Minimum Viable Company

A Minimum Viable Company (MVC) is the operational capability to restore your most critical services to a trusted state, within defined impact tolerances, ensuring continued financial, strategic, and operational viability.  Your organization needs to be able to do this when critical systems, documentation, and identities are rendered untrustworthy or unavailable. These critical services are typically the ones that underpin safety, regulatory compliance, contractual obligations, and primary revenue generation or mission delivery.  

The Cohesity Data Cloud platform underpins a Minimum Viable Company (MVC) strategy by mapping directly to the Cohesity 5 Steps of Cyber Resilience Framework^©: protect data, identity, apps & agents, ensure recoverability in all scenarios, remediate cyber & AI threats, practice application recovery, and optimize data and AI risk posture.

• Protect data, identity, apps & agents: Cohesity Data Cloud protects the foundation of an MVC—jump bag contents, identity systems, and mission-critical workloads — CRM, ERP, databases, VMs, cloud, SaaS, AI agent infrastructure all with immutable backups stored in a modern data platform.
• Ensure recoverability in all scenarios: Cohesity FortKnox cyber vaulting isolates the jump bag, applications, and data that make up your MVC in an air-gapped, immutable vault for an extra layer of resilience.
• Remediate cyber & AI threats: AI-powered anomaly detection, threat intelligence, YARA rules, and threat hunting identify malware before you restore your MVC-critical workloads.
• Practice application recovery: Prove through clean room rehearsal that the MVC can be recovered to a trusted, working state. Engage Cohesity CERT Cyber Resilience Consulting Services for expert guidance to build and test your MVC capability.
• Optimize your data & AI risk posture: Reassess your critical services and their dependencies to keep your MVC current. 

A traditional disaster recovery (DR) plan restores full IT environments from the most recent backup after natural disasters, hardware failures, or human error. A Minimum Viable Company (MVC) plan is built for ransomware and destructive cyberattacks, where recovering the latest configurations and data can re-introduce vulnerabilities, cause reinfection, and prolong downtime. Instead, an MVC rebuilds the smallest set of critical services the business needs to keep operating, using vaulted install images, known-good configurations, and immutable data, so you can trust what comes back. 

Unlike DR's IT-only failover, an MVC needs IT, security, and business leaders making decisions together, because returning a system to production is a risk decision, not a technical one. It also needs capabilities DR doesn't: cyber vaulting, forensics and clean room validation.

Defining a Minimum Viable Business (MVB) or Minimum Viable Company (MVC) state is critical to cyber resilience because it forces organizations to prioritize the systems, applications, and data that must come back online first after a ransomware attack or destructive cyber incident. Rather than attempting to recover everything at once, the goal is to restore only what is most critical to maintain core operations  -  protecting revenue, customer trust, and regulatory compliance with frameworks like NIST CSF, DORA, and ISO 22301. An MVB/MVC state enables faster recovery time objectives (RTOs), reduces downtime costs, and transforms business continuity planning into a proactive, resilience-first strategy.