Cohesity Unveils RecoveryAgent: A New Era of AI-Driven Cyber Resilience Post-Veritas Acquisition

In a landscape where cyber threats escalate daily, demanding ever-more sophisticated defenses, Cohesity has just dropped a game-changer. It’s called RecoveryAgent, and frankly, it’s their first big swing since completing the monumental acquisition of Veritas’ enterprise data protection business. This isn’t just another tool; it’s an AI-driven cyber orchestration powerhouse designed to automate the entire lifecycle of cyber recovery – from preparation and rigorous testing to ensuring compliance and orchestrating rapid response. For anyone already leveraging NetBackup or DataProtect, this means a significantly faster return to normalcy after a cyber incident, dramatically fortifying overall data security and management capabilities. You know how stressful those moments can be, right? This aims to make them, well, less so.

Think about it: the digital world moves at warp speed, and so do the threats. Ransomware attacks aren’t just an IT problem anymore; they’re boardroom nightmares, capable of grinding entire businesses to a halt. The pressure to recover swiftly, impeccably, and demonstrably is immense. RecoveryAgent steps into this breach, offering a lifeline that promises not just recovery, but resilience.

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The Strategic Imperative: Genesis of RecoveryAgent and the Veritas Synergy

The completion of Cohesity’s acquisition of Veritas’ enterprise data protection business in December 2024 wasn’t just a corporate transaction; it marked a pivotal, transformative moment in the data protection and security landscape. It was a strategic masterstroke, really, designed to address the escalating cyber threats that every organization, regardless of size, faces today. Before this, Cohesity had built a strong reputation for its next-gen data management platform, focusing on simplicity, scale, and software-defined solutions. Veritas, on the other hand, brought a rich legacy of robust, enterprise-grade data protection, particularly with its flagship NetBackup product, a staple in countless large enterprises for decades. Marrying these two titans wasn’t just about market share; it was about creating a unified, formidable front against an increasingly sophisticated adversary.

This strategic move wasn’t just about bolstering their technical capabilities, though those gains are profound. It also vastly expanded Cohesity’s market reach, now encompassing an astounding 12,000-plus customers globally. This includes an impressive 85% of the Fortune 100 and a staggering 70% of the Global 500. Just imagine the sheer volume of critical data now under the umbrella of this combined entity. This expanded footprint isn’t merely a number; it represents an unparalleled opportunity to influence data security best practices across industries, leveraging a massive install base to drive adoption of cutting-edge solutions.

Frankly, the integration wasn’t without its complexities; merging two large, established companies never is. But the vision was clear: to leverage Veritas’ deep enterprise penetration and mature data protection technologies, particularly NetBackup, and fuse them with Cohesity’s modern, AI-powered platform and agile development ethos. RecoveryAgent, in many ways, represents the very first, tangible fruit of this ambitious integration. It’s a clear signal that Cohesity isn’t just absorbing Veritas; it’s innovating upon its bedrock, taking proven technologies and injecting them with next-generation intelligence. It’s a compelling narrative, isn’t it? One of evolution and strategic foresight.

Unpacking the Power: Features and Benefits of RecoveryAgent

RecoveryAgent isn’t just a fancy name; it’s an incredibly thoughtful solution engineered to tackle some of the most pressing challenges in cyber recovery head-on. By leveraging advanced artificial intelligence and automation, it transforms what was often a chaotic, manual, and nerve-wracking process into something predictable, repeatable, and, critically, faster. Let’s dig into what this truly means for your organization.

Automated Cyber Recovery Preparation

Preparation is often half the battle in any crisis. In cyber recovery, it’s probably 90% of it. Before RecoveryAgent, many organizations struggled with creating and maintaining accurate recovery runbooks. These are often static documents, outdated the moment a system changes, or worse, residing only in someone’s head. RecoveryAgent changes that entirely. It automatically maps application dependencies, identifies critical data assets, and helps establish immutable recovery baselines. It’s like having a digital strategist constantly updating your battle plan, ensuring that when the worst happens, you’re not scrambling to figure out what goes where. This proactive posture fundamentally shifts an organization from a reactive stance to one of perpetual readiness.

Continuous, Automated Recovery Testing

Here’s a truth bomb for you: if you’re not regularly testing your recovery capabilities, you don’t have recovery capabilities; you have hope. And hope isn’t a strategy in cybersecurity. Manual recovery drills are notoriously disruptive, time-consuming, and resource-intensive, often leading organizations to test only sporadically, if at all. RecoveryAgent obliterates these barriers. It enables continuous, automated recovery testing, allowing organizations to validate their recovery procedures without impacting production environments.

Imagine running daily ransomware simulations in isolated, clean room environments, ensuring your recovery points are viable, your applications can be restored, and your team knows the drill. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario anymore. RecoveryAgent facilitates the automated provisioning of these clean rooms, orchestrating the recovery of data into them for validation, and even scanning restored data for lingering malware. It means you’re not just saying you can recover; you’re proving it, consistently. This constant validation significantly reduces your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), which are, after all, the true measures of your resilience.

Streamlined Compliance Automation

Regulatory scrutiny around data protection and cyber resilience has never been more intense. Think GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) in Europe, and NIS2. Proving compliance isn’t just about ticking boxes; it’s about demonstrating due diligence and operational resilience. RecoveryAgent helps automate the generation of auditable reports on recovery readiness and testing outcomes. This means less manual effort for your compliance teams and more reliable, verifiable evidence for auditors. You’re not just compliant; you can show you’re compliant, with comprehensive, automated audit trails. That’s a huge burden lifted, particularly for organizations operating in highly regulated sectors.

Orchestrated Incident Response

When a cyber incident hits, every second counts. Panic, disjointed efforts, and slow decision-making can amplify damage. RecoveryAgent integrates seamlessly into broader security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms, enabling automated incident playbooks. This means that upon detection of a threat, predefined recovery sequences can be triggered automatically, isolating compromised systems, initiating data restoration, and even notifying relevant stakeholders. It shifts the response from a frantic, ad-hoc scramble to a coordinated, automated ballet. It’s about empowering your incident response teams with tools that cut through the noise, allowing them to focus on remediation and strategic decision-making rather than manual execution. Imagine the chaos averted; imagine the operational continuity preserved.

Enhanced Resilience and Security Posture

Beyond simply recovering data, RecoveryAgent aims to enhance an organization’s overall resilience. By making recovery preparation and testing systematic, it helps identify vulnerabilities in the recovery process itself before they become critical failures. The inclusion of malware scanning capabilities during the recovery validation process ensures that organizations aren’t just restoring data, but restoring clean data, preventing reinfection. It’s a crucial layer of defense, really. This comprehensive, proactive approach not only reduces the mean time to recovery but also cultivates a culture of continuous improvement in an organization’s security posture. You’re not just reacting; you’re building stronger, more robust defenses every single day.

A Boon for Partners and a Lifeline for Customers

This isn’t just good news for Cohesity; it’s fantastic news for their extensive partner ecosystem and, critically, for their customers. The ripple effects of RecoveryAgent are profound, creating new opportunities and solving old problems in elegant ways.

Empowering the Partner Ecosystem

For Cohesity’s vast network of partners – the managed service providers, system integrators, and value-added resellers – RecoveryAgent isn’t just another product to sell. It’s a foundational platform upon which to build innovative, high-value services. Partners can now design and implement custom workflows that integrate seamlessly into their clients’ existing security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) initiatives. Want to develop a highly specialized recovery workflow for a financial services client dealing with unique regulatory demands? You absolutely can. Or perhaps a granular testing protocol for a healthcare provider, ensuring HIPAA compliance at every step? It’s all possible.

For instance, partners can now create highly sophisticated testing workflows that aren’t just isolated drills but integral components of larger security tabletop exercises. Imagine offering a service where you can demonstrably prove a client’s recovery capabilities, not just theoretically, but with actual, automated validation. This transforms the conversation from ‘can we recover?’ to ‘we’ve already proven we can, repeatedly.’ Furthermore, partners can develop services around automating the recovery of data into pristine, isolated clean room environments. This empowers incident responders with a secure sandbox to investigate and remediate threats without risking further compromise to production systems. This capability alone can drastically cut down investigation times and ensure a safer return to operations.

As Mark Conley, Cohesity’s Vice President of Americas Channel Sales, so aptly put it, ‘It allows partners to build custom workflows that can integrate into larger security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) initiatives.’ He also emphasized that RecoveryAgent ‘enables partners to create services that help customers prove compliance and readiness through automated recovery testing and malware scanning, thereby positioning integrators as trusted partners.’ This isn’t just about selling software; it’s about becoming an indispensable advisor, a true partner in navigating the complex waters of cyber resilience. Think about the recurring revenue opportunities here, the deeper client relationships, and the enhanced value proposition. It’s a win-win, don’t you think?

Tangible Benefits for Customers

For the end customers, RecoveryAgent addresses a litany of pain points that have plagued IT and security teams for years. The sheer dread of a cyberattack is palpable for many IT leaders, compounded by the uncertainty of recovery. RecoveryAgent offers a clear pathway to mitigating that fear.

Eliminating Manual Drudgery: Gone are the days of manual, error-prone recovery runbooks and disruptive, infrequent testing. The automation frees up invaluable IT resources, allowing teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than reactive firefighting or tedious validation. This could translate into significant operational cost savings in the long run.

Unwavering Confidence in Recovery: How many times have you heard stories of organizations being held hostage by ransomware, not because they didn’t have backups, but because they couldn’t reliably restore them? RecoveryAgent provides that crucial assurance. With automated, continuous testing, organizations gain an unprecedented level of confidence in their ability to recover swiftly and completely.

Regulatory Peace of Mind: For businesses operating under stringent regulations, the ability to automatically generate compliance reports and prove recovery readiness is invaluable. It transforms compliance from a daunting annual audit into a continuous, verifiable process.

Faster, Smarter Response: In the heat of an incident, every second counts. RecoveryAgent’s orchestration capabilities mean quicker containment, faster recovery, and a more organized response. This directly translates into reduced downtime, minimized business disruption, and potentially, millions saved in avoided losses.

Empowering the Teams: This isn’t just about technology; it’s about empowering your people. Security and operations teams often carry an immense burden. Giving them a tool that simplifies complex processes, automates repetitive tasks, and provides clear, actionable insights fundamentally improves their effectiveness and, importantly, their morale. It’s like giving a surgeon a laser scalpel instead of an butter knife. Which one do you think they’d prefer?

The Broader Landscape and Cohesity’s Vision Ahead

The introduction of RecoveryAgent isn’t an isolated event; it’s a significant marker in Cohesity’s journey to redefine data security and management in the face of an ever-evolving threat landscape. Ransomware continues to be a primary concern, but we’re also seeing the rise of more sophisticated supply chain attacks, nation-state sponsored activity, and even AI-powered malware. Traditional perimeter defenses simply aren’t enough anymore. Data needs to be protected, resilient, and recoverable, no matter where it resides or what onslaught it faces.

Cohesity’s broader vision, especially now with the Veritas integration, is about delivering a truly comprehensive, AI-powered data security and management platform. RecoveryAgent is just the beginning. We can anticipate further innovation that leverages the combined intellectual property and engineering prowess of both entities. Think about deeper integration across the entire data lifecycle – from primary storage to backup, disaster recovery, and archiving – all managed from a single, intuitive platform.

The future, frankly, will demand not just data protection, but data resilience. It’s about ensuring business continuity, trust, and integrity even when under siege. The role of AI, as showcased in RecoveryAgent, will only grow, moving beyond simple automation to predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and self-healing capabilities within the data fabric itself. This isn’t just about making backups; it’s about making businesses bulletproof.

This release underscores Cohesity’s commitment to innovation and their understanding that data is the lifeblood of modern business. With RecoveryAgent, they’re not just offering a product; they’re offering peace of mind, a crucial commodity in today’s unpredictable digital world. It’s a smart play, a necessary evolution, and one that I think many organizations will quickly see the immense value in.

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References

• Cohesity Debuts First New Service with Veritas (channelfutures.com)
• Cohesity and Veritas’ Data Protection Business to Combine, Forming a New Leader in AI-Powered Data Security and Management (cohesity.com)
• Cohesity completes acquisition of Veritas (techtarget.com)