Cohesity Gaia helps businesses transform secondary data into knowledge

Cohesity announced Cohesity Gaia, an AI-powered enterprise search assistant that brings retrieval augmented generation (RAG) AI and large language models (LLMs) to high-quality backup data within Cohesity environments.

Cohesity Gaia will be made generally available on March 15. The conversational AI assistant enables users to ask questions and receive answers by accessing and analyzing their vast pools of enterprise data. When coupled with the Cohesity Data Cloud, these AI advancements transform data into knowledge and can help accelerate the goals of an organization while keeping data secure and compliant. Cohesity has announced plans with the three largest public cloud providers to bring their LLM services to Cohesity Gaia.

The underlying architecture of Cohesity Data Cloud manages and secures data with a unique blend of performance, extensibility, and scale. Cohesity Gaia extends the value proposition of Cohesity Data Cloud even further:

• By building a RAG AI solution on Cohesity’s multicloud platform, Cohesity will be able to seamlessly provide RAG AI conversational search experiences across cloud and hybrid environments that will allow enterprises to gain deeper insights into their data and make informed decisions in the future, no matter where their stored data resides.
• Cohesity maintains a fully indexed backup of all files, across all workloads, and at all points in time. This robust capability supports the creation of AI-ready indexes for rapid conversational search and responses, providing enterprises with quick and accurate results. Initially, Cohesity will support Microsoft 365 and OneDrive data and will expand to more workloads over time.
• The unique architecture of Cohesity Gaia ensures that all indexed data is immediately available for reading without the need for backups to be reconstructed. This allows the Cohesity Data Cloud to function like a data lake, providing businesses with real-time access to their data for analysis and decision-making.
• The Cohesity Data Cloud employs granular, role-based access controls and zero-trust security principles, ensuring that only authorized users and models have access to the necessary data. This not only protects sensitive information but also helps enterprises maintain compliance with various regulatory requirements.

Enterprises looking to utilize LLMs often face several challenges. Developers must first create more copies of data, thereby increasing the threat footprint for an attack. What’s more, the data may be incomplete or dated. Finally, this approach requires additional time and resources, and puts an added burden on the system’s performance.

Cohesity Gaia overcomes these challenges by integrating AI capabilities within a customer’s backup environment.

Cohesity Gaia helps organizations make better, faster decisions across a myriad of use cases, such as:

• To assess an organization’s level of cyber resilience.
• To quickly perform financial and compliance audit checks.
• To answer complex legal questions.
• To serve as a knowledge base to train new employees.

“Enterprises are excited to harness the power of generative AI but have faced several challenges gaining insights into secondary data, including backup, archived and vaulted data – because every approach requires re-hydrating the data, and painfully waiting weeks for the data to be available for analytics and insights. Cohesity Gaia dramatically simplifies this process with our patent-pending approach using Retrieval Augmented Generation,” said Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President, Cohesity.

“With Cohesity Gaia, for the first time in our industry, companies will be able to leverage generative AI to query their data in a virtually seamless way. Our approach delivers rapid, insightful results without the drawbacks of more manual and risky approaches. In short, it turns data into knowledge within seconds and minutes,” added Poonen.

“We are an international materials research and manufacturing company, with research centers in many locations, and our researchers speak different languages,” said Ryan Reed, head of IT Products and Services, JSR Corporation. “We want to be able to use generative AI to quickly discover if work done at one location might apply to other projects. Cohesity Gaia allows us to query our rich store of research data and quickly find relevant work. It will also allow our researchers to use their native language to query the system. This could prove incredibly valuable in accelerating the rate of our research and discovery.”

At the core of Cohesity AI technologies is Cohesity Turing, a patent-pending collection of AI capabilities and technologies integrated into Cohesity’s multicloud data management and security platform, that provide operational and data insights.

The foundation of these AI innovations is the concept of “responsible AI,” with capabilities and frameworks that enable customers to introduce AI to backup data securely and safely at scale. All Cohesity Turing solutions adhere to these responsible AI principles:

• Transparency: Protect access to the data with role-based access controls. Promote transparency and accountability around access and policies.
• Governance: Ensure the security and privacy of data used by AI models and the workforce—so the right data is exposed only to the right people (and models) with the right privileges.
• Access: Integrate indexed and searchable data securely and easily while ensuring data is immutable and resilient.

“It is important to understand that Cohesity Gaia does not retrieve data like a search engine; it answers questions,” said Greg Statton, office of the CTO – Data & AI, Cohesity. ”For example, if you notice a rise in costs in a region, typically, you would search for dozens of invoices, review and compare them, and see if you can discover the reason for the cost increases. It could take hours, days, or weeks to resolve. With Cohesity Gaia, you simply ask, ‘Why have costs increased in the region?’, and Cohesity Gaia will pull the relevant data from your stored data, analyze it, and return an answer to your question. It’s that simple.”

“Cohesity is the first data security and management vendor to bring the power of AI search to enterprises with the Cohesity Gaia AI search assistant. Gaia leverages generative AI with the latest RAG enhancements to enable conversational search across secondary protected data,” said Russ Fellows, VP, The Futurum Group Labs.

“Gaia enables companies to quickly leverage their existing stored data with the power of generative AI, while preserving data security and compliance. With Cohesity Gaia, customers can quickly turn data into insights, without the complexity of creating an AI application themself, or worrying about their data privacy and security,” added Fellows.