Cohesity Backup as a Service Adds Microsoft 365 Support at a Time When Many Organizations Struggle To Successfully Recover Microsoft 365 Data

At a time when more organizations are adopting Microsoft 365 than ever before, Cohesity announced new protection capabilities — via its DataProtect delivered as a Service offering — for Microsoft Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Teams. This Backup as a Service (BaaS) offering provides data protection and retention that goes well beyond the default 30-day native backup capabilities included with a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Cohesity’s BaaS offering gives organizations even more choice in how they can back up and recover Microsoft 365 application data. With Cohesity, customers can choose to:

• Take advantage of this new BaaS offering where the infrastructure is managed by Cohesity, allowing IT teams to spend more time on other business critical tasks.
• Rely on a traditional on-premises Cohesity cluster to back up Microsoft 365.
• Protect their data with a Cohesity cluster running on other clouds.
• Utilize a combination of these options in a hybrid model.

Research suggests there is a critical need for this type of simplicity and choice when backing up and recovering Microsoft 365 data. Recent ESG research queried IT professionals on Microsoft 365 and found that 78 percent of respondents reported using Microsoft 365. Of those respondents:

• 74 percent stated they rely on native Microsoft 365 services for backup.
• 81 percent reported having to recover Microsoft 365 data.
• Only 15 percent were able to recover 100 percent of that data.

This data also pinpoints why it is essential that customers utilizing Microsoft 365 applications consider third-party options to help ensure data can easily be backed up and recovered. While cloud providers commit to offering service availability, it is customers’ responsibility to make sure their data is appropriately protected.

“Our research shows there is a growing need for robust data backup and protection for SaaS data,” said Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst, ESG Research. “The native, default backup features provided by cloud vendors are typically not sufficient, especially given the increased threat to data security, data deletion risks, and rapidly evolving compliance requirements. We believe giving customers an ‘as a Service’ option to backup and recover this data makes complete sense, as it gives organizations more flexibility, improves operational efficiency of IT teams, and helps ensure data is protected.”

“Simplicity and flexibility are why we chose Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a Service to protect our Microsoft 365 data,” said John Sroka, CIO, Duane Morris LLP. “We use Cohesity to back up our on-premises databases and extending protection to Microsoft 365 through the DataProtect service is simple and easy. With Cohesity we have a single backup solution that covers hybrid and multicloud workloads.”

“Cohesity’s support for Microsoft 365 is phenomenal. We currently backup our Microsoft 365 data to our on-premises Cohesity cluster, the addition of a Backup as a Service option that protects cloud-to-cloud gives us the hybrid flexibility we need to store Microsoft 365 backups and offload infrastructure management,” said Ken Watt, senior infrastructure specialist, Ridgeback Resources. “With Cohesity’s constant innovation, we are getting a solution that’s simple yet more robust with each update.”

Protection for Amazon EC2 Cloud Compute and Amazon RDS Cloud Databases

In addition to protecting Microsoft 365, Cohesity’s BaaS offering also includes support for Amazon EC2 Virtual Instances and Compute Infrastructure, and Amazon RDS Cloud Databases.

Building on Cohesity’s strategic collaboration with AWS, SaaS backup support for these workloads helps to protect both homegrown cloud-native applications and refactored legacy applications built on these cloud compute and database services. Customers get unified protection across multiple AWS accounts and services, providing better visibility on cloud data utilization while making it easier to meet their enterprise-grade service level agreements.

The Cohesity Difference: Simplifying Data Management Through a Single, Unified Experience

Customers want flexibility to manage data their way. Some want Cohesity to operate underlying infrastructure for them via an “as a service” offering while others want to manage their own environments directly — or a combination of both in true hybrid fashion. The Cohesity Helios multicloud data platform makes that easier than ever.

With Helios, customers can uniquely manage everything from a single user interface. This reduces complexity, can lower costs, and helps eliminate mass data fragmentation. And as customers wish to expand utilization to file and object services, disaster recovery and more, they can use the same platform with the same simple interface whether consuming from the cloud or deploying into their own self-managed environments.

“Gone are the days of needing to be an expert at operating 10 different tools and user interfaces while trying to manage tedious procurement processes and keep up with constant hardware and software upgrades just to attempt to manage your data,” said Matt Waxman, vice president of product management, Cohesity. “With Cohesity, that’s all a thing of the past. It’s one user interface and one unified experience regardless of the model you choose. That’s modern data management.”

“Offering DataProtect as a Service is a welcome and exciting evolution in data management to help our clients better meet the demands of their hybrid-cloud and multicloud challenges,” said David Olzak, senior vice president, Stratascale. “With more and more of our clients using SaaS applications, they are realizing how important it is to have enterprise-class data protection flexibility with an attractive consumption model; this is a welcome addition to our Cloud Ascension approach.”

DataProtect delivered as a Service is the first offering from Cohesity’s comprehensive Data Management as a Service portfolio. Additional service offerings will be made available in the coming months.