Cohesity is expanding data protection across Microsoft’s cloud, productivity, identity and development platforms while extending its AI data strategy through an integration between Cohesity Gaia Catalog and Azure Databricks. Announced ahead of Microsoft Ignite 2026, the updates cover Azure storage and Kubernetes services, Microsoft 365 recovery, Entra ID, GitHub and Azure DevOps. The broader strategy connects cyber resilience with governed access to enterprise data for AI and analytics.
Cohesity is broadening its data protection capabilities across Microsoft’s cloud, productivity, identity and development platforms while extending its AI data strategy through an integration between Cohesity Gaia Catalog and Azure Databricks. Announced ahead of Microsoft Ignite 2026, the updates cover Azure storage and Kubernetes services, Microsoft 365 recovery, Entra ID, GitHub and Azure DevOps. The broader strategy connects cyber resilience with governed access to enterprise data for AI and analytics.
Extending Protection Across Azure Services
The latest enhancements expand Cohesity’s coverage of Microsoft Azure environments, including Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). For Kubernetes workloads, the company highlights application-consistent backups and granular recovery of resources, addressing the operational complexity of restoring containerized applications and their associated configurations.
The expanded portfolio builds on Cohesity’s existing support for Azure virtual machines and database services. It also adds cloud-native protection in Azure Government for services including Azure SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Table Storage and Cosmos DB.
This expansion is relevant to organizations operating hybrid and cloud-native environments, where recovery plans must account for more than virtual machines and conventional databases. Object storage, managed databases and Kubernetes resources can each hold business-critical application data or configuration. Their recovery requirements differ, making workload-specific protection and restoration important components of a broader resilience strategy.
DevOps and Identity Become Part of the Recovery Strategy
Cohesity is also previewing protection capabilities for GitHub and Azure DevOps. The initial scope includes GitHub repositories and entire Azure DevOps organizations, covering pull requests, boards, wikis and pipelines. The company says customers will be able to maintain isolated, immutable copies and use flexible recovery options.
The preview is significant because source code and development workflows are increasingly central to business operations. A security incident that affects repositories, build pipelines or project-management assets can disrupt software delivery even when production data remains available. Protecting these assets adds another layer to recovery planning, although the capabilities’ preview status means organizations should confirm availability and feature coverage before relying on them operationally.
Identity recovery is another focus. Cohesity says its Microsoft Entra ID protection can restore permanently deleted objects synchronized with on-premises Active Directory. It also supports assigning a new password when restoring an Entra ID user account, helping administrators reduce the risk of continued access through compromised credentials. Support for Microsoft Intune configuration objects is also included in the expanded Entra ID backup capabilities.
Identity is a critical part of cyber recovery because restoring files and applications alone may not return an organization to a trusted operating state. Access policies, user accounts and device configurations can all affect whether recovered systems can be used safely.
More Granular Microsoft 365 Recovery and Governance
For Microsoft 365, Cohesity is adding threat scanning across Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive, alongside protection for the Preservation Hold Library in OneDrive and SharePoint Online. The company also highlights metadata preservation during recovery across OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and Groups.
Additional enhancements include expanded use of Microsoft Graph APIs and multi-geo support. These changes are intended to support recovery across distributed Microsoft 365 environments and help organizations maintain data governance requirements.
Cohesity is also addressing the accumulation of redundant, obsolete and trivial (ROT) information. Its data security posture management capabilities can identify ROT data, while Cohesity Cloud Services can use policy-based archiving and data stubbing to reduce the volume of content maintained in active Microsoft 365 environments.
This has implications for enterprise AI deployments. Tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot depend on access to relevant organizational information, but large volumes of outdated or duplicated content can complicate information management and governance. Identifying and tiering unnecessary data may help organizations improve the quality and manageability of the information they retain. It does not, by itself, guarantee more accurate AI outputs.
Gaia Catalog Connects Enterprise Data With Azure Databricks
Beyond backup and recovery, Cohesity is extending its platform into AI and analytics through the Gaia Catalog integration with Azure Databricks.
The integration is designed to let organizations discover, curate and publish enterprise datasets from Cohesity Data Cloud for use in Azure Databricks. Curated datasets appear as an external data source, while the underlying data remains in Cohesity’s environment. Cohesity says this approach avoids the need to build new extract, transform and load (ETL) pipelines simply to move or duplicate the data for analytics workflows.
The distinction matters for organizations with substantial volumes of secondary or backup data. Such information may contain historical business records and other material useful for analytics, but making it available to AI teams can involve additional data movement, storage and governance work.
Gaia Catalog is part of Cohesity’s broader Gaia strategy. The company also points to its existing Microsoft 365 Copilot integration, which enables employees to query enterprise information using natural language. Cohesity says role-based and file-level permissions are respected so responses reflect the user’s existing access rights.
For enterprises, the value proposition is not simply connecting another data source to an AI platform. It is making information discoverable and usable while retaining controls over where data resides and who can access it.
Microsoft Ignite Puts Resilience and AI Data in Focus
Cohesity plans to demonstrate its expanded Microsoft capabilities at Microsoft Ignite 2026, taking place November 17–19 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The company will exhibit at booth 5215 in the Microsoft Ignite Hub.
It will also participate in a session titled “Build resilience and recover Microsoft operations after compromise,” scheduled for November 19 from 10:45 to 11:10 a.m. Pacific Time. The session will address protection and recovery across Microsoft 365, Azure, Active Directory and Entra ID.
The announcement reflects a wider enterprise technology challenge: organizations need to protect increasingly distributed data and applications while making reliable information available to AI systems. Cohesity is positioning its Microsoft integrations around both requirements—recovering critical services after disruption and enabling governed access to enterprise data for analytics and AI.
The practical impact will depend on deployment availability, recovery testing, integration requirements and how well customers can enforce permissions across their environments. Still, the combination of broader workload protection and AI-oriented data access gives Cohesity a wider role in Microsoft’s enterprise ecosystem than backup alone.
Market Landscape
Enterprise data resilience is expanding beyond traditional backup software. Organizations increasingly need coordinated protection for cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications, developer environments and identity systems. At the same time, AI initiatives are creating demand for governed access to enterprise information stored across primary and secondary data environments.
Cohesity’s announcement sits at the intersection of three market developments:
- Cyber resilience: Recovery planning increasingly includes cloud-native applications, identity services and development assets—not just files and virtual machines.
- Data governance for AI: Organizations need to identify relevant enterprise information and preserve access controls when making it available to analytics and generative AI platforms.
- Cloud ecosystem integration: Microsoft customers are looking for tools that work across Azure, Microsoft 365, Entra ID and development platforms without creating fragmented protection strategies.
Top Insights
- Cohesity is extending Azure protection to Blob Storage, Data Lake Storage, AKS and additional Azure Government database services.
- GitHub and Azure DevOps protection is in preview, extending recovery planning to source code and development assets.
- Microsoft 365 enhancements include threat scanning, metadata-preserving recovery, multi-geo support and protection for additional content.
- Gaia Catalog connects curated Cohesity datasets with Azure Databricks while keeping underlying data in Cohesity Data Cloud.
- The announcement links cyber recovery with governed enterprise data access, two increasingly important foundations for enterprise AI adoption.
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