Cohesity announced that HashiCorp, an IBM Company, has validated the interoperability of Cohesity Data Cloud’s cloud rebuild capabilities with Terraform Self-Managed. Organisations can now quickly recover cloud applications – infrastructure, configuration, and, most importantly, data – after a destructive cyberattack. The Terraform product can recreate the compromised declared configuration; Cohesity Data Cloud then restores the latest usable application data from backup.
This is the first cloud recovery method IBM has validated for interoperability with Terraform Self-Managed, self-hosted platform for defining and managing cloud infrastructure as code. Cloud rebuild is part of Cohesity Data Cloud Enterprise Edition.
Rebuild the declared configuration and restore the data
AI is increasing the frequency and severity of cyberattacks, and recovery plans haven’t kept pace. Cohesity’s 2026 Global Cyber Resilience Report, a Vanson Bourne survey of 3,200 security and IT decision-makers, found that 91% of surveyed organisations in the UAE said their recovery plans would need moderate or significant changes to handle attacks that use AI to find and exploit software weaknesses. Only 1% say their plans are ready today. Cloud recovery also lags. 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.
Cohesity cloud rebuild takes a different approach. It uses an organisation’s infrastructure-as-code files, which define its cloud networks, servers, and access permissions, as the blueprint for recovery. Terraform uses the organisation’s reviewed and approved code to recreate the declared configuration, and Cohesity Data Cloud restores the latest usable backed-up application data. Together, they return the application to a trusted state rather than to a copy that may already contain an attacker’s changes.
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. Cloud rebuild instead restores the environment described by the organisation’s own reviewed and approved code, returning applications to their declared configuration and restoring protected data from the selected backup.
Cohesity cloud rebuild can read applications through Terraform’s official interface and runs customers’ code unchanged, maintaining record accuracy. Terraform code recreates the declared configuration, while Cohesity restores application data from backup. What’s more, administrators can integrate cloud rebuild into existing incident response and recovery workflows.
“Attackers using AI move faster than any team can rebuild by hand. Organisations 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.
“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.”
Cohesity Data Cloud + Terraform Self-Managed: How it works
Here’s what happens from protection through recovery:
- Map the application. Cloud rebuild reads the organisation’s Terraform code and creates a detailed map of each cloud resource that needs protection and the order in which resources should be restored.
- Save trusted versions. Cloud rebuild backs up both the Terraform code and the application data over time, so teams can choose a recovery point that pairs the intended configuration with backed-up application data.
- Rebuild step by step. 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.
- Show the timing gap. Because infrastructure and data can be backed up on separate schedules, Cloud rebuild pairs the closest data backup with the chosen code version and clearly shows how far apart in time the two are. Teams can see which data backup the recovered application will use.
Availability
Cohesity cloud rebuild is available now as part of Cohesity Data Cloud Enterprise Edition. Existing Cohesity customers running Data Protect or Cohesity NetBackup can upgrade to Enterprise Edition to gain access to cloud rebuild and the full breadth of Cohesity’s cyber resilience portfolio.
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