Cohesity and Semperis Team Up to Protect Your Data Nervous System

Your Active Directory is having a moment. Not the good kind.

While you’ve been busy hardening perimeters and patching vulnerabilities, cybercriminals have zeroed in on the central nervous system of your entire IT operation. Compromise Active Directory, and suddenly every door in your digital house swings wide open. It’s the skeleton key attack that keeps CISOs awake at night—and for good reason.

Cohesity and Semperis just announced they’re doing something about it. Their new joint offering, Cohesity Identity Resilience, aims to be the fire extinguisher and the fireproof safe for your identity infrastructure. It’s now available for purchase, combining Cohesity’s data resilience platform with Semperis’ Active Directory protection expertise into what they’re calling the strongest solution of its kind.

“Identity Security is one of the key battlegrounds of cyberattacks for enterprises and governments,” says Sanjay Poonen, Cohesity’s chief executive officer. The pitch is straightforward: prevention, resilience, and recovery without turning your security stack into a Jenga tower of complexity.

Active Directory manages authentication and access to basically everything in most enterprise environments. When it gets compromised, attackers don’t just get a foothold. They get the master controls. Ransomware deployment, data exfiltration, prolonged business disruption: the whole nightmare playlist.

Peter Hanna, Cohesity’s vice president for APAC partners, explains: “Identity access is emerging as one of the fastest-growing threat vectors” across the Asia Pacific region. Cyber criminals aren’t slowing down, and they’re getting better at exploiting the sprawl of modern hybrid environments.

So, Cohesity Identity Resilience tackles Active Directory protection across hybrid environments, covering on-premises setups and extending to Microsoft Entra ID in the cloud. It protects what Semperis chief executive officer Mickey Bresman calls “so many paths” that attackers can exploit in compromised Active Directory environments.

Proactive AD hardening scans for hundreds of indicators of exposure, assigns risk scores, and maps out attack paths to your Tier 0 privileged assets. Secure, immutable backups with cyber vaulting capability give you isolation when you need it most. The rapid recovery feature promises to restore AD forests with minimal downtime after an attack or catastrophic failure.

But the interesting part is the forensics capability. The solution cleanses your systems of attacker artifacts and validates AD integrity before you bring production back online. It’s the difference between putting out a fire and making sure the arsonist leaves the building.

Scott Harrison, director of hybrid infrastructure solutions at CDW, notes, “Active Directory compromises often turn into prolonged business disruptions that are costly and difficult to contain.” His customers have been asking for exactly this kind of unified capability.

The partnership between Cohesity and Semperis started in 2024, and this product represents the deepening of that collaboration. By integrating Semperis’ Active Directory technology into the Cohesity Data Cloud platform, they’re betting that enterprises want streamlined protection rather than another point solution to manage.

The timing isn’t accidental. As hybrid and multi-cloud environments become the norm rather than the exception, the attack surface around identity infrastructure continues to expand. Protecting the source of authority for objects synchronized across your entire AD and Entra ID landscape becomes existential.

For CDOs and data engineers dealing with increasingly sophisticated identity-based attacks, the message is clear: your directory services need the same level of protection you’ve been giving your data. Because in 2026, they’re basically the same thing.

Image credit: iStockphoto/metamorworks