The conversation that companies have around data management, data backup, and data insurance isn’t going away — but the kinds of questions and solutions they are wrestling with are changing. So what’s driving businesses now? And why are so many customers reassessing their backup approach and their overall data?

Terry Ramos (pictured), vice president of alliances at Cohesity Inc., talks to organizations all the time about their data questions and concerns. “The biggest thing we hear always is the data silos,” Ramos said. “It’s really breaking down those silos, getting rid of the old legacy silos where you can’t use the data how you want to, where you can’t run analytics across the data. That is the number one talk track that customers tell us.”

Ramos spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in San Diego, California. They discussed data management and data protection (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

New ways to protect and manage data

A few years ago, everybody thought of data protection as just protecting one’s data in straightforward backup and recovery, according to Ramos. But businesses want cutting-edge solutions more than ever before, and protecting siloed data just can’t offer them what they want. Data protecting one set of systems and the data protecting the next … and then data protecting the next — there is no actual management across silos and other data sources.

“What we’ve done is really looked at it as … you should be able to use your data however you want to,” Ramos stated, going on to explain Cohesity’s data management solutions. “We may do data protection on the platform, but then we do test dev, we do file shares, we do things like that — and we make it this cohesive data management platform where customers get various use cases, but then they can look at their entire dataset. And that is really the key.”

A company shouldn’t keep their data in one location anymore, according to Ramos. Multicloud is the future, and companies are continuing forward with these multi-faceted solutions with both on-prem and public cloud solutions, he explained.

Another demand that businesses want is data protection on software as a service, and Ramos is already seeing use cases like this popping up. For example, backing up applications like Office 365 can actually be extremely important.

“They have some backup services, but even if they do, it’s not tying into your overall data management solution,” Ramos said. “And so backing up O365 gives you access to all that data as well — so you can do algorithms on it, analytics, all those things once it’s part of the bigger platform.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Cohesity Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cohesity nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE