Cohesity wants the 200 exabytes it backs up to feed enterprise AI agents

Cohesity's pitch asks one store of data to do two jobs. Its five-step resilience framework includes cyber vaulting, keeping a clean copy isolated ^[9]. The third act of Poonen's pitch asks customers to draw insight from that same data ^[3]. "It's like soil with a time series stamp on it," Poonen said. "If you knew that you had gold underneath your house, why would you just want to keep it secure? You want to use it, and that's in essence what we're doing." ^[6]

The store is large. About 200 exabytes across about 12,000 customers ^[4] comes to roughly 17 petabytes each on average ^[14]. The biggest customers are banks, public sector bodies, healthcare groups, telcos and technology firms, where years of history settle into immutable backups ^[5]. Poonen defines a workload as anything that sits underneath an application, from SAP down to an agent ^[12]. Under the plan iTWire's headline describes, an agent is both something Cohesity backs up and something that reads the backups ^[12][8].

Poonen described the core engineering as "a pipe and lake problem": pipes to every workload, a secure immutable lake, and recovery as quick as possible ^[13]. He also described what happens when a pipe is missing. "Not covering a workload is like having a bank where one of the doors and windows are open," he said. "The bad guys get onto that application or workload, extract the data, exfiltrate the data, and then from there get to your entire network." ^[11]

A skeptical finance chief would say a backup vendor is relabelling storage as AI to defend its renewal price. The record supports a narrower claim. The session was a vendor making its case at a press event ^[1][7]. No customer in the account is described moving backup or security budget into AI, and the account does not include results from the Mythos test on Cohesity's own code named in iTWire's headline ^[8]. I would treat the budget question as open this quarter. The supervision question is one Cohesity's own product chief has already answered ^[7].

Banks raised the sequencing question first. "Many of our largest banks came and said to us, 'If the entire bank goes down, how do we set up a minimum viable bank?'" Poonen said ^[10]. He said the step of working out what a business needs to survive could easily become the first of the framework's five ^[9]. I think the same order applies to agents. A firm that defines its minimum viable business this quarter knows which backups are too important to expose, and next quarter's choices about which agents may read what can start from that list. According to Poonen, BNY Mellon and JPMorgan Chase have spoken about the concept at Cohesity's Catalyst events ^[10].