Cohesity Collaborates with AWS SaaS Factory and AWS Marketplace to Accelerate Launch of Data Management as a Service

By using the AWS SaaS Factory Program, Cohesity quickly brought to market an industry-first, fully managed solution for Data Management as a Service, built on AWS and offering customers radically simplified data backup, security, governance, and analytics. Previously, Cohesity built its solutions for large-scale customer-managed infrastructure and deployments but was not optimized for turnkey software as a service (SaaS). As an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, Cohesity could collaborate with AWS experts to build a high-quality SaaS product that expanded the company’s addressable market and increased its resiliency at half the time to market.

The amount of data generated by enterprises is growing exponentially. Much of this data sits in fragmented infrastructure silos that hamper information technology (IT) teams from protecting, analyzing, and cost-effectively managing it. Companies need a solution that eliminates data infrastructure silos and radically simplifies data management for a wide spectrum of use cases. However, most offerings available today do not provide a frictionless and unified customer experience. Rather than solving data management problems, they often increase management overhead while worsening mass data fragmentation. Furthermore, growing cloud adoption has created strong customer demand for cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions with flexible, consumption-based pricing options tailored to different customer segments.

Seeing an opportunity in the market for a secure, scalable, integrated cloud-based data management service, Cohesity—an Advanced Technology Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network—collaborated with AWS SaaS Factory and AWS Marketplace to develop an industry-first solution for Data Management as a Service (DMaaS). Managed by Cohesity and hosted on AWS, the DMaaS solution enables efficient data consolidation, removes complexity to unlock agility, and extends the usability and use cases of enterprise data to make it more productive. The product builds on Cohesity’s existing enterprise-grade data management offerings to give customers greater choice on how they manage their data. “When this product releases in December 2020, Cohesity will be the only data management company on the market to offer the choice of self-managed deployments, Cohesity-managed DMaaS, and any combination in between, giving users both on-premises and cloud options,” says Vikram Kanodia, Senior Director of Strategy and Business Development at Cohesity.

Founded in 2013 with a mission to radically simplify data management, Californiabased Cohesity develops IT software enabling organizations to manage, back up, and repurpose data. Previously, the company offered data management solutions for customers to self-manage on premises or in the cloud. However, in order to provide customers with maximum value through economies of scale, the ability to scale seamlessly, and flexible deployment options, Cohesity was looking to enhance its existing data platform’s capabilities for SaaS and enhance the user experience without sacrificing the level of enterprise-grade features and resiliency that Cohesity has always provided its customers. Additionally, Cohesity was looking to optimize its product and business model to align with SaaS best practices, such as product-led growth, flexible consumption-based pricing, and a revised yet minimally disruptive sales and channel strategy and business processes.

Recognizing early on that developing a successful SaaS model would require a comprehensive transformation of its business, products, and technology, Cohesity used its AWS Partner benefits to engage AWS SaaS Factory, as well as AWS Marketplace experts, to guide it on the development and launch of a product that would enable customers to manage their enterprise data in the same seamless and unified way wherever they wanted to manage it—on premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid model.

AWS’s rich portfolio of services would enable Cohesity to build its microservicesbased architecture and storage infrastructure quickly. As a fast-paced company that prizes agility, rapid and iterative delivery of value to customers, and continuous innovation to land pathbreaking and highly differentiated products, Cohesity found the AWS team to be a perfect fit culturally. As a result, Cohesity chose to collaborate closely with AWS to build its DMaaS offering exclusively on AWS. Additionally, the company chose to use its existing SaaS solution, Cohesity Helios—which has enterprise-grade manageability—to manage on-premises, cloud, and hybrid workloads in a unified manner, using AWS’s breadth of services and AWS expert advisory to migrate the solution to AWS from another cloud platform.

Through early and deep collaboration with experts from AWS, Cohesity’s leadership and cross-functional teams—including engineering, product, marketing, sales, finance, and operations teams—came together to enable a holistic business and product transformation and to enhance the company’s architecture for performance, reliability, security, and cost on AWS. “It was really a collaboration where all teams knew they were in it together,” says Kiran Bondalapati, Senior Director of Engineering at Cohesity. “The AWS team really put effort into bringing everyone aboard the right way of thinking about and approaching this product’s development and design architecture, as well as how to get it up and running on AWS.”

Cohesity built the DMaaS solution using a two-part multitenanted architecture with role-based access control support for customers. The first part is a control plane, which Cohesity built on Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) to host its microservices. Amazon EKS is a fully managed Kubernetes service that enables companies to run their most sensitive and mission-critical applications with security, reliability, and scalability. The control plane runs management services such as provisioning, capacity management, automatic scaling and healing, a data-processing pipeline, a data lake, and a data warehouse. And the second part is a storage-centric data plane that manages data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon S3 Glacier, as well as using Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES), to enable telemetry and analytics of system data. Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance, while Amazon S3 Glacier is a secure, durable, and low-cost Amazon S3 cloud storage class for data archiving and longterm backup. Amazon ES is a fully managed, highly scalable, highly secure, and cost-efficient implementation of Elasticsearch.

As with many successful SaaS providers, it was imperative for the success of DMaaS to build SaaS-focused go-to-market motions—using AWS Marketplace and programs such as ISV Accelerate Initiative—to align Cohesity with the vast network of AWS customers and channel partners to ensure maximum customer reach and shortened sales cycles, as well as to scale Cohesity’s engagement with the AWS field sales teams for co-sell opportunities. Cohesity collaborated with experts from AWS SaaS Factory, AWS Marketplace, and the storage segment to define and implement market expansion and customer adoption strategies to expand its total addressable market significantly; detailed monetization, packaging, and consumption management strategies to offer customers maximum flexibility and value for the price paid; highly optimized trials and a frictionless onboarding experience for customers signing up; and a sales and channel strategy to enable a collaborative sales model. Cohesity used the full portfolio of AWS Marketplace offerings, including consulting partner private offers (CPPOs) as its preferred and predominant sales model, contracts with consumption-based pricing options, the full array of rich billing features for revenue reporting and reconciliation, and backend system integrations to streamline complete operations and maintain data consistency.

Being an AWS Advanced Technology Partner has produced notable benefits for Cohesity. Firstly, the company applied the extensive knowledge of AWS experts to build a high-quality SaaS offering that is truly optimized for AWS. Secondly, the product enables Cohesity to meet the needs of customers who until now couldn’t use a SaaS offering to support their use cases. Thirdly, the product has expanded Cohesity’s addressable market by giving smaller companies access to top-tier data management solutions through a fully integrated cloud-based SaaS product. Fourthly, the collaboration has resulted in greater agility for Cohesity, which built the product in such a way that it can add new use cases with minimal change in backend architecture. And finally, the collaboration offered Cohesity a significant advantage in time to market and staff productivity: “Collaborating with AWS SaaS Factory has reduced our time to market by half and by extension has optimized time for engineers by 50 percent,” explains Kanodia. “What would have taken over 12 months to build and launch took Cohesity less than 6 months, due to fast, continuous engagement from AWS in aligning all stakeholders in the development process.”

Not only has Cohesity developed a pathbreaking solution to radically simplify data management for all use cases and deployment strategies, but it is also bringing to market an exceptionally well-architected SaaS offering that meets the highest standards of security, reliability, scalability, and performance. General availability for this DMaaS solution is slated for December 2020. And even then, the work will continue. “We think we have a very good product that meets current market needs. But our road map calls for continual product optimization—we will continue to build on this by offering customers additional use cases. So in our view, we are just starting our journey toward the most comprehensive DMaaS solution in the market,” Kanodia says.