Even in the seemingly established services umbrella, there’s room for new concepts and products as computing pushes further into the era of digital transformation. The novel data management as a service is showing promise for enterprise businesses looking to better integrate and secure their data for today’s hybrid cloud environments.

“The key to this DMaaS solution that Cohesity is building on top of AWS is to provide one platform and one user interface,” said Sabina Joseph (pictured right), general manager of the Americas technology partners at Amazon Web Services Inc.

Having one platform makes data more manageable and cost-efficient.

“We all realize that customers do many different things with their data — they do disaster recovery, file services, development testing, etc. The value-added services [the solution provides] are around analytics, compliance, machine learning, and so on,” Joseph pointed out.

Joseph and Chris Wiborg (pictured left), vice president of product marketing at Cohesity Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the Cohesity and AWS collaboration, the DMaaS problem-solving and benefits, and Cohesity’s backup and recovery software DataProtect. (*Disclosure below.)

Sharing a vision

Cohesity and AWS’ strategic collaboration has led to a new kind of service. DMaaS came from the same vision both companies have been sharing for some time.

“What we believe in is the next chapter in data management. So, how can we make it simple for organizations to protect and manage their data, but also get more value out of it?” Wiborg said.

Both companies’ common customers, interests and sense of purpose gave them a shared vision. “There was a lot of alignment both in terms of culture and working backward from customers,” Joseph said. 

Overall, both companies want to help their customers lower costs, be more flexible, adapt, innovate faster and maximize the utilization of their data.

“When we started to talk to each other, we understood that these were some of the things that we wanted to not just address, but also provide an opportunity for customers. That is why we collaborated in this unique way to bring forward the data management as a service solution for our customers,” Joseph stated.

Giving value to dark data

“What Cohesity is solving as a company is called mass data fragmentation,” Wiborg pointed out.

Chunks of data are being generated every single second in every corner of the world. And it is highly probable that these pieces of data are being stored multiple times across different data silos.

“We have data stored in many different locations: on-premises, cloud, edge, etc. Typically, in many different pieces of infrastructure, so a lot of silos going on there,” Wiborg stated.

The result of this mass data fragmentation is duplicates stored across complex distributed and isolated silos. With data fragmentation, there is minimal visibility into what this data is, what is it doing, and even where it is.

“It is really hard to get your hands around entirely on what you have, and also make sure it is protected, and plus there are some compliance implications to that,” Wiborg said.

So how can customers get better transparency and more value out of that dark data?

Let somebody else run the show

Cohesity is working hard on providing an alternate data consumption option “for those that want to make that shift from operating expenses to capital expenses,” Wiborg stated. Instead of running their own data center, which requires tremendous initial and recurrent capital expenses, users can let somebody else do the management.

With this, Cohesity is bringing its own cards to the table along with backup with the advanced AWS services powerhouse. “Data management in our sense is not just about backup, or disaster recovery, files and objects, test data management, or more. But also about leveraging the value and the power on some of the advanced AWS services,” Wiborg said.

Cohesity is laying out the options and giving its customers the power of choice. “You can do cloud-only, on-prem only, or you can do both. And we expect a lot of customers leaning into the third bucket, and that is the hybrid scenario,” Wiborg concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE