Cohesity has formed the industry's largest alliance of DSPM vendors to reduce customer risks of cloud transformation and data democratisation. 

Cohesity, an expert in AI-powered data security and management, announced it is expanding its Data Security Alliance ecosystem with six leading Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) vendors, including long-standing partner BigID, as well as Cyera, Dig Security, Normalyze, Sentra, and Securiti. 

Cloud adoption continues to increase, but copies of data are often shared between clouds without oversight by IT or security, resulting in the growth of shadow data. Because of this, data security, cyber recovery and compliance are at risk. This is evidenced by 82% of breaches involving data stored in the cloud.  

Cohesity affirms that the need for DSPM capabilities, modern data security, and management services has never been greater.

DSPM gives customers a deep understanding of their sensitive data, who has access to it, how it is used, and where it is stored. When combined with Cohesity's modern data security and management technology, customers can build a robust cyber resilience posture.  

With these partnerships, Cohesity expects to integrate with the industry's broadest selection of DSPM solutions. This newly formed group represents most of the DSPM market, providing Cohesity customers the flexibility to choose the solution that best fits their needs.  

Organisations face a significant challenge regarding critical data visibility across many repositories. Accelerating cloud adoption, compounded by an explosion of microservices and a high rate of change (driven by modern DevOps practices), puts customers at risk of significant data sprawl. 

Due to these visibility gaps, critical and sensitive data becomes hidden from IT teams and often goes unprotected. Cohesity is working to solve this issue by partnering with the leading DSPM vendors and Cohesity Data Security Alliance members.  

With this unique collaboration, joint customers maintain visibility and help assure all their stakeholders, including employees, customers, and shareholders, that their sensitive data is protected.  

Cohesity's data security and management technology, coupled with the benefits of DSPM, will instantly discover all sanctioned and unsanctioned data workloads while assessing which data workloads have sensitive data that bad actors often target. 

These capabilities enable enterprises to be even more proactive in the fight against cyberattacks. They also provide cyber resilience benefits, including backup admins seeing which objects have sensitive data quickly, IT and security can instantly identify protection gaps for critical workloads, and Actionable Cyber Recovery risk reports going directly to compliance teams.  

Elad Horn, Group Vice President, Product, Cohesity, says: "As organisations rapidly expand their hybrid cloud footprint, their data risk and exposure increase in lockstep."

"We look forward to continuing our partnership with leading DSPM vendors to help our joint customers rapidly identify and protect their most sensitive and business-critical data across both public and private cloud environments."  

Amer Deeba, CEO and Co-Founder of Normalyze says: "Cohesity is helping some of the largest enterprises in the world protect their data against  ransomware and cyber threats in hybrid cloud environments."

"Now, with the integration with Normalyze DSPM platform, customers get full visibility into their data across all clouds, SaaS, and on-prem." 

"The joint solution gives security teams unprecedented visibility into their sensitive data locations and types, identifies and prioritises risks based on the highest monetary impact to the organisation in case of a data breach, and proactively protects the data from ransomware and cyberattacks," says Deeba. 

Jennifer Glenn, Research Director for the IDC Security and Trust Group, says: "Cohesity's Data Security Alliance ecosystem offers customers the opportunity to implement security on their terms, making it easy to integrate with vendors in adjacent technology spaces."

"The expansion of the program to include DSPM solutions such as BigID and Normalyze, as well as other pending integrations, gives customers more insight and visibility into their data and more confidence that it will be protected appropriately."  

The Cohesity Data Security Alliance was founded in November 2022 and contains 15 members, with the addition of the six DSPM security vendors bringing the total membership to 21. 

Tyler Young, CISO at BigID, says: "It's more important than ever for organisations of all sizes to proactively identify and remediate risk across their entire data landscape, including dark data, shadow data, and critical data."

"BigID's market-leading DSPM capabilities enable companies to accelerate their security strategies and improve their security posture with differentiated actionability, risk remediation, and unmatched data discovery and classification built for the enterprise."

"Our partnership with Cohesity is a natural fit to extend DSPM capabilities to help customers better manage, reduce, and remediate risk," says Young.

The integration with Normalyze, Cohesity's initial design partner, is expected to be available within 30 days. 

The company's partnership with BigID on enterprise-grade, ML/AI-powered data classification grows through this new integration with BigID's DSPM capabilities and is expected to be available in 60 days. Additional DSPM partner integrations will be available in the coming months.