CIO Bulletin

Cobalt Iron — Delivering the industry’s most cyber secure enterprise-class backup SaaS offering

Protection of enterprise data, whether onsite or in the cloud, requires keeping copies of that data adequately secured and remotely stored. This ensures your valuable data is protected from any theft attempt or even natural calamities. With digital information, the volume of data for companies is growing while at the same time cyber threats are increasing. All of this requires robust data protection software that protects data from unauthorized access, use, or contamination.

Cobalt Iron delivers the industry’s first and most cyber secure enterprise-class backup SaaS offering. Cobalt Iron’s platform, Compass^®, scales from terabytes to exabytes and provides simplicity not found in backup technologies and tools today. We interviewed Greg Tevis, the Vice President of Strategy at Cobalt Iron, to know more about the company and its solutions. Here are a few excerpts of the interview:

Q. How does Cobalt Iron help enterprise customers save big while enhancing security?

Cobalt Iron was born to remedy the repeated failures, security risks, high costs, product complexities, spiraling data growth, and growing need to protect enterprise data beyond basic backup and restore. Cobalt Iron solves these challenges through technology — specifically, SaaS-delivered, analytics-driven, software-automated backup — instead of people.

The addition of data analytics can drive efficiency and automation in the enterprise backup environment, freeing IT pros from the drudgery of many time-consuming backup functions that are currently handled manually. Cobalt Iron customers have seen dramatic cost reductions and the elimination of up to 90% of daily backup tasks.

Furthermore, by replacing expensive Data Domain appliances, enterprises stop paying twice for deduplication, cutting hardware costs by over 50%. SaaS delivery also eliminates tape-based backup, which not only improves the ability to recover data but reduces storage inefficiencies by over 40%. And when enterprises stop treating NAS data like a silo, they can improve operational efficiencies by over 50%. All of this automation and analytics have the added benefit of eliminating many of the security exposures common in traditional backup products.

Q. Would you describe some of the important solutions offered by the company?

Cobalt Iron’s flagship product is Compass — enterprise-scale data protection software delivered as a solution. It automates and continuously optimizes backup functions, infrastructure, orchestration activities, and software currency. Compass provides ransomware readiness, detection, impact analysis, and recovery. It also supports many different cloud providers — including Alibaba, Amazon, Azure, Google, and IBM Cloud — for many different cloud use cases and scales to petabytes of data in data centers or across thousands of remote locations. Further, Compass automates daily operations, allowing customers to run backup servers across hundreds or thousands of locations with ease. Compass also provides end-user self-service to enroll, review, and monitor backups.

Q. How does Compass help in the transformation of enterprise data protection?

Imagine if it were possible to automate the entire enterprise backup infrastructure, no matter the complexity or size, and make it impervious to cyberattacks. That’s what Cobalt Iron’s Compass software does for customers today. The Compass data protection platform delivers the highest levels of security in a simple-to-deploy and easy-to-manage solution, ensuring that data will be available when and where it is needed.

The Compass approach provides simplicity, operational automation, and secure deployment and maintenance of components. Robust workflow integration means that backup operations are securely consolidated with enterprise IT operations — a characteristic that also delivers higher levels of visibility for the backup operations.

Analytics-driven automation in the Cobalt Iron Compass solution is defining the future of enterprise data protection. Using analytics, Compass constantly monitors and analyzes metrics, conditions, and events associated with backup infrastructure, operations, and environment, looking for indications of ransomware or other security attacks. Many of the analytics are internally optimizing, meaning Compass can adjust itself based on the conditions, behaviors, and events it detects across the entire Compass universe.

Q. “Cobalt Iron eliminates the burden of constantly monitoring, maintaining and upgrading in-house data protection environments while allowing customers to retain full operational control.” Interesting! Can you elaborate on how Cobalt Iron achieves this?

With Compass’ built-in backup automation features, backup administrators never have to log into a backup server again. Compass automates most infrastructure and operational tasks associated with the backup, including:

Keeping backup server and OS software at the latest validated release levels
Automated configuration, maintenance, monitoring, reporting, best practices tuning, and other administrative tasks
Constant health monitoring and predictive failure analysis of backup server and environment
Proactive problem determination and remediation
Defect identification, management, and resolution with vendors as needed
Automation assistance with file system client installs
Automation of all backup, replication, data migration, scheduling, policy, maintenance, and other backup operations

Data managers get a unified view of the enterprise data protection environment through the user-friendly, web-based Compass Commander interface. Through Commander, they can manage all data protection infrastructure and operations – regardless of the workload or the location. Commander can be configured to work in whatever way it’s needed. Access is role-based and fully multi-tenanted so that data protection managers can create groups of users, such as service providers, managers, or admins. Each group gets an experience tailored to fit their needs. Users can log in and get started on the Commander dashboard. From this page, they can view backup events, investigate failed events, or go into more detail with options like Reports or Analytics, depending on their role.

Q. Being an IT services and SaaS provider, how do you ensure protection from a potential data breach?

One of Compass’ biggest differentiators is its built-in security. Compass Cyber Shield technology, included in every deployment at no extra charge, offers incomparable security features by design, such as:

Built-in containment and immutability
Extensive auditing and data governance, made stronger through analytics
Robust multitenant, role-based access controls
Backup domains isolated from production domains for safe recovery

Compass also adds extensive ransomware monitoring and analytics for additional security benefits, such as:

Elimination of common backup attack points
Continual software-enabled problem detection and predictive problem avoidance
Data content inspection features to ensure absence of ransomware in the backup data
Ransomware analytics for continuous cyber readiness

The Compass solution protects backup data and operations by completely restricting access to the backup infrastructure. No user or administrator logins exist for the backup server, operating system, backup software, backup database, or storage. All management is handled by policy and channeled through the Compass Commander user interface. This approach eliminates nearly all cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the backup estate. Backup containment and isolation by design secures the backup data against unauthorized access during its lifecycle.

Q. How do you incorporate privacy and global data privacy regulations?

The Cyber Shield security features built into Compass help keep data under the enterprise’s control to minimize risk from potential audit requirements, compliance, and governance violations. Some of those features include:

End-to-end encryption
Data protection in transport, at rest, and at source
Customer-controlled security certificates
Strict enforcement of data locality and privacy policies
Comprehensive audit trails to support governance
Audit exception handling triggers notification and review process
Multi-factor authentication

Cyber Shield accounts for all governmental data security mandates around the world, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and longtime data privacy measures such as HIPAA, SOX, and ISO 27001.

Q. Tell us about your major technology partners.

Cobalt Iron’s IronClad Partner Advantage (IPA) program empowers our channel partners to compete in the multicloud, next-generation data protection world by offering support through their customers’ entire journey. IPA is the most lucrative and rewarding partner program in the industry, and it’s backed by a proven sales team with a laser focus on supporting VARS, VADs, GSIs, and MSPs. Major partners include IBM, Lenovo, Arrow Electronics, TechData, Mainline Information Systems, Sirius Computer Solutions, and Rahi Systems.

Meet the Vice President

Greg Tevis is the Vice President of Strategy at Cobalt Iron. He has 39 years of experience in storage hardware and software development, systems programming, storage architecture, disaster recovery, technology strategy, mergers & acquisitions, data & cloud consulting, and intellectual property protection. Tevis was an IBM Master Inventor for over 15 years and currently has 38 patents issued or pending.