Cohesity & Semperis launch platform to defend Active Directory

Cohesity and Semperis have launched Cohesity Identity Resilience, a new product aimed at strengthening the protection of enterprise identity infrastructure such as Microsoft Active Directory.

The solution brings together Cohesity's capabilities in data security and recovery with Semperis' specialisation in Active Directory protection, offering a consolidated platform to help organisations counter the increasing threat of cyberattacks targeting identity systems. The platform is now available for purchase through Cohesity and is designed to help enterprises harden their defences, speed up their response to breaches, and conduct in-depth forensic analysis following incidents.

Active Directory is a fundamental component in most enterprise IT environments, serving as the backbone for authentication and access control to vital systems and data. Its central role has made it an attractive target for cybercriminals, whose attacks on Active Directory can lead to ransomware infections, data theft, or persistent business interruption.

Hybrid protection

Cohesity Identity Resilience offers support for both on-premises Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID in cloud and hybrid environments. Through this approach, organisations gain the ability to protect and recover their entire identity system landscape, including objects that span across synchronised directories.

Peter Hanna, Vice President of Partners, Asia Pacific, Japan & Greater China at Cohesity, said, "Across the Asia Pacific region, identity access is emerging as one of the fastest-growing threat vectors, as cyber criminals work relentlessly to exploit vulnerabilities in today's complex IT environments. This makes protecting foundational identity systems like Active Directory absolutely critical. With Cohesity Identity Resilience, we can now offer our partners and their customers a market defining solution that uniquely combines proactive protection, rapid recovery and post-incident analysis."

Cohesity Identity Resilience builds on Semperis' experience in Active Directory security, including automated recovery features designed to minimise operational downtime and provide a reliable restoration pathway following a successful cyberattack. The solution delivers a range of capabilities:

• Proactive hardening: The system scans hybrid and on-premises Active Directory environments for hundreds of exposure indicators and provides risk assessments, remediation instructions, and prioritisation of attack paths to privileged assets.
• Secure, isolated backups: Cohesity's platform maintains immutable backups, supporting cyber vaulting techniques to separate backup repositories from compromised environments.
• Rapid and secure recovery: The solution restores entire Active Directory forests, reducing downtime and supporting quick resumption of operations.
• Forensic and incident response tools: It removes attacker artefacts from environments, restoring Active Directory to a trusted state.
• Comprehensive post-breach analysis: Post-attack forensic tools allow assessment and validation of Active Directory before resuming production.

Gerry Sillars, Vice President Asia Pacific & Japan at Semperis, stated,

"Active Directory remains one of the most targeted assets in modern cyberattacks. Cohesity Identity Resilience, powered by Semperis, enables organisations to strengthen their resilience, ensuring they can withstand, respond to, and recover from identity-based threats with confidence."

The collaboration between Cohesity and Semperis, which began in 2024, aims to directly address vulnerabilities inherent in hybrid identity environments, especially as organisations adopt increasingly complex IT and cloud architectures.

Scott Harrison, Director, Hybrid Infrastructure Solutions at CDW, commented,

"Active Directory compromises often turn into prolonged business disruptions that are costly and difficult to contain. With Cohesity Identity Resilience, powered by Semperis, we see a solution that directly addresses this gap - helping enterprises strengthen defenses, recover quickly, and maintain confidence in their core identity systems. It's the kind of capability our customers have been asking for, and it represents an important step forward in building true cyber resilience."

The companies have also made free tools available to help organisations test the security of their identity infrastructure, including an attack path analysis tool and an identity security assessment.