Forrester TEI Study: Cohesity Delivers 150% ROI and 7 Months Payback

We’re proud of the fact that Cohesity helps organizations modernize IT. We’ve seen customer after customer score major wins by deploying Cohesity to simplify data management. Reducing TCO by over 70% in one instance. Reducing backup footprint by 20 times over in another.

But we wanted more evidence about the overall return on investment (ROI) of our multicloud data platform. So we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a rigorous and independent Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to further quantify what enterprises can achieve by deploying Cohesity’s multicloud data platform for running multiple data management services. 

The results are in, and they’re impressive. The organizations studied realized an overall ROI of 150% in three years, with payback achieved just seven months after deployment. Total benefits present value (PV)? Approximately $23.4 million.

Keep reading for highlights from the August 2020 Forrester TEI study, then download the report to read about the robust ROI Cohesity can deliver for your organization.

Challenges Driving Enterprises to Reimagine Data Management

Legacy data management point products simply aren’t making the grade anymore. As organizations accelerate their shift to remote and automated operations, they are concurrently moving increasing amounts of data to the cloud. Yet most existing on-premises solutions were designed before cloud.

So how can organizations most effectively and efficiently manage their data which, as the Forrester Analytics Business Technographics® Data and Analytics Survey reveals, is becoming increasingly important and relevant to the business? According to the results of the Technographics survey, IT decision-makers are dedicating an impressive 35.7% of their IT budgets to data, data management, and analytics in 2020.

Here’s what organizations are trying to do with those investments:

• Break free from expensive and outdated legacy on-premises backup solutions — Everyone interviewed for the Forrester TEI study said, before Cohesity, they were paying large sums for on-premises hardware, software licensing, and maintenance.
• Eliminate siloed data streams — As a direct result of having multiple data centers, physical servers, and network-attached storage (NAS), enterprises have to manage multiple, isolated data streams.
• Get better support from data management vendors — Forrester TEI survey respondents complained that when their legacy backup systems would go down or experienced problems, they would have to wait days to get help from their vendors. Plus, they found out that vendors were releasing software updates that contained bugs, creating security risks for their companies.

The Forrester TEI Study Numbers Show Cohesity Is a Valuable Investment

For the TEI survey, Forrester interviewed four existing Cohesity customers regarding the benefits they have realized post deployment. For the purposes of the study, Forrester aggregated the experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization.

Reduced Overall Costs

Respondents told Forrester that their organizations previously spent upwards of $3,000 per front-end terabyte (TB) for backup and storage with their legacy backup products. To possess enough storage for data so that they could then perform deduplication, organizations were also forced to overprovision more software licenses and storage capacity than ultimately needed.  

Not only did Cohesity offer more affordable pricing per TB, it only charged based on the amount of back-end TB needed post deduplication and compression. This alone saved the enterprises millions of dollars, and allowed them to achieve a 66% reduction of total backup and data management costs.

Eliminated the Need for Planned Downtime

Because of Cohesity’s ability to perform non-disruptive upgrades, the organizations that Forrester interviewed didn’t have to schedule downtime to solve mass data fragmentation. This both saved operational costs and improved the experience for IT professionals, who no longer had to interrupt their days to spend hours on preventative maintenance work.

Reduced Unplanned System Downtime

Restoring systems from unscheduled downtime events previously took several hours of time with legacy backup products. Since adopting Cohesity for modern data management, respondent organizations cut unplanned downtime to minutes while reducing the risk of lost production time.

Saved Significant CapEx

Because Cohesity is a software-defined solution, enterprises saved the money they would otherwise spend on proprietary hardware, maintenance, and off-site storage for tapes. This resulted in an average of more than $200,000 of capital expenditure (CapEx) savings per organization.

Final Assessment

The Forrester TEI customer interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization using Cohesity would experience benefits of more than $23.4 million over three years. When compared to the costs of $9.3 million, it added up to a net present value (NPV) of more than $14 million and an ROI of 150%.

Report Includes Non-Quantifiable Benefits, Too

There were also non-quantifiable benefits to deploying Cohesity for data management, according to those interviewed.

• Reduced security risk — Organizations reported reduced security risks because of Cohesity’s integrated cybersecurity capabilities — machine learning-driven ransomware detection, virus scanning, and immutable file system.
• Superior team support — Respondents said the Cohesity team provides superior support. Interviewees cited Cohesity’s availability to quickly answer questions and provide technical support as a welcome change from their experiences with other vendors.
• Improved production testing (aka Agile Dev/Test) ­— Enterprises were able to improve their production testing. With Cohesity, enterprises could create temporary, zero-cost snapshots of their organization’s production data and use it for testing purposes.

Learn More

Read the full Forrester TEI report here.