Azure Backup vs Cohesity DataProtect comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 19, 2023

We compared Azure Backup and Cohesity DataProtect based on user reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.

  • Features: Azure Backup is commended for its scalability, comprehensive security options, and non-disruptive backup process. Users also like its seamless integration with various Azure services. Cohesity DataProtect offers instant recovery and built-in integration with Office 365 and Active Directory. Azure Backup needs to improve its backup and file-level restoration procedure. Cohesity DataProtect users have suggested enhancements to its user interface, rollback methodology, and cloud data recovery. Other pain points include file server capacity and legacy platform support.

  • Service and Support: Azure's customer service is generally considered helpful and proactive, but a few users have reported longer wait times and slow issue resolution. The customer service experiences for Cohesity DataProtect have been mostly positive, but some say the quality of Cohesity's support may differ depending on the region.

  • Ease of Deployment: Azure Backup's setup is easy, quick, and can be completed with minimal user involvement.  Most users consider the setup process for Cohesity DataProtect to be easy, although a few found it more complex than other products.

  • Pricing: Azure Backup is a cloud-based solution, so its pricing depends on factors like storage and data consumption. Azure offers competitive pricing and is considered more cost effective than many competing solutions. Cohesity's pricing is higher than its competitors, although some customers consider it affordable.

  • ROI: Azure Backup offers a solid return on investment with its affordable pricing and low initial costs, particularly when upgrading solutions. Cohesity DataProtect provides security against ransomware and efficient file retrieval.

Comparison Results: Azure Backup is an affordable, scalable solution that features an effortless deployment and native integration with Azure services. While reviews of Azure Backup’s features were generally positive, some users reported unsatisfactory experiences with Azure support. Cohesity DataProtect is regarded as an affordable solution that offers instant recovery and superior ransomware protection. However, users say its customer service is inconsistent across regions, and its rollback methodology has room for improvement.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Backup vs. Cohesity DataProtect Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is that it is easy to create a backup by using Azure Backup. It also has a good user interface and nice features for sending notifications when any backup fails or there is a change in the status of virtual machines.""The tool has a lot of features.""You can select the tiering for your backup and manage your cost.""The scalability has been good.""The most valuable feature of Azure Backup is the native backup capabilities.""It's stable.""When it comes to Azure Backup, the advantage is that it's native and it's very easy to configure. We don't require a separate tool or manage something on a separate server. At the backend, it's managed by Microsoft itself, and we don't need to manage it.""This solution is easy to configure and restore. It is a Microsoft product so is easily compatible with other solutions."

More Azure Backup Pros →

"Cohesity's web-scale architecture enables us to scale up as needed.""I have found that the speed of restores, especially files and folders, are extremely fast. This bodes well for us, and our end users are always amazed at how fast you can get them their files.""The most valuable features of Cohesity DataProtect are SpanFS and the handling of hybrid workloads.""It's stable.""Cohesity has very simple reports to help you stay in the know of which servers are being backed up or not.""Cohesity is a cost-effective storage designed for secondary or archival data. It also integrates well with a number of other systems, like VMware, Pure Storage, or AWS with its large array of APIs available to the user.""Its most valuable feature is its ransomware protection, so it has immutable backups.""It is also very easy to determine which VMs are being backed up and which ones aren't. This is helpful to make sure nothing is being missed."

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Cons
"We have a concern with the backup when were are working with VMs that are running in Barracuda Firewall because it usually fails.""The product could improve its performance.""On-prem can be complex to set up but the cloud is simple.""The compression ratio of the backup data should be improved.""I can’t use the solution to restore another native cloud solution. Azure must add this new feature.""I would like to see better integration with more products, and more services.""I believe more options could be available to understand better what's happening in the system. Additionally, automating the client updates and connector updates would be beneficial. Updating the connector from time to time can be challenging, and it could be made more transparent and straightforward for users. Moreover, another drawback lies in the time it takes to test full data backup recovery. Deploying a full recovery takes longer. We need to allocate a longer period for complete data recovery to establish the environment again.""Technical support can be slow to respond at times."

More Azure Backup Cons →

"The tool could benefit from further improvements in AI features, particularly in areas such as a generative AI chat interface. This feature could help answer queries about the data being protected. One feature that would greatly improve our experience with the product is the ability to identify data redundancies through a central console. This feature would help us reduce storage costs by managing redundant data.""At times, you may click the wrong server or click too fast and accidentally restore a cluster of servers. It would be very helpful to have a cancel option under restores.""The error handling could be improved.""I would like to see Microsoft Exchange DAG supported as soon as possible.""Their documentation could be refined.""In terms of the product itself, there have been a handful of patches that have had to be applied outside of the GUI via the command line. It's very straightforward and easy and in the same redundant fashion, but not quite as simple as one or two clicks. I'm hoping that will decrease going forward.""Initial setup can be complex if you need to change IP addresses. Hopefully, they improve that in a future release.""Many of the reports are basic, at most, and at times we had to open a support ticket to help find or develop a report for our needs."

More Cohesity DataProtect Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The pricing of this solution is ok, but I'm expecting that the price will decrease in the future."
  • "The pricing of this solution is good, and it is one of the easiest things that you can sell Azure with."
  • "This is an expensive solution in the Bangladesh marketplace."
  • "We are paying about $100,000 USD per year, just for a couple of servers."
  • "The price is pretty good, maybe $30 for a machine, I can't complain."
  • "It is a bit costly initially, but it is well worth it in the long run, especially for fighting against a number of threats, such as ransomware, which the IT industry is facing."
  • "Price-wise, it's similar to AWS."
  • "The price is somewhat high and could be lower."
  • More Azure Backup Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Licensing is per node and per protected terabyte. You will also pay 10-15% annually for support."
  • "If SQL is in heavy use at your location, I would highly recommend narrowing your PoC testing to Cohesity and Rubrik. They will be competitive on pricing with each other, so really put them through the paces."
  • "The ROI is huge. Not really measurable at this point, but the price of the unit was a fraction of what a couple hours of downtime could result in."
  • "Cohesity came in at the best price."
  • "Cohesity came in at the best price. Setup was included and done in half a day."
  • "Ensure that you understand the per TB licensing model. Also, Exchange backups are not native to Cohesity and require Kroll."
  • "We purchased support from Cohesity to ensure that should we face an issue, we don't have to deal with different service providers."
  • "With respect to pricing, make sure that you look at both Rubrik and Cohesity as they are very similar and are quite competitive."
  • More Cohesity DataProtect Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Veeam has a version for Azure but there are organizations, like ours, that are considering moving to an Azure environment and wonder if Azure Backup is better than Veeam Backup and Replication (Veeam… more »
    Top Answer:It is a stable solution...The product is worth the money you pay for it.
    Top Answer:Azure Backup is a product that is priced at a cheap rate, and it is a great tool. The product is worth the money you pay for it.
    Top Answer:The solution's SQL cloning is great, and its Instant Mount restoration of virtual machines is brilliant.
    Top Answer:We have a capacity license for the solution that we renew annually. On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten.
    Top Answer:I would like alerts if any local accounts on the platform are changed for security. If someone were to change an admin account password, I would like an alert raised for that, which is not available… more »
    Ranking
    7th
    out of 131 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    14,155
    Comparisons
    11,320
    Reviews
    27
    Average Words per Review
    463
    Rating
    8.0
    9th
    out of 131 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    16,117
    Comparisons
    9,928
    Reviews
    12
    Average Words per Review
    434
    Rating
    8.2
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Cohesity
    Learn More
    Overview

    Azure Backup is a scalable backup solution with zero capital investment and minimal operational expenses that can help a company achieve maximal data protection. Azure Backup’s System Center Data Protection Manager provides optional integrations that can enable you to protect both advanced workloads running in your datacenter in VMs as well as those that are on physical servers.

    Azure Backup has many features that make it a most effective product. Included among these is its ability to easily scale up your storage capacity. It taps into the cloud to give you the ability to expand on a massive scale. This can be done without any monitoring or maintenance overhead.

    Benefits of Azure Backup

    Some of the benefits of using Azure Backup include:

    • The ability to control and track the performance of your network from a single centralized location. Azure Backup has a “single pane of glass” interface that enables users to monitor, operate, govern, and analyze their backups from one place. This eliminates any need to add additional management infrastructure. You can manage different workload types, subscriptions, vaults, and regions with Azure’s Backup Center.

    • A wide array of security features allows you to prevent malicious users from doing damage to the system, receive alerts if an unauthorized action takes place, and recover from any damage that results. Azure Backup has authentication requirements built in to protect vital functions, such as the ability to delete backed up data from unauthorized users. If something that impacts the backed up data takes place, users are immediately notified. Azure Backup saves any and all deleted backup data for two weeks. This enables administrators to use recovery points to recover their lost data.

    Reviews from Real Users

    There are a number of characteristics that make Azure Backup extremely effective. Two of these are the flexibility that it offers users and its overall effectiveness.

    PeerSpot user Ayman Y., an IT manager at NOMAC, notes all of the different backup options that Azure Backup offers. He writes, “It has many features. First of all, you can schedule a backup for the client as you like. You can do a backup from the whole virtual machine as an image. You can do a backup only from files and folders. It has every option. All options are available for the backup, for the restore, for the bandwidth utilization to do backups, even virtual machines or a physical machine. If you need to do a backup of the whole image from the virtual machine, all these options are there.”

    PeerSpot user Muzammil M., a senior operations engineer at the AlGosaibi Group, notes the effectiveness of Azure Backup when he writes, “Azure Backup is good because it is entirelycloud-based, which means that you can be 99.9% sure that your backup is safe. This is the reason that I suggest its use for companies that need to back up critical data.”

    What is Cohesity DataProtect?

    Cohesity DataProtect is a top-level, sophisticated, software-defined backup and recovery solution created for cloud environments. Cohesity DataProtect is made to hyperscale and is one the most thorough policy-based protection solutions available on the market today.

    Cohesity DataProtect melds multiple-point products into a single software that is able to be deployed as on-premise or consumed as a service.

    Top Features:

    Hyperscale made easy: Cohesity DataProtect improves data protection by doing away with the need for backup silos and administers backup and recovery with a single user-friendly, easy-to-understand interface. Cohesity DataProtect provides extensive 24/7 enterprise-class protection for a large, varying set of sources, including virtual and physical servers, NAS and SaaS workloads, relational and distributed databases, and traditional and containerized applications.

    Super fast recovery: Cohesity DataProtect offers near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs) and near-instant recovery time objectives (RTOs) to satisfy your business service-level agreements (SLAs). Using Cohesity Helios’ unified data plane and control plane you can immediately search and recover data on any Cohesity cluster, located anywhere. DataProtect distinctively minimizes downtime by immediately mass restoring any amount of virtual machines (VMs) to any point in time, and lowers data protection costs by as much as 70% or more.

    Backup as a Service: Feel free to take advantage of the elasticity of the public cloud and the cost-effective value of Cohesity DataProtect when delivered as a service. When you choose an OPEX option, you can eliminate the need for on-premises hardware. There is a SaaS option that will allow you to very simply configure your backup workloads and immediately begin protecting your vital all-important data and applications.

     It’s as easy as: sign-up, connect, and protect!

    Ransomware protection: Cohesity DataProtect offers stellar recovery at scale. The solution is so intuitive, it has machine learning-based anomaly detection to stop incidents before they happen. Cohesity DataProtection can provide immutable backups, Datalock write once, read many (WORM), encryption, and role-based access control (RBAC).

    Cohesity DataProtect integrates well with many of today’s top solutions, including, but not limited to: 

    • Hypervisors: VMware vSphere (5.5 and later), Microsoft Hyper-V (2019, 2016, 2012 R2), Nutanix AHV and RHeV 
    • Kubernetes-based data and application state
    • Cloud: AWS EC2, Amazon RDS, Azure VM, and Google Compute
    • Physical: Windows, Linux(RHEL, CentOS, OEL, Debian, Ubuntu), AIX (7.x), and Solaris
    • Databases: Oracle (11g R2, 12c), Oracle RAC and SQL (2008 or later)
    • Distributed Databases (NoSQL and Hadoop): MongoDB, CouchbaseDB, Apache, Cassandra, Cloudera, and Hortonworks. 
    • Bare Machine Recovery: Windows and Linux 
    • Applications: MS Exchange (2010 SP3 or later), MSFT Active Directory, Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, Groups), SalesForce (SFDC), and SAP HANA 
    • Primary storage: Pure FlashArray, HPE Nimble, and Cisco Hyperflex 
    • NAS: Pure FlashBlade, NetApp, Isilon, IBM GPFS, Google EFS, Elastifile, and generic solutions*

    Reviews from Real Users

    One reviewer, who is head of IT infrastructure at Kampmann says, “Cohesity really is a Next-Gen Data Management Software,” and goes on to indicate that Cohesity “works flawlessly with easy replication of backups and numerous supported backup sources.”

    Another user, who is a senior network engineer at a legal firm, relates that "Cohesity is a robust and feature-rich solution"





    Sample Customers
    Russell Reynolds Associates, Somerset County Council, Kardem, PCL Construction
    Tribune Media
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company30%
    Manufacturing Company15%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Construction Company11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company17%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    University8%
    Construction Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization33%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Government6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business45%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise35%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise46%
    Buyer's Guide
    Azure Backup vs. Cohesity DataProtect
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Backup vs. Cohesity DataProtect and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Azure Backup is ranked 7th in Backup and Recovery with 50 reviews while Cohesity DataProtect is ranked 9th in Backup and Recovery with 67 reviews. Azure Backup is rated 8.0, while Cohesity DataProtect is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Azure Backup writes "Easy to install, performs well, and the technical support is helpful ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cohesity DataProtect writes "Easy to use, offers good scalability and responsive support ". Azure Backup is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Rubrik, Commvault Cloud, Acronis Cyber Protect and Microsoft DPM, whereas Cohesity DataProtect is most compared with Rubrik, Veeam Backup & Replication, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain), Commvault Cloud and IBM Spectrum Protect. See our Azure Backup vs. Cohesity DataProtect report.

    See our list of best Backup and Recovery vendors.

    We monitor all Backup and Recovery reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.