In today’s data-driven world, companies are swimming in mountains of information, yet most of it remains untapped and underutilized. Everyone is talking about AI, but many organizations aren’t quite sure how to effectively harness it. At IP Pathways, we keep getting asked about AI — while most of our solutions have AI integrated at their core, we also offer several that take the AI journey to the next level. Enter Cohesity Gaia, a generative AI platform designed to unlock the power of your backup and archival data, turning what was once “dark data” into actionable insights.
The Challenge: Data Everywhere, Insight Nowhere
Organizations often store data across backups, archives and siloed repositories. However, only about 32% of this data is actively used for analytics or business intelligence, leaving most of it as untapped “dark data” (IDC, 2023). This underutilization creates a major barrier: according to Gartner, 85% of organizations report data silos and poor accessibility as key obstacles slowing digital transformation (Gartner, 2024).
Meanwhile, Forrester found that over 60% of data-driven initiatives fail or underperform due to fragmented data and poor data quality (Forrester, 2022). Executives want faster insights, but IT teams wrestle with managing vast, scattered data securely and compliantly.
Industry analysts highlight that this gap between data availability and insight generation is one of the biggest hurdles slowing digital transformation efforts today.
Introducing Cohesity Gaia: Conversational AI for Enterprise Data
Cohesity Gaia tackles this challenge head-on by acting as a secure, AI-powered assistant that works directly on your backup data. Built into the Cohesity platform, Gaia indexes your enterprise data lake, including backups, files, logs and archives, making it instantly searchable and accessible. Cohesity’s customers are already seeing the benefits:
• Cost Savings: Gaia eliminates the need for expensive analytics silos and duplicate data warehouses by querying data in place, dramatically cutting infrastructure costs.
• Boosted Productivity: Analysts and IT teams reclaim hours spent on manual data hunts, accelerating investigation, reporting, and decision-making.
• Faster Decisions: Executives can now access near real-time answers, enabling quicker responses to market shifts and operational issues.
• Data Monetization: Companies transform secondary data from a cost center into a revenue driver by uncovering trends and opportunities hidden in their archives.
• Improved Cyber Resilience: In ransomware recovery scenarios, Gaia helps rapidly identify compromised files and available backups, reducing downtime and risk.
• Simplified Compliance: Automated, searchable archives ease audit burdens and speed regulatory responses.
The National Retail Federation (NRF) leveraged Gaia to unify massive retail datasets across member organizations, running complex analytics without taxing live systems. This empowered NRF to discover new insights into customer behavior and supply chain trends, improving member services and forecasting — all while slashing data management costs. Another enterprise used Gaia’s immutable backup indexes for ransomware forensics, restoring critical systems within hours instead of days, preserving operations and customer trust. Global research firms have also benefited by breaking down data silos across international teams, enabling rapid access to decades of R&D archives, resulting in accelerated innovation and avoiding duplication of efforts.
What Makes Gaia Different?
Cohesity Gaia stands out for its secure, scalable architecture that combines:
• A unified, indexed data lake spanning on-prem and multi-cloud environments
• Advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) AI that grounds answers firmly in your actual data
• Conversational natural language access that requires no coding or specialized skills
• Enterprise-grade security and governance trusted by all three-letter government agencies, including zero-trust access controls, encrypted storage and auditability — all ensuring your sensitive data never leaves your secure environment.
Unlike other AI offerings that risk data exposure by moving data outside your control, Gaia keeps AI processing safely within your Cohesity ecosystem, making it ideal for highly regulated industries.
Industry Reactions and Outlook
Tech leaders praise Cohesity Gaia as a game-changer in “activating dark data.” Analysts point to Gaia’s approach as a rare solution that balances business value, usability, and security — three critical factors often at odds in AI adoption. Executives excited by the prospect of accelerating decision-making and uncovering new revenue streams see Gaia as a key enabler of data-driven transformation, while CIOs appreciate the built-in governance and seamless cloud scalability that reduce risk and complexity. As enterprises grapple with data overload and rising AI expectations, platforms like Gaia that unlock existing data assets safely and effectively are poised to lead the next wave of innovation.
In Summary
Cohesity Gaia offers a compelling path forward for organizations eager to harness AI without sacrificing security or incurring massive new costs. With real-world results already emerging across industries, Gaia is worth investigating as a way to transform your backup data into your most powerful business asset.
