The lines between on-premises, cloud and edge computing continue to blur, and digital data has become scattered and muddled across the disparate environments. To handle the newfound complexities of managing big data, businesses need flexible computing infrastructure that can run autonomously, boosted by machine learning and artificial intelligence to unscramble the chaos and access key insights. Looking to meet the challenge is Cohesity Inc, a provider of secondary data protection and productivity solutions.

Sameer Nori (pictured), director of product marketing for Cohesity, met with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed how Cohesity is developing new solutions to help clients simplify secondary data management. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Knight: You lead outbound marketing for Cohesity’s cloud solutions. Can you tell our viewers about what you do and what your day is like?

Nori: My day oscillates and changes between developing value propositions and messaging for our solutions, working with customers to understand their pain points and challenges, being able to translate that into tangible benefits for customers to parley off of, and then really enabling and working with our sales teams closely to help them and arm them with the necessary things they need to go succeed in the market. 

Miniman: What are you seeing and hearing from customers as to how they deal with the portfolio of their applications, and how does Cohesity advise and help with those solutions? 

Nori: I think our sweet spot is using backup as the foundation for what customers can do. Our core hypothesis has always been that back-up should not be just an insurance policy; you can do a whole lot more with it.

So, what we see customers doing is taking their back-ups on-premises, which are often times just idle with alternative solutions, and reusing them in the cloud for test dev purposes, where it makes sense. At the end when you’re done, you can move those things back on-premises and really use it in that context.

So for us, really, I think it’s a combination of assessing the right use case and the right application of the workload, and then helping customers with understanding that and making the shift.

Miniman: Many people think that the coming together of AI and applications is the future. “AI, AI, AI” is one of the main things that Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella talks about. How is that similar with the Cohesity division? 

Nori: We recently announced Helios [software as a service-based secondary data and app management solution] as the global management piece to manage all your secondary apps. We’ve injected machine learning and AI capabilities to help customers, with smart-assistant capability to help them predict when they need more capacity and smart-alerts to tell them what’s happening in their system. And that’s both on-premises and in the cloud. For us, I think that’s where we see specifically AI and ML coming together.

Miniman: We’re also seeing that a lot of the new applications are cloud-native. Is there something different about how the new architectures tie into Cohesity’s solutions? 

Nori: We have actually integrated with the snapshot application programming interface of Microsoft Azure, for instance, and Azure disks. We bring through a combination of what we do on the platform side, and with that integration we’re actually able to bring enterprise class backup capabilities to cloud-native apps.

We are starting to see more demand in terms of more cloud-native backup as it relates to applications that are born in the cloud. I think with us the beauty is that we have a single platform that’s going to work on-premises and in the cloud and not a separate solution that’s just for the cloud versus one that’s for on-premises.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Microsoft Ignite event. (* Disclosure: Cohesity Inc. sponsored coverage of Microsoft Ignite, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE