Cobalt Iron
Highly Secured and Scalable Data Protection Solution

Managing backup remains a daunting task for many organizations. Although enterprises invest heavily in data protection, administrators still struggle to handle complex, backup-centric IT infrastructure. Effectively leveraging cloud services as part of business cloud strategies adds to these challenges. Cobalt Iron offers software-defined solutions that are revolutionizing enterprise data protection. Using operational automation and analytics-driven optimization, the company delivers more value with less effort and expense. Leveraging decades of industry experience in solving complex backup challenges for enterprises, the company provides software solutions that run on standard hardware, which allows the clients to pay as they grow. In an interview with CIO Applications, Greg Tevis, VP of Global Strategy, Cobalt Iron, shares his insights on Compass®, their proprietary SaaS platform. The platform takes all the heavy lifting associated with backup by monitoring, managing, and provisioning the complete enterprise backup landscape. Utilizing Compass, administrators can manage entire backup operations, including in the cloud, from a single web interface with analytics-driven optimizations that improve overall performance.

Could you give us an overview of Cobalt Iron?

In 2013, when the complexities and cost inefficiencies around enterprise backup were becoming increasingly intolerable for organizations, a global expert on data protection and recovery, Richard Spurlock developed the software platform Compass, which completely transformed the user experience of enterprise backup. This spurred the conception of Cobalt Iron. Compass is a SaaS-based pluggable platform that enables various technologies such as backup technologies, cloud technologies, and storage technologies. Adding automation, analytics, SaaS, deep security controls, and multi-cloud capabilities, Compass offers a modernized approach to enterprise backup. The platform simplifies backup by monitoring and managing the entire enterprise backup environment through automation. The automatic updates of the application are carried out without any human element, which reduces the administrative workload in backup tasks. The automation, analytics-based optimization, capacity analytics, performance analytics, and ransomware detection analytics, makes Compass unique within the backup industry. Compass seamlessly supports private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud environments, all managed through a single and intuitive user interface. With incredibly high scalability, the platform consistently manages petabytes of data. Compass focuses on enhancing the user experience by eliminating the complexity of operations and delivering award winning cyber protections across on-premises and cloud workloads. Cobalt Iron advises customers to leverage the cloud responsibly and efficiently. The company helps users understand cloud usage, its operational and cost effects, and how it fits in with their overall strategies and service level requirements. From the security standpoint, Compass deeply secures backup operations, infrastructure, and data in both on-premises and cloud environments. In essence, through automation, analytics, optimizations, security, and SaaS delivery, Cobalt Iron is transforming the enterprise data protection experience.

Please elaborate on the functionalities of Compass.

Compass has a multi-component architecture that implements technologies such as analytics, multi-cloud, SaaS, and virtualization.

The first component is the Compass Accelerator, a full backup engine that includes compute, storage, backup, archive, restoration, automation, and analytics capabilities. These Accelerators can be implemented in physical, virtual, or cloud versions, including for all the major cloud platforms. This highly flexible and scalable software-defined-solution provides numerous deployment options for enterprises looking to support private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Ready to plug-in, these Accelerators do not need hardware configurations, storage monitoring, backup software revision management, service and support ticketing, or security software patch updates. Moreover, Accelerators are automatically maintained and updated to ensure that data protection is consistently running the latest versions of software and security – all delivered without any intervention from the customer. The second component of Compass is the Analytics Engine that delivers the flexibility and insights needed for enterprise backup by continuously tuning and optimizing data protection operations through machine learning. It simplifies the complexity of enterprise backup by providing operational intelligence, automated efficiencies, and proactive problem avoidance. The third component is Compass Commander that offers an excellent user experience for managing business outcomes from control to visibility without any complex training or technology skills. Commander utilizes the Analytics Engine for creating or changing schedules, adjusting management policies, and provisioning new systems. With just a few clicks, businesses can extend data protection to new systems and apply role-based access to users by organization, all via Commander. Unlike other players in the market, Cobalt Iron does not leave the implementation of data protection solutions to the partner or customer, rather, the Cobalt Iron deployment team ensures a seamless and rapid deployment of the SaaS-based solution

What is Cobalt Iron’s approach towards security?

With native built-in security, Cobalt Iron Compass has a unique approach that locks down the backup infrastructure, compute, and catalog. In addition to this unique approach, Compass adds ransomware readiness, ransomware detection, ransomware responsiveness, data governance, and auditing capabilities. Together these features are called Compass Cyber Shield™. With other solutions, if the enterprise runs a backup product in the cloud, the infrastructure might not be visible to hackers, but the backup software, the backup catalog, and associated storage might all still be accessible. However, with its Cyber Shield security features, Compass locks down the workloads and makes Compass backups resilient to the cybersecurity points of failure. Since Compass automatically maintains software currency and does not permit users to log directly in, it is also not prone to password stealing.

What is the process that you follow while delivering your solutions?

Compass is delivered as a SaaS model, and its deployment is very simple. The process is similar to a cable or satellite set-top box installment, i.e., getting the box, plugging it into the network and TV, and the box is ready to use. Similarly, clients can easily install Compass Accelerators within a few minutes just by plugging it into the network and power. Since everything is pre-configured and ready to roll after network connectivity, it initiates the final configurations through commands delivered to the Accelerator from the Compass Analytics Engine. Workloads are known to Compass Accelerators only through secure pre-shared keys, ensuring complete security.

Could you give us a customer success story?

A large healthcare provider with hundreds of clinics, remote sites, and massive data centers wanted a hybrid cloud approach to backup. They needed on-premises backups for heavy workloads in their data centers and at many clinics, but wanted to leverage AWS as the backup target for other sites as well as for disaster recovery. With a combination of physical and cloud Compass Accelerators, Compass delivers a unified, comprehensive, and effective solution that orchestrates on-premises backups, backups to and in the cloud, and disaster recovery in the cloud.

What does the future hold for Cobalt Iron?

Compass is a platform that allows us to plug in various technologies that work in tandem with Cobalt Iron developed intellectual property. Focusing on embedding various technologies to deliver extra protection for cloud workloads will further extend the Compass multi-cloud maturity. Further, we have continued security enhancements for public and private cloud environments coming that will generate interest. Compass will continue to lead the enterprise backup market with continuous new automation, security, analytics, and multi-cloud capabilities.