Challenges

H.I.G. Capital is a leading global alternative assets investment firm. For more than a decade H.I.G. Capital had been backing up its virtual machines in the cloud, with LiveVault. “Our long-time solution hadn’t kept up with the times,” says Luis Suarez, CIO. “Resolving periodic hiccups took too long. If a virtual machine failed, our engineering team had to rebuild it from the backed-up data, which took days. And with rising cyber threats, we needed ransomware protection.”

Solution

Mr. Suarez and his chief information security officer (CISO), Marcos Marrero, worked closely to select a new data protection solution. “In our industry, we get technology requests with a short fuse,” Suarez says. “The only way to succeed is with an extremely collaborative relationship between IT and security.” Narrowing the list to Cohesity and other market-leading products, H.I.G. Capital put them through their paces in a proof of concept. “Cohesity DataProtect came out on top,” Suarez says. “Integration with VMware vSphere was a big plus. When our engineers saw Cohesity restore an entire virtual server with a few clicks, their jaws dropped. They couldn’t believe that was all there was to it.”

H.I.G. Capital started with Cohesity DataProtect, backing up 30 TB of virtual machines and databases in two data centers. A few servers running in branch offices are backed up in the cloud with Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service. No matter where they’re stored, Cohesity backups can’t be encrypted or deleted as part of a ransomware attack.

When Cohesity FortKnox on AWS was introduced a year later, H.I.G Capital adopted it for even stronger security. “Not only does FortKnox create immutable backups like DataProtect, it also stores them in an isolated vault on AWS, strengthening our security stance,” says Marrero. “We like that Cohesity is always innovating— not resting on its laurels.”

Results

Just three months after deployment, H.I.G. Capital saw firsthand the value of Cohesity for business continuity. “When a faulty patch impacted our Citrix servers, with a few clicks, we restored them from a snapshot we knew to be secure,” Suarez says. “The first server was back online in an hour and all of them within a day. Before we had Cohesity, our engineers would have spent two long days rebuilding the servers from scratch, testing them, and checking for security compliance.” Restoring virtual servers with Cohesity is so quick that engineers now do it routinely if they can’t resolve a server issue after 30 minutes of troubleshooting.

Ransomware protection benefits H.I.G. Capital, its investors, and the companies they invest in. “Our philosophy is that the more difficult we make it for bad actors, the better,” says Marrero. “By storing immutable backups in an isolated vault on AWS, Cohesity FortKnox adds yet another layer of protection.”

The engineering team likes that Cohesity spares them from having to reinvent the wheel. “We don’t need to spend time on the nuts and bolts of backing up in the cloud because Cohesity FortKnox does it for us,” Suarez says. “I also recommend FortKnox to the companies we invest in to help them work smarter while strengthening security. A single product that can do both of those things is a winner.”

About H.I.G.

H.I.G. Capital is a leading global alternative investment firm with $59 billion of equity capital under management. The H.I.G. family of funds includes private equity, growth equity, real estate, debt/ credit, lending, and biohealth. The company invests in companies in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.

Key Benefits

• < 1 hour restoration of virtual servers
• Ransomware protection
• Time savings for engineering team