Cohesity emphasises need for customer minimum viability

Cohesity has underlined the need for partners to focus on data resilience that goes beyond backup and gives businesses the ability to get back on their feet quickly after an attack.

The vendor pulled partners together at an event earlier this week, where it shared its mantra around the “minimum viable company” and the base level required to protect customers.

Harvey Smith, director of channel development for the UK, Ireland and Benelux at Cohesity, said partners need to be able to get users back up and running, providing protection to minimise attacks and delivering solid resilience services.

“The conversation we’re having [is around] the ability to come back to a minimum viable company. It’s really about the ability to be able to come back,” he added. “You can’t just press a big red button and recover from a cyber attack. It is people and process, it is a network of organisations working together to support you.”

Stéphane Arnaudo, senior director of channel sales Europe at Cohesity, added that the focus had to be on getting customers, all of which face the prospect of an attack, through that period as quickly as possible to reduce the impact on trading.

“With a minimum viable company, you have a real opportunity to restart things, to recover, to get things in the right order,” he said.

Smith said one of the key messages it shared with partners was that “recovery does not equal resilience”, so they needed to think beyond the traditional backup approaches.

“A lot of organisations are talking about cyber resilience, but [the idea that] you can just press a big red button and AI [artificial intelligence] will go and do it for you is not true,” he added. “Partners can play a vital part in positioning this and educating, because we understand that the message isn’t always clear that recovery doesn’t equal resilience.”

Smith said the channel was reacting to the changing landscape, with more partners fusing security and storage skills to provide data resilience. “Some partners are set up with datacentre practices and security practices – the blurring of the lines is certainly there now,” he added.

Arnaudo said Cohesity had been through some changes, and it was important to have the channel aligned with the strategy and focused on the opportunities that it sees in the market.

“I shared an equation … that was clearly about alignment, execution, trust and profitability, and I think that we can have a very powerful and strong strategy on our way to help customers in their cyber resilience strategy, but we also want to be sure that we embark our partners here and clearly show them where they can have all that together, more profitably,” he said.

He added that there was a positive mood across its European channel base, and they appreciated the vendor’s commitment to increasing partner profitability.

“We are working with partnerships to be sure that we can clearly bring the broadest solution here. On top of that, we need our partners to be sure that they can position, put in place, and continue to track throughout the process with their customers.