Cohesity Chief Product Officer on the Cohesity x Veritas Innovation Roadmap - Six Five On The Road

The rules of data protection are being rewritten in the face of the AI revolution! 🤖

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At RSA Conference 2025, host Will Townsend and Cohesity’s Chief Product Officer Vasu Murthy, discussed how the company is leveraging AI and strategic partnerships to redefine data protection and cyber resilience. Discover the strides being made with the launch of RecoveryAgent, a product that is the direct result of the synergies between Cohesity and Veritas. This isn't just about recovery, it's about actively preparing for and mitigating the impact of attacks!

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Key takeaways include:

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🔹Synergy with Veritas: The integration of Veritas' NetBackup technology with Cohesity's platform is creating a powerful solution that unifies data protection and recovery, offering customers a more streamlined and comprehensive approach.

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🔹AI-Powered Cyber Resilience: The conversation highlighted the critical need for robust cyber recovery strategies. Cohesity's RecoveryAgent is designed to help organizations proactively prepare for and quickly recover from cyberattacks, minimizing disruption and data loss.

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🔹Unlocking the Value of Secondary Data: Cohesity's platform goes beyond traditional backup, enabling businesses to leverage their stored data for additional AI-driven insights and applications, unlocking new value streams.

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🔹The Age of Agentic AI: The discussion explored the future of AI in cybersecurity. Vasu shares a vision of intelligent agents that can communicate and collaborate to enhance threat detection, response, and overall security posture.

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Learn more at Cohesity, and for insights on breach response and how to strengthen your organization’s resilience, learn more.

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Will Townsend: Hi, I'm Will Townsend, and this is Six Five Media On The Road at RSA Conference 2025, and I'm speaking with Coheysity’s Chief Product Officer Vasu Murthy. Vasu, how's the show been for you so far?

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Vasu Murthy: Amazing. Great people, great location, weather. It's been just great.

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Will Townsend: Weather is awesome. It was a little cloudy, but the sun is out. But before we get started, I know you're a science fiction fan, so what's your favorite? Star Trek or Star Wars?

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Vasu Murthy: I like both, but if I had to pick one, it'd be Star Wars.

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Will Townsend: Oh, you and I are gonna get along really well today. I'm a big Star Wars nerd. In my office. I have all the Star Wars paraphernalia, and my wife just gives me constant grief about it. But that's fun. That's awesome. We're both Star Wars kids. But. But let's get into it. So tell me a little bit about Cohesity and your role as a Chief Product Officer. And there's a lot of synergy with Veritas. Right? So let's spend some time there.

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Vasu Murthy: It's amazing. Well, so Cohesity was built as a data platform that can house all the world's data, and we built great applications on top of it. DataProtect, that gets all the data into the platform. We built a whole suite of products for cyber resilience, and now we are billing for AI. But Net Backup has been there for so long, and so many customers trust it. It supports so many data sources. What if Net Backup is also an app on our platform? That's a great way to bring the value of the platform to all of our customers. 85 of the top 100 customers in the world, 70% are Fortune 500. So that is the opportunity we have. The synergies between the companies.

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Will Townsend: Yeah, we're gonna get a little more into AI in a moment. But I know that you just announced a recovery agent, and can you speak a little bit about that? And what has the Veritas partnership done to enhance that solution?

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Vasu Murthy: So cyber resilience, that is being prepared for a cyber attack, and being prepared to recover from cyber attacks is pretty hard. It's a hard thing to do. Most customers, when they're attacked, they are trying to recover for the first time. They never practiced it before. And if you don't practice enough, you're not going to be ready when it hits. The reason we do fire drills is because we know exactly what to do when a fire happens. Right. But there are not enough tools for customers to practice this recovery from cyber attacks. And even there are tools for disaster recovery. And people have been trying to repurpose that for cyber recovery testing, but those are not adequate. They really don't reflect the real needs of cyber recovery. Plus they're difficult to use. So if it's difficult to use, people are not going to use it.

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Will Townsend: They're disparate. I mean, there's a lot of tools for all that's associated with that, right?

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Vasu Murthy: Disparate, yes. So Veritas actually set out to solve this problem by building the first version of the product called Cyber Recovery Orchestrator. And within months. So the two companies came together December 10, and within months we were able to get this combined product that works on data protection.

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Will Townsend: That's incredible. Like the time to integrate, the time to market. That speaks volumes to the engineering teams on both sides of the equation.

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Vasu Murthy: Yeah, it not only speaks volumes to the engineering team's abilities, it also speaks to the amount of effort, the path that's been put in to modernize the platform, keep it up to date, use the latest frameworks such that we could bring these things together. The API based containerization that can really change microservices makes it so easy to blend these things together. So to launch this with additional functionality, including agentic AI that we're going to talk about, it's just amazing. So this tool is really built for cyber recovery testing and it has primitives for malware scanning and drag and drop that it knows what rehearsals mean because it's not the same thing as a disaster recovery. And it can also help build these complex scripts to test it and give you a certification of how long it took in a cyber recovery environment. And we have a whole bunch of assistive and agentic AI features as well. Part of it.

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Will Townsend: Well, let's get into that because you and I were talking before we got started, and modern AI presents a host of challenges. Right. It requires data, it requires the unification of data. So can you speak to that and what Cohesity is doing to address this whole notion of unstructured data that customers are struggling with on a daily basis.

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Vasu Murthy: Yeah. So AI touches upon everything we do now. Right. It touches our lives.

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Will Townsend: Well, it's got to. Right. You got to check that box.

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Vasu Murthy: It's got to. So we are doing a lot in making our products easy to use, getting customers' workflows easier. Let me go digress a little bit on the recovery agent side. Then I'll come back to this larger question. If you had an AI that has seen many such blueprints for runbooks being created and it knows what kind of complexities that entails. It knows the kind of patterns that are in customer inventory, what kind of applications there could be. Typically disaster recovery has been relegated to some core subset of applications, a minimum viable thing. But if you want to expand that, you need something that is smart enough that can scale and keep up to date with all the changes in infrastructure.

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Will Townsend: Because it's very dynamic. It's always changing, right?

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Vasu Murthy: Always changing.

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Will Townsend: The current vector is always changing.

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Vasu Murthy: And so suppose you have this repertoire of training data and you can actually build an agent that finds such patterns, automatically creates runbooks for you, automatically groups applications saying hey, you did report on these things together and you have a different SLA for these. So they must be together in one application. So we put them together and create blueprints and so on. So there's a whole bunch of work we are doing to make the day to day lives of our customers easy. But then there's the other side of AI that we have a pretty unique value proposition for customers is that throughout the world we have customers managing hundreds of exabytes, hundreds of exabytes of data. Exabytes is 1000 petabytes and hundreds of exabytes of data in our platform. And this data includes everything; the customers' valuable assets, all their crown jewels are in there. It's already aggregated and we have a great opportunity to now unlock that data, make it useful for them by providing AI directly on top of the data to be able to answer questions on top of it. So we already have an application called Gaia that works on top of the data. And why backup data? Because first of all, we already did the tough job of integrating all the unstructured data in one place. We also run data classification on it. We know the data security posture of this data. So we know that you don't want to be using PII identifiable information.

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Will Townsend: Heaven forbid that leaks. And there's data leakage with all of these models.

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Vasu Murthy: Yes, yes. So we can scan it, and help you remove such information from that data. Plus we are immutable so you can go back and audit in case you want to check that. And so we built this application for Gaia. Now customers are super interested in multiple ways to answer questions from the data, to experiment with data, to roll it out to multiple departments. And so this is another huge opportunity. It's all because we started as a data platform. So when you start as a data platform with an application on top of it, you have data protection, recovery, just recover faster for any incident. You have cyber resilience functionality that makes it much easier to recruit cyber attacks. And now we have this whole AI stack that can help customers get insights from their data and accelerate the adoption of AI in their company.

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Will Townsend: I mean, it's powerful, faster, time to insight. You're removing friction from the whole management process and ultimately delivering tremendous value to organizations. But I'd like to go back to what I touched on about. It's pretty incredible how the two companies came together in such a quick amount of time. From your perspective, how do you align product design documentation through that development cycle? Because obviously you're doing a great job. You mentioned you're working with the largest companies on the planet. Can you give us an inside peek at how the sausage gets made?

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Vasu Murthy: For a company and products to be great, every part of the company needs to be great. So we all need to be great. In fact, it expands beyond design documentation and product. I mean, it goes into engineering and goes into marketing. We all need to work together. One principle I do have is everybody must have a say in what we should build.

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Will Townsend: That's fantastic. And a lot of companies that are very innovative, like Google, give their engineers time to experiment, right?

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Vasu Murthy: Yeah. And me being in a product position, it's actually a pretty privileged position. So we get to curate. So often product managers are asked to come up with ideas on how are you going to solve it, what's the strategy. But the thing is, everybody can have a say in it and the product managers are pretty privileged to kind of curate that and say, hey, this we'll do first, this we'll do next. And this requires participation of everybody. How do we position it? Marketing needs to be involved pretty early in the cycle. Design needs to be involved because they're worrying about how to get the best experience for customers. Documentation is involved because their whole job is to make sure people don't come to documentation. They don't need it.

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Will Townsend: So they get that it's that easy to use.

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Vasu Murthy: Yeah. And also proactively in line as customers are working on our UI should be able to guide them. In fact, my charter for my documentation team is to make sure people never have to go to the docs, but make sure you work on the product itself. Give them hints, give them clues on what to do next so users never need to go out of their context to search for information.

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Will Townsend: Yeah, I love that. I love that philosophy. Well, as we close our conversation, I want to talk about your vision. You've been very successful obviously. You're only as good as the next iteration of what you do. You've got competitors in your space. So what are you doing to drive the innovation value line and stay that much further ahead of the competition?

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Vasu Murthy: So our longest differentiation, long term differentiation, is still going to be one of the first things that we did, which is the platform. Our platform is so unique in this industry that first of all we can manage a lot of data in it, plus we can develop applications on top of it.

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Will Townsend: Lots of adjacencies that flow out of.

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Vasu Murthy: That, lots of adjacencies that flow that you can already see this evolution of data protection, cyber resilience and AI in each of these areas, we have so much more to do that is still going to be the driving advantage differentiator for us. And with this new set of customers that we have gotten with Veritas, we have an opportunity to get them to better cyber resiliency, better AI utilization, the smoothest process possible. It's really about innovation for all of our customers. We're going to have more workload support than any other company on the planet. More smoother transition from whatever architecture they may be in into the best cyber resilient posture as well as being able to make use of their data for AI. That gives us enough, I think, for many, many years of business and also many, many years of making our customers successful.

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Will Townsend: Yeah, and it sounds like it's going to continue that innovation slope upward into the foreseeable future.

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Vasu Murthy: And who knows what the next application would be?

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Will Townsend: Aren't our minds blown by Gentex AI? And we were just talking about Generative a year ago and now like I'm beginning to see it at the conference this year and it's exciting. It's an exciting time to be in the tech industry and to really use the power of modern AI to drive more customer value.

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Vasu Murthy: Yeah, there's so many ideas there in this case. I mean think of very shortly we have multiple agents in our product. One is taking care of each part of the customer needs like for threat scanning and threat protection. And now we just launched a recovery agent that takes care of the cyber recovery practice. There's an agent for backup. We'll also use MCP to talk to agents in other products. For example, we can talk to the sieve and source of the world and say this is the kind of threat profile we are seeing and so they can get the right priority on the other side. It's not just sending a record over and getting them. They will just understand it. You can actually have much more lively conversations between these agents that hopefully get better results, better security, better insights into data, and overall, you know, better success for our customers.

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Will Townsend: Yeah, well, exciting. Vasu, thank you for your time. It's been a very compelling conversation and I just want to thank our viewers for tuning in. This is Six Five Media On The Road at RSA Conference 2025.

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