The Economic Benefits of Managing Unstructured Data with Cohesity SmartFiles

This ESG Economic Validation focused on the quantitative and qualitative benefits organizations can expect from leveraging Cohesity SmartFiles to reduce cost, increase operational efficiency, and improve business agility on-premises, at the edge, and in the cloud. ESG created a modeled scenario that considered the operational benefits of deploying Cohesity SmartFiles and predicted the cost savings for a modeled organization over a five-year period.

As unstructured data capacity continues to grow faster than ever before, many organizations continue to store, manage, and maintain mountains of accumulated data in silos of storage that span multiple storage technologies and protocols. This data is often created for a particular use but remains valuable over time. In fact, 93% of organizations have been very successful or somewhat successful at utilizing data to create or discover significant, new revenue opportunities or to increase value in the future. The data is important, but continuing to store, protect, and manage unstructured data across legacy storage solutions is inefficient, time consuming, and costly. It is no small surprise that as organizations look to modernize, operational efficiency remains the most important objective for their digital transformation initiatives. These concerns are echoed in the fact that the most important considerations in justifying IT investments over the next twelve months include investments that improve cybersecurity, digital transformation, business processes, collaboration capabilities, compliance, and return on investment amongst the others shown in Figure 1.

Digital transformation also allows users to interact in new ways, provide better and more differentiated customer experiences, and develop new data-centric products and services. Becoming more operationally efficient at managing data is critical to the success of modern organizations. Storage administrators now play a vital role in helping the business make the most of its valuable data by making it securely available to the right person or application in the data center, at the edge, or in the cloud as quickly as possible. Manually managing and migrating data across traditional storage silos and technologies is inefficient, time consuming, prone to human errors (such as accidental deletion or exposure of data making it vulnerable to potential cyber-attacks). This has become a roadblock to business agility.

Organizations need a software-defined, data-centric storage solution that helps them to simplify data management, optimize storage efficiency and flexibility, improve visibility and insight into data, reduce risk, and maximize business agility.

As shown in Figure 2, SmartFiles software works efficiently on-premises as well as in the public cloud to optimize data capacity to make data visible and manageable. Its multi-cloud capabilities ensure seamless and rapid data mobility and application portability. Wherever data resides, it is always protected and preserved with integrated layers of security features and file integrity functions. Intelligent policy-based management and automation affirm efficient placement, governance, and protection of volumes of data.

Unlike traditional NAS, SmartFiles is data-centric, not storage- or infrastructure- centric. This means there is no need to move data to applications since applications and data are integrated in the same platform, thereby removing the complexity and cost of running file ecosystem applications for file environments. Cohesity Marketplace applications and machine-learning-assisted management provide intelligence and ease of management, which separate SmartFiles from traditional scale-out NAS appliances.

The Cohesity Marketplace offers free and licensed apps from Cohesity and leading data security, compliance, and business intelligence vendors. Marketplace apps have UI-level integration within Cohesity and allow IT teams to access and control applications from within the Cohesity UI (see Figure 3).

Using AI-powered cybersecurity and built-in governance capabilities, SmartFiles offers a holistic approach to protecting against ransomware attacks, discovering cyber-vulnerabilities, detecting attacks in progress, and responding and recovering quickly from ransomware and other emerging cyber-threats.

SmartFiles is designed on a secure platform with built-in multitenancy with strong QoS support, data isolation, role-based access control, data at rest and in-flight encryption, and separate encryption keys. SmartFiles is compliant with leading standards. Unlimited snaps and clones and immutability with DataLock provide advanced protection against ransomware and other potential malicious attacks. Furthermore, the Cohesity DataGovern data security and governance service will integrate with SmartFiles and uses AI/ML to accurately discover sensitive data, meet compliance requirements, and detect suspicious activities based on usage patterns.

ESG’s Economic Validation process is a proven method for understanding, validating, quantifying, and modeling the economic value propositions of a product or solution. The process leverages ESG’s core competencies in market and industry analysis, forward-looking research, and technical/economic validation. ESG conducted in-depth interviews with end-users to better understand and quantify how Cohesity SmartFiles has impacted their organizations, particularly in comparison with previously deployed and/or experienced NAS storage solutions. The qualitative and quantitative findings were used as the basis for a simple economic model showing the cost benefits, data protection, and operational efficiencies gained by deploying Cohesity SmartFiles.

ESG’s economic analysis revealed that Cohesity SmartFiles provided its customers with significant savings and benefits in the following categories:

• Cost Savings: SmartFiles helped to lower storage costs by consolidating data onto more efficient and massively scalable storage systems, retiring older hardware, and effectively automating data lifecycle management.

• Improved Operational Efficiency: SmartFiles reduced the effort required to manage data by reducing the number of management interfaces, greatly simplifying management tasks, streamlining workflows, integrating applications, and intelligently automating information lifecycle management (ILM).

• Improved Business Agility and Reduced Risk: SmartFiles provided faster identification and access to archived data, enabling improved business agility while reducing risk through improved security, availability, and compliance.

As businesses struggle with rapidly growing volumes of unstructured data, the need to optimize and simplify data management becomes more critical. By introducing SmartFiles into their data center or cloud environments, administrators noted that operational efficiency was greatly improved. Cohesity helped to save organizations time and improve processes through:

• Management Simplicity: ESG found that SmartFiles was easy to deploy and made it simple and quick to migrate data without requiring complex training for administrators. SmartFiles provided a single consolidated platform for data protection, files, objects, dev/test, analytics, and cloud integration that required no disruptive upgrades. Organizations reported that they were able to free up to 60% to 80% of their time by consolidating operations into a single and intuitive management interface, managing data in the cloud, at the edge, and in the data center through policy-based actions with SLAs, with quick searching for VMs, files, and objects aided by automated global indexing and Google-like global content searches. Administrators reported that they were able to save time by providing multiprotocol access to the same data using unified sets of permissions. The time saved by administrators enabled them to be more proactive and allowed them to provide faster response to the needs of the business when required.

• Streamlined Workflows: One of the most noticeable benefits reported was that SmartFiles helped organizations to streamline workflows that involved searching for, providing access to, or restoring data for individuals across the organization. While these workflows previously involved opening an IT ticket and took up to a week to complete, administrators could now keep the business operating at speed within a single phone call, helping to restore deleted or compromised files, objects, and VMs, or identify useful and related project information that end-users did not know how to find. In addition, customers reported significantly less time spent dealing with backups, security, and compliance. Administrators were also able to automate some of the more repeatable workflows with the use of the Cohesity API to remove bottlenecks introduced by manual activities and interactions and quickly leverage marketplace integrations to solve new and existing business requirements.

• Operational Intelligence and Insight: Customers stated that, by consolidating all of their previously siloed data with SmartFiles, they achieved a much-improved operational view of the organization’s data from a view that was disaggregated from the application. This new insight allowed for much simpler monitoring and predicting of capacity requirements and made it possible to provide globally efficient data-driven services at scale while making well-informed decisions to improve the cost effectiveness, security, and compliance of data regardless of where and how it was currently stored, located, or being accessed from.

• Intelligent Information Lifecycle Management: SmartFiles can greatly simplify ILM for administrators through automated data tiering that can automatically age data from higher-cost NAS storage systems to more cost-effective storage and even archive to AWS S3 storage in the cloud. This built-in ILM and NAS tiering capability allows for greatly simplified scalability and offloads many of the decisions and manual work previously required by administrators to migrate data and permissions between systems and locations.

ESG leveraged the information collected through vendor-provided material, public and industry knowledge of economics and technologies, and the results of customer interviews to create a five-year TCO/ROI model that compares the costs and benefits of Cohesity SmartFiles against the costs and benefits of continuing to store files and cold data across a variety of siloed storage devices. ESG’s interviews with customers who have recently made the transition, combined with experience and expertise in economic modeling and technical validation of Cohesity SmartFiles, helped to form the basis for our modeled scenario.

ESG created a modeled scenario of a typical organization managing 1.16PB of data. ESG assumed the organization currently operated a tier-1 flash storage for business-critical workloads (200TB of databases and 110TB of cold data), several tier-2 NAS arrays (650TB of file shares and cold data), 200TB of objects stored in S3 cloud storage, and a tape-based backup/archive solution archiving 5TB of data per month. Our model included an assumption of 10% annual growth for business- critical workloads and a 20% annual growth for unstructured data. We then modeled the expected costs, including the cost of hardware and software acquisition, cloud storage and subscription costs, support and maintenance, and operational expenses (power/cooling/floorspace) and the expected administrative costs to manage and maintain storage and provide file-related business services. We modeled the costs for the current environment (PMO or “Present Mode of Operation”) for both a greenfield scenario (net-new purchase or complete refresh scenario) and a brownfield scenario (continue to operate and grow the existing infrastructure). Finally, we modeled the expected costs to solve the same set of business needs by consolidating files and cold storage onto Cohesity SmartFiles. Figure 4 compares the PMO scenarios to the Cohesity consolidation scenario.

Organizations amass a large quantity of files and cold data across many siloed storage devices. Managing this data and providing timely access to their files has proven to be costly and a roadblock to business agility.

Cohesity SmartFiles enabled organizations to consolidate their files and cold data onto a more cost effective and simpler-to-manage solution while greatly accelerating the time to find and retrieve data for the business from days or even weeks to minutes—helping to speed time to value and positively impact revenue.

We found that, by consolidating files and cold storage onto Cohesity SmartFiles, the organization could clear enough space on their tier-1 storage array to handle growth and decommission their aging NAS arrays, tape backup solution, cloud gateway appliance, and cloud gateway service. Our analysis showed that, by consolidating with Cohesity SmartFiles, the organization could lower the expected storage-related Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 45% to 51% over a five-year period. The result of our analysis is shown in Figure 5.

The above analysis includes:

ESG also modeled the expected impact to revenue that Cohesity SmartFiles can have on a data-driven organization where quickly finding files and file sets can have a large impact on business. Examples of this include a project-based business such as a design or architecture firm, law or publishing company, hospital imaging services, software R&D, etc. Our conservative analysis predicted that a $25M company with 300 projects a year could produce an additional $1.88M in revenue by improving the efficiency of a small percentage (10%) of projects that would be expected to be impacted by up to a week waiting for required files to be found and made available to the project stakeholders.

In addition, we estimated the expected cost of dealing with ransomware incidents that could potentially be avoided by earlier detection with AI-based alerts and quicker remediation with SmartFiles. By detecting and remedying ransomware in only a few days instead of up to 45 days, SmartFiles allows the organization to restore the state of the affected solution before many backup retention policies have expired. Based on numbers published by IBM reporting data collected by the Ponemon Institute, our calculations considered the average probability of a ransomware breach and the expected total impact of a successful breach. We estimated that SmartFiles could help avoid up to $1.8M over the 5-year period.

Because impact to revenue and risk and cost of ransomware events would vary greatly between businesses, we calculated the expected return on investment both with and without the expected revenue improvement and ransomware avoidance costs. As shown in Figure 6, the net result was a return on investment of 354% (TCO savings only) to 593% (TCO savings and revenue impact).

While ESG’s models are built in good faith upon conservative, credible, and validated assumptions, no single modeled scenario will ever represent every potential environment. ESG recommends that you perform your own analysis of available products and consult with your Cohesity representative to understand and discuss the differences between the solutions proven through your own proof-of-concept testing.