There is a tendency in the IT industry to treat backup as a necessary evil. Something you set up, forget about and hope you never have to use seriously. That attitude costs businesses billions every year. <\/p>\n
Modern ransomware attacks now explicitly target backup systems – because the attackers know exactly what they’re doing. If they can encrypt or delete your backups before they hit the production environment, you’re stuck. Backup is no longer the internal affair of the IT department. It’s a business-critical function with a direct link to how long the business can survive an attack. <\/p>\n
In this context, the choice of backup platform is a security decision, not just a storage purchase.<\/p>\n
The market has effectively converged around two dominant platforms: Cohesity<\/a><\/strong> and Rubrik<\/a><\/strong>. Both are replacing legacy solutions from a completely different technological paradigm. But that’s where the similarities end – and the differences are not marginal. <\/p>\n Cohesity<\/a> was founded by Mohit Aron, one of the architects behind Nutanix<\/a>, and it shows in the design. At its core is SpanFS<\/strong> – a distributed file system designed to scale linearly, without bottlenecks and without reliance on a central metadata database. Data and metadata are spread evenly across all nodes in the cluster from day one. <\/p>\n What makes Cohesity technically interesting is not just how it stores data, but what it does with it. SpanFS is a live file system. That means a backup volume can be exposed directly to a hypervisor – VMware<\/a>, Nutanix AHV, or Hyper-V – and hundreds of virtual machines can be booted directly from the Cohesity repository in a disaster scenario, while the data in the background is migrated back to the primary environment. It’s an architectural possibility that legacy backup never even approached. <\/p>\n Deduplication occurs with variable block lengths in real time, globally across the entire cluster. In practice, this means that an organization that puts backup, archive, file services, and test\/dev environments on the same Cohesity cluster often sees dramatic reduction numbers – and a unit cost per terabyte that drops steadily with scale. <\/p>\n The licensing model is capacity-based (per TB or per node), which rewards consolidation. The more you spend on the platform, the better the calculation. <\/p>\n Rubrik<\/a> took a fundamentally different approach. The question they asked was not “how do we manage data effectively?” but “how do we design a system that an attacker with full network access still cannot compromise?”<\/p>\n The answer is Atlas<\/strong> – a file system built on the principle of immutability. Data in Atlas is append-only. A written block cannot be modified or deleted via external commands, ransomware, or administrator accounts on the production network. It’s not a configuration setting – it’s an architectural feature embedded in how the file system works. <\/p>\n During normal operation, Rubrik does not expose its storage surface via standard protocols like SMB or NFS. This is a deliberate choice: the attack surface is minimized by removing the interfaces that are otherwise the most common vectors. <\/p>\n The configuration philosophy reflects this. Rubrik has replaced the traditional backup job with SLA Domains: you define the business requirement (“protect this database every four hours, retain for seven years”) and the platform takes care of the rest. Scheduling, resource allocation, verification – everything is automated and API-driven. This makes Rubrik popular in devops-oriented environments, but it’s equally suited to organizations that want a system that requires minimal ongoing administration. <\/p>\n The licensing model is subscription-based and tied to the amount of front-end data – that is, the actual data you protect, not the capacity behind the scenes. A transparent model where the cost follows the business rather than the infrastructure. <\/p>\n There is no universal ‘best’ platform. There is the platform that best fits your environment, your threat landscape and your requirements. <\/p>\n A rough rule of thumb that holds in practice:<\/p>\n Cohesity is often the right choice when:<\/strong><\/p>\n Headline is often the right choice when:<\/strong><\/p>\n But it’s not always an either-or. Several of the organizations we work with have come to the conclusion that they want both – and that’s a perfectly rational decision. <\/p>\n In security architecture, it is well known that monoculture is a risk. If your backup environment is built entirely on one vendor’s codebase, you expose yourself to that vendor’s vulnerabilities – and history shows that no systems are immune to zero-day vulnerabilities, even those designed for security. <\/p>\n Having Cohesity’s SpanFS and Rubrik’s Atlas in parallel means that a critical bug in one system does not compromise the other. For organizations with extremely high availability requirements – financial institutions, critical infrastructure, healthcare – it’s not overkill, it’s reasonable risk management. <\/p>\n It’s also about matching the right architecture to the right data classification. Your most sensitive, irreplaceable data may deserve Rubrik’s strict immutability. Your large volumes of operational data benefit more from Cohesity’s consolidation and active reusability. <\/p>\nCohesity: backup as an active data platform<\/h4>\n
Heading: backup as a security domain<\/h4>\n
How do you choose?<\/h3>\n
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Why dual platforms can be an active strategy<\/h3>\n
Test in real life, not in slides<\/h3>\n