Data management software company Cohesity Inc. said today it’s creating a new cloud-based data management-as-a-service offering in partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc.

The new offering is aimed at enterprises and midsized businesses that want an easier way to back up, secure, govern and analyze their data. Cohesity said it will manage the DMaaS offering via its Helios platform and host it on AWS.

It said it worked with Amazon for 18 months to create the new offering. Amazon has also made an undisclosed investment in Cohesity, which was most recently valued at $2.5 billion after securing $250 million in funding in April.

Cohesity is betting that its customers will prefer to manage their data on a consumption-based pricing model, without worrying about managing infrastructure. With Cohesity’s traditional data management software offering, customers have to manage the underlying infrastructure themselves.

“A typical [business] customer has all these different vendors in their data centers and in the clouds that they’re using,” Cohesity founder and Chief Executive Mohit Aron told The Wall Street Journal. “They want to simplify.”

Aron told the Journal that enterprise data management operations are often very complex, involving multiple vendors to provide analytics, backup, disaster recovery and storage, and requires a large number of staff.

The new service will enable enterprises to subscribe to various discreet data management products that address multiple use cases, helping them to consolidate vendors and data silos. It will also provide management of both on-premises and cloud environments, policy management, security and ransomware detection through machine learning, and consumption-based pricing.

He said the first product to be made available under the service is Cohesity DataProtect, a backup-as-a-service offering that’s currently in early access.

In addition, customers will be able to access AWS services such as Amazon Macie, which uses machine learning to protect sensitive data, and Amazon SageMaker, which makes it easier for developers and data scientists to build, train and deploy artificial intelligence models.

Sabina Joseph, general manager at AWS Americas for ISV relationships, told CRN that Amazon is eventually planning to offer more services for data managed on Cohesity’s new DBaaS offering, around analytics and data warehousing.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that the number one lesson learned by enterprises in the pandemic economy is that they need to move capital expenditure to tie their IT footprints and costs to business success through both technology and commercial elasticity.

“This has not escaped tkey infrastructure vendors like Cohesity,” Mueller said. “This is a major win for AWS given the load and footprint Cohesity customers will bring along. But on the flip side, customers that have chosen alternative cloud platforms may not be enthusiastic about moving their data to AWS to take advantage of this.”

Cohesity said it’s offering early access to customers starting this month with free trials in the AWS US east and west regions. General availability is expected in December around the time Amazon hosts its annual re:Invent conference.

Image: Cohesity