Cohesity CEO and President Sanjay Poonen on Securing Government Data in the Age of AI
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a new episode of the Washington AI Network Podcast, founder Tammy Haddad sat down with Sanjay Poonen, CEO and president of Cohesity, for a conversation on how government and industry can secure sensitive data as artificial intelligence transforms every sector. Poonen described today’s environment as both data-rich and threat-filled. “Data is exploding, and the bad guys want to get at it,” he said. “The most important thing to that data — especially sensitive or classified data — is to keep it secure from ransomware attacks … You can’t do AI before you’ve secured your data, because if you don’t have the data, what’s the point of AI?”
He explained that Cohesity’s founder, a former Google engineer, built a platform to ingest and protect fragmented data across silos. Once that data is secured, he said, agencies can safely apply AI to it. “There’s a security element of data, and that’s more paramount than the AI, but you put those two together … AI is now exploding everything.”
AI Innovation with NVIDIA
Poonen introduced Cohesity Gaia, the company’s generative-AI offering which leverages technology from partner and investor NVIDIA. “We built that tool for the data that’s on our platform,” he said. “It’s the first time that a generative-AI tool can be applied directly to enterprise and government data … That’s a very powerful concept.”
Government Efficiency and Productivity
Asked about the administration’s call for innovation and efficiency, Poonen said, “This is the age-old debate: is fire helpful or not? Fire is a tool. Is a typewriter helpful? You could have written by hand. But thank God for a word processor that’s made us more efficient.”
He added, “All of us should not fear AI. We should use it the same way we once embraced the printing press or the word processor — in ways that make us more productive.”
Cyber Hygiene and the AI Action Plan
Discussing the President’s AI Action Plan, Poonen said, “We wrote a paper on this AI action plan. We talked about how there’s no AI without secure data … if the data is not of high quality and high security, the AI algorithms are going to fail.”
He outlined Cohesity’s framework for cyber hygiene: “It’s really important that we have multifactor authentication … We educate all our employees on it and eventually all our citizens on it.” He urged organizations to prepare for ransomware events: “Assume you’re going to get breached and prepare for that event when it does happen … Those types of preparedness are all part of that framework of cyber resilience.”
Looking Ahead
“Artificial intelligence should be viewed the same way we once viewed fire or the printing press,” Poonen said. “It’s a tool — and if we use it wisely, it will make us safer, smarter, and more productive.
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