Cohesity Expands Threat Defense Architecture with Security Advisor

Cohesity is extending its ability discover vulnerabilities in backups and archives with the release of its new Security Advisor tool. The data protection provider this week released the new tool, which scans and scores global Cohesity Helios environments.

Helios is a unified platform that provides SaaS-based data management services including backup, business continuity, analytics, development and test environments. The new Security Advisor, now available through the Helios Dashboard, scans the entire environment and provides a score.

The tool assesses an organization’s security posture with a score based on how the infrastructure maps against Cohesity’s best practices. In the dashboard, it provides a central view of an organization’s entire set of security settings across its Cohesity clusters.

Administrators can drill down into specific regions and clusters. Security Advisor also provides recommendations on how to mitigate risks, particularly those that could subject them to ransom demands. For example, it will point to how to remediate misconfigured settings. Security Advisor renders the suggestions as a link, directed to documentation.

“We think it’s going eliminate lots of time in searching and guessing and save administrators potentially hours on what to do or what to fix,” said Lance Boley, a senior product marketing manager at Cohesity. “Overall, I think this is going to be a great add to our security portfolio, especially around protecting the data protection environment, the configuration, the operations kind of side of things.”

Building on CyberScan

Boley said Security Advisor is an internally created solution that builds on the CyberScan tool. CyberScale is a Cohesity-branded offering provided by Tenable that scans backup snapshots for known vulnerabilities.

CyberScan, which can run manually on demand or on an automated basis, is designed to discover gaps in production environments. Cohesity’s new Security Advisor aims to provide more detailed information and offer solutions to risks that it discovers.

Security Advisor is the latest addition to Cohesity’s Threat Defense architecture. Like most data protection providers, Cohesity has extended its focus on security, ransomware protection and risk management. In October, the company introduced Cohesity DataGoven, a managed security and governance service designed to detect potential risks.

Using AI and machine learning models, DataGovern detects anomalies in access and usage patterns indicative of a potential attack. Its also designed to automate data classification with already defined policies for regulations such as GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA. DataGovern, which integrates with third-party security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms, can use those systems polices to trigger remediations.

Also in the pipeline is Project Fort Knox, which provides isolated copies of backup data stored in a Cohesity-managed vault. Project Fort Knox will pull the latest clean copy of data and recover to any on-premises or cloud instance.