CANCER waits for no one, nor does it care if a healthcare provider’s system has been shut down or hacked. When human lives are at stake, there usually isn’t much of a choice for healthcare entities once they’re hacked other than paying the ransom to restore operations.

       Sky Lakes Medical Centre, however, was able to resist cashing out millions to cyber criminals who planted ransomware into its system – because it had been engaging Cohesity – an information technology company whose IT architecture helped the United States-based hospital recover the attack on its 600 servers within a few short days.

       “The rise in cyber crimes and attacks due to the accelerated shift towards a digital economy due to Covid-19 is precisely the reason why effective data management is crucial to build resilience in a digitised economy,” said Cohesity Asean managing director Sheena Chin.

       She pointed out that organisations are currently dealing with complex data centres, infrastructures and multiple applications, often resulting in data silos, which increases data attack surfaces for cyber criminals and scales up complexities resulting in detrimental impact for storage performance, efficiency, and cost.

       Cohesity's Sheena Chin

       “For Malaysia to sustain further digital excellence, it is necessary for effective data management and resilience for the nation to make even more advances in its abilities to aggregate, analyse data and to derive action based on insights that positively impacts many aspects of daily life,” she said at the recent Smart Gov & Public Services Live Virtual Conference on Sept 7 and 8, held in commemoration of Star Media Group’s 50th anniversary.

       Titled “Redefining Next Generation Data Management. Unlocking Data Resiliency for the Digital Nation”, Chin’s joint session with Cohesity Malaysia technical director Low Kong Loong touched on solving mass data fragmentation and redefining data management towards a resilient nation in line with Malaysia’s digital economy blueprint.

       A common underlying issue Cohesity has witnessed among many companies is mass data fragmentation, said Low, adding that the company took to using a multi-pronged platform approach called Cohesive Helios to solve the issue.

       “For many organisations, data is left sprawled at different locations, making them inefficient and invisible – leading to problems of complexity. To tackle this, we provide a next-gen data management platform, Cohesity Helios, which provides a comprehensive range of data management services.”

       Using the concept of the backup, Cohesity offers a software-defined architecture that functions as a backup software that runs on any hardware, cloud or virtual machine, plugging into all of the myriad databases and aggregating them into one central pool.

       The first step to efficient data management, said Low, was to backup software by consolidating multiple backup capabilities into a single simplified data management solution. “Everyone needs backup because it is a great way to collect enterprise data and extract value.”

       Citing Sky Lakes Medical Centre as an example, Low noted that Cohesity also classifies and governs data at its source, detects persistent or new threats faster, prevents future attacks using a comprehensive ransomware recovery solution, as well as consolidates other data management workload such as files and objects, disaster recovery, testing development and analytics.

       “Besides being top class in cyber response in helping businesses resume operations as fast as possible with a good amount of data to reduce both downtime and data loss, we radically simplify enterprise data management and unlock value of the data within the Cohesity Helios platform.

       This helps customers protect, harvest, manage, extract value and monetise data which enables them to come up with data business insight to improve services,” said Low, who opined that data security and data governance must converge.

       “This is to give customers full visibility on who has access to their data, data leakage, location of sensitive data and methods to improve compliances.”

       He added that the firm – which meets complex compliance needs such as FIPS, CFTC, SOCs, PCI-DSS – manages business risks, controls impact radius, gains global visibility, and ensures rapid incident response.

       Meanwhile, Chin said organisations will need to get a handle on data fragmentation and complexities while addressing core data security and protection requirements. “By doing so, it helps the nation hasten its digital transformation journey in a data-safe manner. This is truly fundamental to the nation’s continuing status as a strong economic force,” she added.

       Cohesity is an IT firm recognised as an innovator, disruptor, and market leader in next-gen data management. For the third year in a row, Cohesity made the ranking on Forbes 2021 Cloud 100 – the definitive ranking of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world.

       The IT firm was also recently recognised as a leader for the second consecutive year in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions; and for the fourth time in a row, as Customers’ Choice in the 2021 Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer: Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions report”.

       Discover the newest trends, the latest innovations, and next-gen data management solutions to help you stay ahead of modern challenges. For more info, visit bit.ly/cohesity-connect. Cohesity was a Terabyte Partner of the Smart Gov & Public Services Live Virtual Conference. To rewatch their session, visit bit.ly/smartgovcohesity.