Cohesity, a company specializing in AI-driven data security, has signed a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enhance protection, backup, and large-scale data recovery. Announced from Santa Clara, California, this initiative aims to respond to a landscape where cyberattacks and intensive AI use require a rethink of how corporate data is protected and utilized.
The agreement consolidates the relationship between the two firms and combines three increasingly inseparable elements: global cloud infrastructure, advanced cybersecurity, and generative AI capabilities applied to large volumes of information.
From “keeping backups” to building cyber resilience
For Cohesity and AWS, it is no longer enough to perform periodic backups. The goal is to offer organizations true cyber resilience: the ability to withstand, respond to, and recover quickly from an incident, while also leveraging that data for analysis and AI projects.
“By deepening our collaboration with AWS, we take an important step toward our shared vision of providing cyber resilience to organizations worldwide,” stated Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President of Cohesity. He explained that integrating Cohesity’s AI-based data security capabilities with AWS’s secure and scalable infrastructure will enable clients to protect their data, keep it resilient, and use it to drive business priorities.
On AWS’s side, the message aligns. “Our customers want to do two things with their data: protect it and put it to work,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS. “This collaboration with Cohesity helps them achieve both, leveraging AWS’s global infrastructure and AI technologies to safeguard critical data and fuel AI and analytics initiatives.”
Fast, unified, and cost-effective backups
A key pillar of the agreement focuses on strengthening cloud backup capabilities. Cohesity already supports over 1,000 data sources, offering native integration with key AWS services such as:
- Amazon EC2 for compute workloads.
- Amazon RDS for relational databases.
- Amazon S3 as the industry’s reference object storage.
- Amazon DynamoDB for fully managed NoSQL databases.
Cohesity’s platform applies enterprise-grade deduplication and compression, reducing stored data volume and associated costs, without sacrificing quick recovery times. The idea is that a single solution protects both on-premises environments and cloud-deployed workloads, with unified management.
Practically, this means an organization can centralize data protection—from traditional applications to native cloud services—and recover data swiftly in case of a security incident, operational failure, or human error.
Immutable cyber vaults across 36 AWS regions
An additional key component is the deployment of “immutable cyber vaults” on AWS. These vaults leverage native immutability controls and private network isolation within Amazon’s cloud.
Cohesity will enable companies to deploy these vaults in up to 36 AWS regions worldwide, adding multiple layers of protection:
- Geographical isolation of backup data from production infrastructure.
- Protection against tampering or malicious deletion, through immutability policies.
- Immediate access for recovery, avoiding lengthy restores from external media.
This model is especially beneficial for high-regulation sectors—such as finance, healthcare, education, and public administration—facilitating compliance and strengthening defenses against ransomware attacks aiming to encrypt or destroy both production systems and backups.
A data lake ready for AI: the role of Cohesity Gaia
Beyond protection, the collaboration focuses on transforming backups into a strategic asset for analytics and AI. Cohesity aims to turn backup data from “dormant storage” into a searchable, securely exploitable information source.
To accomplish this, the company developed Cohesity Gaia, a generative AI assistant that leverages protected data and AWS capabilities. Gaia enables organizations to extract insights from petabytes of unstructured data, including traditional file shares and SaaS applications.
The promise is to offer natural language search and query capabilities over historical data, reports, documents, and logs—always under strict governance and security controls—ensuring data use does not compromise compliance or confidentiality.
Real-world cases: from airlines to educational institutions
The announcement of the SCA is complemented by testimonials from clients already working with Cohesity and AWS. For example, Delta Air Lines’s CTO, Narayanan (KK) Krishnakumar, emphasizes that such alliances help place data and AI “at the heart of the customer experience,” boosting resilience and supporting service innovation.
In the education sector, Pearl River Community College highlights the importance of protection and compliance in its strategy. Its IT services director, Kevin Lomax, notes that the Cohesity-AWS combination helps meet security requirements while accelerating infrastructure modernization. The ability to quickly manage and recover data across AWS regions provides “peace of mind and agility” for IT teams.
These examples illustrate the broad scope of the partnership—from large airlines to educational institutions, and sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services—where data is a critical asset and availability is essential.
From defense to business opportunity
Underlying the partnership is a clear market trend: the convergence of cybersecurity, storage, and analytics. Companies can no longer see backups solely as a defensive expense. In an environment of growing attacks, stricter regulation, and AI-driven innovation, the same data can fuel models, enhance processes, and uncover new business opportunities.
This collaboration positions both companies to offer a comprehensive solution: protect, isolate, recover, and exploit data, all on AWS’s global platform with Cohesity’s specialized AI-enabled tools tailored for an AI-driven world.
FAQs about the Cohesity-AWS collaboration
What does the strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) between Cohesity and AWS entail?
The SCA is a framework where Cohesity expands its use of advanced AWS technologies to deliver large-scale backup, recovery, and security solutions. The collaboration combines Cohesity’s AI-powered data protection platform with AWS’s global infrastructure and AI capabilities to enhance cyber resilience and leverage protected data for analytics and AI projects.
How does this alliance improve data protection against ransomware and cyberattacks?
Cohesity enables deploying immutable cyber vaults on AWS, distributed across 36 regions, where backups are isolated from production systems, protected by immutability policies and private networking. This setup makes it harder for attackers to encrypt or delete backups. Integration with services like Amazon S3, EC2, RDS, and DynamoDB allows for rapid recovery of affected workloads and restoring operations quickly.
What benefits does having a “data lake” ready for AI derived from backups offer?
By turning backups into an accessible data lake under secure controls, organizations can extract value from historical and unstructured data without compromising security. With Cohesity Gaia, teams can perform natural language queries, identify patterns, locate relevant documentation, or support AI and analytics initiatives using data already stored for protection purposes.
What types of organizations can benefit from the Cohesity–AWS joint solution?
Any enterprise managing critical data—such as airlines, educational institutions, financial entities, public agencies, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, etc.—particularly those operating in hybrid or multi-cloud environments, with compliance, recovery, and security needs, can benefit from this integrated approach.
Sources:
• Official Cohesity press release about the strategic collaboration with AWS.
• AWS corporate information on cloud data protection and management.