On the zig-zag route to multicloud’s ultimate destination, it helps to have a Swiss Army knife on hand — a tool that can core an apple as easily as it can pop the lid off a bottle of Martinelli’s. For businesses migrating data, that tool would be data protection that spans on-premises and cloud environments and allows them to start with small, scalable use cases.

“Customers are always looking to also solve their immediate pain point while looking into the future,” said Sai Mukundan (pictured), product management at Cohesity Inc.

Mukundan spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed Cohesity’s partnership with Microsoft and its new announcements. (* Disclosure below.)

Cohesity and Azure hang in each other’s digs

Cohesity’s entry point for many of its customers included both immediate problem solving and long-term efficiency. “Their immediate pain point was around, ‘how do I make my backup and data-protection systems, first of all, simple, efficient and less [fragmented]? And while I’m doing that, how can I then potentially invest in a platform that is capable of doing more?'” Mukundan said.

Cohesity is offering more by its expanding hybrid-cloud footprint with a Microsoft Corp. Azure partnership. A number of announcements allow Microsoft customers to move data between on-prem environments and cloud Azure deployments with Cohesity’s platform.

For starters, Cohesity will allow Microsoft Office 365 users to backup and recover data to the Cohesity platform.

A second announcement is around Azure Data Box. Cohesity will integrate seamlessly with it to migrate data from on-prem to the Azure cloud. “The use case is really around when customers are looking at Cohesity, there is backup and recovery that they can do from on-premise, but Azure and Azure block storage in particular becomes a seamless extension for long-term retention,” Mukundan stated

The third new feature allows hybrid customers to fail their backup data over to Azure, then bring it back on-prem.

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 this segment. Cohesity and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE