As organisations face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats and growing regulatory requirements, cyber resilience has become a strategic priority. In Luxembourg, Anidris x Easi supports organisations in strengthening their data protection and recovery capabilities, combining deep technical expertise with a strong understanding of local business and regulatory environments.

Building on its partnership with both Veritas and Cohesity, Anidris x Easi helps organisations move beyond traditional backup approaches towards a more comprehensive cyber resilience strategy, one that not only protects data, but also ensures that it remains secure, recoverable and usable when it matters most.

Interview with Peter Schellemans, Sales Engineer at Cohesity, to discuss why the partnership with Anidris x Easi is particularly valuable in the Luxembourg market, and how organisations can assess their cyber resilience maturity, prepare for ransomware attacks and ensure the rapid recovery of their most critical services.

 

Peter, what falls within your scope at Cohesity?

I look after Benelux with the majority of my customers being in Belgium and Luxembourg. We have several account managers, but my focus is pre-sales from a technical perspective. Asking good questions to help clients understand their own architecture and actions needed with the relevant follow-up within which we operate; the public sector from industry and the financial sector from hospitals. My remit, as is the remit for my entire team, is to fully support all customers utilising NetBackup or Data Protect and ensure long term AI driven cyber security and business resilience across all sectors and all customers of all sizes across my region.

 

Why did you choose Anidris for this BE / LU partnership? And what is the added value for the market?

Historically, Anidris was already a partner of Veritas, and also of Cohesity, even before the acquisition of Veritas by Cohesity. Anidris was already present with our solution at several key customers in Luxembourg. Next to that, we value the professionalism of Anidris and the deep technical expertise, and of course their large network and many contacts they have in the Luxembourg market. So, it is not more then logical that after the acquisition we continued the partnership with Anidris.

 

You often hear people refer to the 5-step maturity model within Cyber resilience. Could you explain what this model is and how it helps organisations assess and improve their level of cyber resilience?

• Protect all data; ensure data is always recoverable; detect and investigate threats; practice application resilience; optimise data risk posture!
  First of all, you need to make sure that all of your data is protected. Today, data can be everywhere, on-prem, in the cloud, in SaaS applications, databases and different environments. You need to know where that data is and make sure it is all properly backed up and protected.

 

• Make sure your data is always recoverable.
  The second point is to harden the environment where your backups are kept. Attackers are increasingly targeting backups because they know this is your last line of defence. So you need things like immutability, multifactor authentication and separation of duties. You should also have multiple copies of your data, including an isolated or air-gapped copy, so that even if somebody gets into the production environment, you still have clean data that you can recover.

 

• Detect and investigate threats.
  Then you need to be aware of what is happening inside the backup environment. You should regularly scan your backups for malware, vulnerabilities and unusual changes, and you need the ability to investigate specific threats. The objective is very simple: if something happens, you want to know that you can recover quickly using clean data.

 

• Practice application resilience.
  You also need to test the recovery process regularly. You don’t want the first time you try to recover your infrastructure, applications and data to be during a real ransomware attack. Where possible, automate and orchestrate the recovery process and rehearse it. You need to understand which systems have to come back first so that you can restore the minimum viable service as quickly as possible.

 

• Optimise your data risk posture.
  And finally, optimisation. Your environment is changing every day – there is new data, new infrastructure and potentially new risks. So you need to continuously review where your data is, how it is protected and what level of risk you have. Technologies such as Data Security Posture Management and data classification can help you understand what data you have and, if there is an incident, exactly what may have been affected.

 

What new capabilities does the combination of Cohesity DataProtect and Veritas NetBackup bring to customers, particularly in areas such as cyber resilience, workload protection and recovery?

The acquisition took place two years ago. Both companies have a lot of experience in data protection, and the combination of the two brings a lot of interesting solutions for customers.

Veritas was traditionally offering scale-up solutions, while Cohesity was offering scale-out solutions, so it really depends on the use case. Today, we can offer solutions to customers of all sizes and across a very broad set of workloads, including the most modern workloads, SaaS and PaaS solutions. We can offer solutions in the cloud and on-premises, so it is not an either-or choice with DataProtect.

We also offer Helios as a management solution. It is a multi-domain, multi-cluster management tool that allows you to monitor the environment and look for anomalies.  across NetBackup or DataProtect. Our customers can write backup images from NetBackup to the DataProtect platform, and have fully integrated Malware scanning, data vaulting and security controls regardless of the data mover they are using .

 

How does Cohesity DataProtect help organisations recover critical data quickly after a ransomware attack?

As I said before, the fourth step of the maturity model is about recovery. With DataProtect, you can instantly restore VMs, but today it is not just about backing up and restoring. It is becoming more complicated. The real question is: can I restore clean data?

There is a whole procedure you need to follow. You can look at your latest backup, but what happens if that backup is infected with malware? Is the malware known or unknown? We scan the data in different ways to look for these threats. The objective is to restore a clean image. If it is not clean, then you need to go further back in time until you find a clean recovery point. When I speak to many CISOs, they also want to understand what happened. They want to investigate the incident, restore the data into a staging environment, and implement patching if needed.

So you need to make sure the data is clean, and you need to make sure you are recovering into a staged environment. There is much more involved than simply being fast. Our automated agent can also help automate the recovery process.”

 

A key question for banks in the context of protecting critical data is how quickly they can return to a minimum viable service. What is your advice on how they should plan for this?

There are two steps we discuss with our clients. The first step is to identify the critical workloads. These are usually the databases and applications that are essential for running the business. The second step is to define the other assets that need to be in place upfront. These tend to relate to people and processes, which we describe as the “digital jump bag”. This includes things such as response plans: who reports to whom, who needs to do what if the whole production environment is down, who has the network configurations, and who has access to the staging area. This must all be decided upfront.

The recovery process also has to be tested to comply with NIS2 and DORA, so that you can go to your auditors and prove that you have carried out the test. We have services to help you do all of this.

 

Many Luxembourg financial organisations still have a data room in the basement because their compliance teams have been concerned about the cloud from a security and sovereignty perspective. How can Cohesity help solve some of these issues?

You would be surprised by how many customers using cloud solutions say that they still want to have copies on-premises.  Customers have complete freedom to choose where the backup solution resides, and can run our DataProtect solution in a self-managed way on prem or in the cloud, or can choose to have it run as a managed service”  A fully hybrid solution is also possible. We have customers who have a solution on-premises, a backup in the cloud, and then another copy on tape. In Helios, you can then look at and manage the full environment.”

 

Do you have an example you can share?

A financial institution wanted to strengthen the protection of sensitive customer and business data while reducing the operational burden of managing backups. With a relatively lean IT team, its existing approach required 10–12 hours of management every week, including time spent troubleshooting failed backups. At the same time, the organisation wanted greater confidence that it could recover quickly following a cyberattack or major system failure.

By moving to Cohesity, the institution was able to simplify data protection while significantly improving cyber resilience. Backup management for both on-premises and cloud-based workloads was brought together through a single interface, giving the IT team a clear view of the overall environment. The organisation also implemented multiple immutable copies of its data, providing additional protection against ransomware and other attacks.

The operational impact was significant. Weekly backup management time fell from 10–12 hours to around 10 minutes, freeing IT staff to focus on projects that improve automation and the customer experience. Upgrades could also be completed without disruption, reducing the need for weekend maintenance.

Most importantly for a financial institution, Cohesity helped improve recovery capabilities. If a critical production database is compromised or fails, the organisation can restore a clean copy with a recovery point objective of just five minutes. This provides much greater confidence that essential banking services can be restored quickly while minimising potential data loss.

The organisation also reduced the impact of backups on its network. Previously, full backups caused network utilisation to rise sharply. With Cohesity, only changed data needs to be backed up, helping applications and online services perform consistently.

The result is a simpler, more resilient data protection environment: dramatically less administration, stronger protection against cyber threats, and faster recovery of critical services.