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Popular cyber vault SaaS protects essential data when all else fails.
A cyber vault is an essential component of every cyber resilience strategy. Now, IT and security leaders have a new option to protect their data in the event of a worse-case scenario.
Cohesity's award-winning cyber vaulting solution, FortKnox, can now be deployed directly within Google Cloud's infrastructure as a managed service—ensuring immutable, isolated copies of critical data while adhering to geographic and regulatory requirements. This availability atop Google Cloud builds on existing support for AWS and Azure, providing enterprises with greater flexibility in multicloud environments. The product is available for self-managed and on-premises deployments as well.
Threat actors are after your backup data. During an attack, snapshots of backup data stored in systems connected to production networks can be encrypted or deleted. Once the cyber criminals encrypt, or destroy, these copies, they eliminate your best chance of a clean recovery.
Modern data protection platforms are an essential way to reduce your risk from this scenario. But it’s not foolproof. This is where a cyber vault like Fort Knox comes into play. A cyber vault ensures that your organization is ready to recover confidently from an attack even if the rest of your backup data is compromised.
Cyber vaulting ensures you have an untouched copy of your data to recover if all else fails. Vaulting provides the separation, verification, and control necessary to guarantee clean, recoverable data.
Cohesity FortKnox is a secure, isolated storage mechanism designed to protect critical data from cyber threats, particularly ransomware and other malicious attacks. Unlike traditional backups, which can be vulnerable if attackers infiltrate the primary system, FortKnox creates an "air-gapped" environment—virtually or physically separated from the main network—to store immutable copies of data. This ensures that even if primary systems are compromised, the vaulted data remains untouched and recoverable.
Cohesity FortKnox includes additional security measures like quorum authentication. This feature requires multiple users to access the vault and recover data from the vault. As a result, your risk from insider threats, unintended read access and data exfiltration is lower. (Read more about quorum approvals in FortKnox– customer login required.)
Cohesity FortKnox helps enterprises like yours adopt this pattern as a SaaS-based cyber vaulting solution. It employs advanced technologies like immutability (data that cannot be altered or deleted), encryption, and obfuscation to hide vault locations from potential intruders. FortKnox supports a 3-2-1 backup strategy: three copies of data on two different media types, with one off-site or in the cloud. On Google Cloud, it adds layers of security such as policy-based geographic restrictions and integration with cloud-native features.
In practice, users configure replication schedules to Fort Knox based on business requirements. Recovery is streamlined, allowing organizations to verify and restore clean data quickly without reintroducing threats. This is crucial in a landscape where ransomware variants can encrypt backups if they're not properly isolated.
FortKnox transforms data protection from a reactive process into a proactive defense, ensuring business continuity in the face of escalating cyber risks.
This expansion into Google Cloud comes at a critical time when ransomware attacks and data breaches are surging, with organizations facing unprecedented threats to their data integrity and availability. With Google Cloud's global infrastructure, FortKnox now enables policy-based controls to keep data vaults within approved jurisdictions, addressing sovereignty concerns for regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and government.
The partnership also extends to enhanced data protection for Google Cloud services such as Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, GKE, and BigQuery, with immutable backups that can be stored in Google Cloud or on-premises.
Cohesity's certification as a Google Cloud Ready – Regulated & Sovereignty Solutions partner underscores this milestone, allowing seamless deployment within Google Cloud's Data Boundary for compliance with data residency rules.
The two companies have also collaborated to improve threat protection with recent integrations of Google Threat Intelligence and Google Private Sandbox Scanning into Cohesity's platform.
What data should you put into FortKnox? The service is best used for your most critical data—assets essential for business operations, compliance, and recovery. This includes backups of virtual machines (VMs), databases, applications, and files from services like Google Compute Engine or Cloud Storage. But it's not just any data. It's prioritized based on risk and value, often following a tiered approach.
Key categories include:
Two key concepts guide what data enters FortKnox: the "digital jump bag" and "minimum viable company" (MVC).
A digital jump bag is an emergency kit of digital assets, akin to a physical go-bag for disasters. It contains immediately accessible items like configuration files, encryption keys, access credentials, emergency contacts, and recovery scripts. In a cyber vault, this ensures quick response during incidents—e.g., restoring access to critical tools without delay. FortKnox facilitates this by allowing granular recovery, so teams can pull specific files from isolated vaults without full system restores.
The minimum viable company concept refers to the minimal dataset needed to restart operations post-disaster. This includes core applications (e.g., CRM, ERP), essential employee data, supply chain info, and basic infrastructure configs. By vaulting MVC data, organizations avoid total shutdowns, focusing on high-priority recovery. For instance, a manufacturing firm might vault production blueprints and inventory systems to resume minimally within hours.
In FortKnox, data ingestion is policy-driven: Automated replication from Cohesity Data Cloud, with deduplication for efficiency. This ensures only vital, non-redundant data is vaulted, optimizing costs while maximizing protection.
Cohesity FortKnox has been adopted by diverse organizations, delivering tangible benefits in cyber resilience:
These successes highlight FortKnox's versatility across industries, with common themes of faster recovery, cost savings, and robust protection.
The launch of Cohesity FortKnox on Google Cloud marks a pivotal advancement in cyber vaulting, offering enterprises data isolation, data sovereignty and compliance options, and seamless integration with modern data platforms. By addressing ransomware threats head-on, FortKnox ensures organizations can recover clean data rapidly, safeguarding operations and unlocking AI potential.
In an era where data is the lifeblood of business, investing in a cyber vault isn't just prudent—it's imperative. Don't wait for a breach to expose vulnerabilities. Explore Cohesity FortKnox today: Your business continuity depends on it.
Written By
Jared Ruckle
Sr. Director - Product Marketing, Solutions & Industry
Dayanand Sharma
Director, Product Management
