Cohesity recently used its Cohesity ReConnect conference to introduce some new capabilities including Cohesity DataHawk. What is that?

DataHawk has multiple capabilities. It has a cyber vault. We released our cyber vault earlier as a stand-alone product called Fort Knox. But we’re now bringing together a much broader platform. DataHawk will have cyber vaulting. It will have threat detection capabilities that we built both natively into the platform and which also gets the best threat hunting capabilities from the best vendors out there or people who want to write their own ‘YARA’ rules to access hunting capabilities from companies like CrowdStrike, Palo Alto [Networks] or Tenable. [YARA, or “yet another ridiculous acronym, refers to a rules-based approach to describing malware families.]

The third is intelligent data classification. We’re building this in such a way that a lot of it can be classified with AI and machine learning capability so you can be better prepared before or after a ransomware attack. And the fourth is we’re building real strong integration into other companies’ product lines so we don’t have to be the center of gravity for a security operations control center. We want that control center to be what customers decide to use, maybe it’s Palo Alto [Networks] or Splunk or CrowdStrike. They send feeds to us, and when we see malware, we would send feeds to them. … Once that capability is in place, we’ve got what we believe is the best threat scanner for live data. And we will constantly be updating the intelligence to that feed.

What was the second big news from the conference?

We announced the Data Security Alliance. We want to move the industry forward with a set of the best partners that are coming to our tent to support our vision for a safer world. This is a $100 billion market cap worth of companies: BigID, Cisco, CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, Securonix, Splunk and Tenable, along with Mandiant and PwC. And it’s just a starting point. [Those companies] have different relative strengths of their best products, for example, Palo Alto and network security, or CrowdStrike and endpoint security. But they’re all going to have natural integrations, some of which exist today and some which will be built in the foreseeable future, so that we can bring the best security products to this alliance. And we’re going to keep this alliance open even to competitors. We want this to be a broad industry initiative. We think it takes a village to protect organizations and firms and governments from the bad guys. This is a first time in the industry an alliance of such big players has embraced any one player. And we think that’s a unique position showing our power in the industry, the power of our customers and the power of our ability to bring those folks together.