Cohesity Cloud Services expands to support workloads in Microsoft Azure

Cohesity is excited to offer new capabilities to protect your organization’s data in Microsoft Azure. Cohesity Cloud Services now supports the backup and recovery of Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), Azure SQL databases, in addition to the existing support for Microsoft 365 data.

In addition, Cohesity Cloud Services in Microsoft Azure is available in multiple regions around the world.

Cohesity Cloud Services (CCS) has long offered robust data security and a single management plane for on-premises, SaaS, and cloud-native workloads. Now, Cohesity and Microsoft Azure customers have more options to streamline data security and management to better protect themselves against cyber threats and unplanned outages. The new backup and recovery support for Azure SQL and Azure VMs will enable customers to create data copies outside of their tenants. This approach results in offsite backups that can be used for a multitude of enterprise cloud use cases such as operational recovery, regulatory compliance, and disaster recovery. Organizations can use Cohesity’s robust data security and management to get the consistency and familiarity of a single pane of glass extending from on-prem to the cloud.

With our comprehensive data protection and management solution hosted in Azure, organizations can safeguard their data, ensure swift recovery, and reduce operational costs while benefiting from the efficiency and security of Cohesity’s and Microsoft’s services. Let’s delve into our most recent features and capabilities.

Powerful Azure VM protection with granular recovery capabilities

Azure VMs are one of the most popular cloud services. As such, timely recovery of VMs in the case of an incident is crucial. Cohesity Cloud Services empowers you to manage backup and recovery options with the ease and convenience of an on-demand model.

Some of the product’s capabilities available today include:

• Backup and recovery of an entire VM in place or to an alternate location such as subscription, Azure region, and resource group.
• Source registration at Azure AD tenant level providing operational ease.
• Support for backup of Azure VMs using private endpoints with a Shared Access Signature (SAS) URL, when additional layers of security are required.

An Inside Look: How backup and recovery for Azure VMs works with Cohesity Cloud Services
Cohesity Cloud Services in Azure lists all the VMs that need to be backed up and takes a snapshot by issuing a request to the Azure Resource Manager. Cohesity Cloud Services in Azure uses stateless VMs called SaaS connectors that act as data movers between the customers’ environments and Cohesity Cloud Services for backup and recovery workflows. Backup data can be recovered to the same or an alternate location. From there, administrators can select multiple configuration options like the target Azure resource group, and storage account which provides control over the attributes of the recovered Azure VM.

Figure: Flexible policy options for backing up Azure VMs.

Reliable, consistent Azure SQL backups ensure a clean recovery

Native Azure backup and recovery capabilities can suffice for some organizations—but others have additional security and compliance requirements. Azure SQL is a great example of the type of workloads that demand more powerful capabilities.

For example, many organizations need SQL backups to feature offsite backups (out of tenant), data portability, long-term archive, and data immutability. Cohesity Cloud Services is a fantastic option for these scenarios that work alongside native backup features offered by Azure SQL.

Cohesity Cloud Services ensures storage efficiency for Azure SQL backups to minimize storage costs, with useful data protection protocols built-in, and many restore options through a single, easy-to-use management console.

With Cohesity’s new Azure SQL backup and recovery service, organizations can take advantage of:

• Automated backups that are retained for 35 days. To retain data beyond 35 days, a distinct policy can be put in place, for long-term retention of up to 10 years.
• Full backups on a customizable schedule.
• Enable portability of SQL databases to and from the cloud.
• Immutable backups stored outside of tenant.
• Minimize data transfer with synthetic incremental backups that employ source-side deduplication to simulate incremental backups.
• 100% transactionally consistent backups, whereby tables are up to date and in sync.

An Inside Look: How Backup and recovery for Azure SQL works with Cohesity Cloud Services
Cohesity’s Azure SQL and Azure SQL MI (Managed Instance) data protection that runs on Cohesity Cloud Services on the Microsoft Azure Platform features flexible backup policies. Once a policy is selected and the backup begins, Cohesity clones the production database (“Primary”) to a new instance (“Clone”) to ensure a transactionally consistent source copy. Once cloning has completed, Cohesity will export the database in its entirety, and securely send the backup data to CCS on Microsoft Azure. All data transferred between the Customer Azure tenant and CCS is deduplicated, compressed, and transmitted fully encrypted. Once the backup process is completed, Cohesity removes the clone of the database.

Recovering the data is as simple as selecting the database to recover, the snapshot to recover from, and selecting a restore location, whether it’s an in-place recovery, or cross-instance recovery—all through Cohesity’s easy-to-use single management pane, Helios.

Figure: Database clones ensure a consistent recovery.

Secure, enterprise-class protection for Microsoft 365

Additionally, Cohesity brings security, simplicity, flexibility, and efficiency to the backup and recovery of Microsoft 365 data encompassing Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, and Groups with Cohesity’s Cloud Services. Cohesity can confidently say that we provide a 50% typical TCO reduction for M365 protection as compared to other offerings using per-user pricing. Cohesity Cloud Services empowers IT teams to control backup and recovery processes and costs while meeting compliance and mitigating risks—from human error, ransomware, and other threats.

Test drive Cohesity Cloud Services in Microsoft Azure today

This announcement is the latest in a long series of collaborations between Cohesity and Microsoft.
Cohesity is a member of the Microsoft Content AI Partner Program. Cohesity and Microsoft’s solutions help organizations lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through unprecedented space efficiency and energy consumption. Additionally, Cohesity’s solutions are listed on the Azure marketplace enabling customers to take advantage of their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) credits to offset their costs. Scaling up or down is easy with Cohesity and Microsoft Azure through a simple click.

With Cohesity and Microsoft, customers gain additional data resiliency, cyber resiliency, and simplicity in an era of rising threats, with the pay-as-go flexibility of an on-demand offering. Sign up for a free trial of Cohesity Cloud Services on Microsoft Azure.

Learn more

• Learn more about Cohesity’s partnership with Microsoft.
• Read about Cohesity backup and recovery solutions for Microsoft 365.
• Read about Cohesity solutions for Azure backup and recovery.
• Read about Cohesity’s integration with Microsoft 365 storage backup solution.

Watch Cohesity CEO and President Sanjay Poonen’s vision for why customers and partners choose Cohesity, below.