immutable recovery option.
• Work through what an MVC could look like for your organization.

Tell us which Microsoft services your business depends on most. We’d love to talk through your recovery priorities.