A Vision For The Future Of Enterprise AI Security With Sanjay Poonen

Dec 16, 2025

Sanjay Poonen, CEO of Cohesity and former executive at SAP and VMware, dives into the evolving landscape of enterprise AI security. He discusses transforming 'dark' secondary data into business intelligence with generative AI and emphasizes the vital role of data in enhancing security measures. Poonen explains Cohesity's integration of Veritas' NetBackup for unified scanning and AI analytics, and their collaboration with NVIDIA to build AI applications. His vision highlights the intersection of data protection and AI, making data the gold of the modern economy.

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INSIGHT

Data Is The New Gold

Data is the gold of the new economy and drives both AI and security advances.
The more data you operate on, the better AI models and threat detection become.

INSIGHT

Unlocking Value In Secondary Data

Secondary 'dark' data under the iceberg holds vast, often untapped historical value.
RAG techniques can extract insights directly from backups without always using hot GPU cycles.

ADVICE

Start AI With Unstructured Data

Prioritize starting AI work on unstructured data like PDFs, docs, images, and video.
Use generative AI for search, summarization, and analytics before moving to structured datasets.

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Episode Summary

The future of cyber resilience lies at the intersection of data protection, security, and AI. In this conversation, Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen joins Danny Allan to explore how organisations can unlock new value by unifying these domains. Sanjay outlines Cohesity’s evolution from data protection to security in the ransomware era, to today’s AI-focused capabilities, and explains why the company’s vast secondary data platform is becoming a foundation for next-generation analytics.

Show Notes

In this episode, Sanjay Poonen shares his journey from SAP and VMware to leading Cohesity, highlighting the company's mission to protect, secure, and provide insights on the world's data. He explains the concept of the "data iceberg," where visible production data represents only a small fraction of enterprise assets, while vast amounts of "dark" secondary data remain locked in backups and archives. Poonen discusses how Cohesity is transforming this secondary data from a storage efficiency problem into a source of business intelligence using generative AI and RAG, particularly for unstructured data like documents and images.

The conversation delves into the technical integration of Veritas' NetBackup data mover onto Cohesity's file system, creating a unified platform for security scanning and AI analytics. Poonen also elaborates on Cohesity's collaboration with NVIDIA, explaining how they are building AI applications like Gaia on the NVIDIA stack to enable on-premises and sovereign cloud deployments. This approach allows highly regulated industries, such as banking and the public sector, to utilize advanced AI capabilities without exposing sensitive data to public clouds.

Looking toward the future, Poonen outlines Cohesity's "three acts": data protection, security (ransomware resilience), and AI-driven insights. He and Danny Allan discuss the critical importance of identity resilience, noting that in an AI-driven world, the security perimeter shifts from network boundaries to the identities of both human users and autonomous AI agents.

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