Know a good way to shush a room full of techies? Ask them how to move data in multicloud within cost and time constraints acceptable for analytics. After a long silence, they might venture some suggestions. A few may opine that backup is the snafu solver du jour, and perhaps its newfound powers could prevail here. 

“It’s difficult [with] today’s ever increasing amounts of data; how do you have customers ship petabytes of data around easily? It’s not scalable for them or operationally cost effective,” said Lynn Lucas (pictured), chief marketing officer of Cohesity Inc.

A single backup platform for all environments means that data need not constantly travel from one to another. This provides a big piece to a workable multicloud paradigm, Lucas explained. 

Lucas spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd., during the recent AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. They discussed how backup might help solve multicloud’s data-mobility quandary. (* Disclosure below.)

Apps run in multicloud; backup data runs in place

Backup providers are tilting en masse toward data management. Among them is Cohesity, whose software business has grown 100% year over year, according to Lucas. Cloud and software-as-a-service delivery are enabling this shift. Backup is suddenly a platform for data governance, analytics, security and compliance. And this all comes at an opportune time, with multicloud begging for some consistent elements.

“We’re talking about letting them gain those insights or protect against those risks in place,” Lucas said.

The Cohesity platform was built from the start with S3 storage from Amazon Web Services Inc. Its distributed file system provides customers zero-cost data clones and copies of data. They can re-use this data in any environment for analytics, development, etc. This access to usable data — not just virtual snapshots — effectively dissolves some logistic obstacles to multicloud operations.

Its file system — which it calls SpanFS — also features in its partnership with AWS. AWS recently validated the Cohesity platform for backup and protection of workloads on AWS Outposts on-prem cloud offering.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent 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