Singapore – HashiCorp, an IBM company, has validated the interoperability of Cohesity Data Cloud’s cloud rebuild capabilities with Terraform Self-Managed, according to Cohesity.
Cohesity says it is the first cloud recovery method IBM has validated for interoperability with the self-hosted platform, which defines and manages cloud infrastructure as code. Cloud rebuild is part of Cohesity Data Cloud Enterprise Edition.
The validated approach splits recovery between two tools. Terraform recreates the compromised declared configuration, while Cohesity Data Cloud restores the latest usable application data from backup.
The announcement follows a Vanson Bourne survey of 3,200 security and IT decision-makers. It found that 83% of surveyed organisations expect their recovery plans to need moderate or significant changes to handle attacks that use AI to find and exploit software weaknesses, while only 3% say their plans are ready today.
Cloud recovery also lags, according to Cohesity. When an attack compromises a cloud application, IT teams often rebuild it by hand or rely on tools that piece the environment back together using bespoke methods.
Cloud rebuild instead uses an organisation’s infrastructure-as-code files, which define its cloud networks, servers and access permissions, as the blueprint for recovery. Terraform applies the organisation’s reviewed and approved code to recreate the declared configuration, and Cohesity Data Cloud restores the latest usable backed-up data.
Cohesity says this returns the application to a trusted state rather than to a copy that may already contain an attacker’s changes. By contrast, some recovery tools restore a copy of production as it looked just before an attack, which can include errors or changes made by the attacker.
On the technical side, cloud rebuild reads applications through Terraform’s official interface and runs customers’ code unchanged, which Cohesity says maintains record accuracy. Administrators can also integrate it into existing incident response and recovery workflows.
“Attackers using AI move faster than any team can rebuild by hand. Organizations have already codified exactly what their cloud environments should look like in Terraform. Cohesity uses that code to recreate the declared configuration, then restores the latest usable application data from backup. Teams need both to bring the application back. If you build as code, you can now recover as code,” said Vasu Murthy, Chief Product Officer, Cohesity.
IBM described the work as a response to customer demand. “Our customers have asked how they can recover from an attack leveraging Terraform and it’s state, and not just build a new environment,” said Tyler Lynch, Outbound CTO, Automation, IBM Software.
“We worked with Cohesity to validate how our technologies work together when they use Terraform state to recover cloud applications, the infrastructure they run on, and the data as part of the recovery process,” Lynch added.
The process begins with mapping. Cloud rebuild reads the organisation’s Terraform code and creates a detailed map of each cloud resource that needs protection, along with the order in which resources should be restored.
It then backs up both the Terraform code and the application data over time. Teams can choose a recovery point that pairs the intended configuration with backed-up application data.
During recovery, cloud rebuild recreates the declared infrastructure and configuration from Terraform code, then restores application data from the latest usable backup for that recovery point. For databases such as Amazon RDS, a guided multistep process walks administrators through reconnecting the restored database to the rest of the application.
Because infrastructure and data can be backed up on separate schedules, cloud rebuild pairs the closest data backup with the chosen code version. It also shows how far apart in time the two are, so teams can see which data backup the recovered application will use.
