Cohesity has become the first vendor to have its cloud recovery method validated for interoperability with IBM’s Terraform Self-Managed, giving organisations a way to rebuild cloud applications – infrastructure, configuration and data – after a destructive cyberattack.
Key Takeaways
- Cohesity Data Cloud’s cloud rebuild is the first cloud recovery method HashiCorp, an IBM Company, has validated for interoperability with Terraform Self-Managed.
- A Cohesity-commissioned survey of 3,200 security and IT leaders found 83% say their recovery plans need moderate or significant changes to handle AI-assisted attacks, with just 3% saying they are ready today.
- Cloud rebuild is available now as part of Cohesity Data Cloud Enterprise Edition.
Cohesity, which describes itself as the leader in AI and data security, said HashiCorp, an IBM Company, has validated the interoperability of its cloud rebuild capability with Terraform Self-Managed, a self-hosted platform for defining and managing cloud infrastructure as code. Terraform recreates the compromised declared configuration, while Cohesity Data Cloud restores the latest usable application data from backup.
Recovering the Declared Configuration, Not a Tainted Copy
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 uses an organisation’s reviewed and approved infrastructure-as-code files as the blueprint for recovery, returning applications to their declared configuration while restoring protected data from a selected backup point.
The process works in steps: cloud rebuild maps the application by reading an organisation’s Terraform code to determine which resources need protecting and in what order; it backs up both the Terraform code and the application data over time so teams can choose a recovery point pairing the intended configuration with backed-up data; and it then rebuilds the declared infrastructure before restoring application data from the latest usable backup, flagging how far apart in time the two are.
“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.
Most Recovery Plans Not Ready for AI-Driven Attacks
The validation lands alongside new findings from Cohesity’s 2026 Global Cyber Resilience Report, a Vanson Bourne survey of 3,200 security and IT decision-makers. It found that 83% of organisations said their recovery plans would need moderate or significant changes to handle attacks that use AI to find and exploit software weaknesses. Only 3% said their plans are ready today.
“Our customers have asked how they can recover from an attack leveraging Terraform and its 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.”
Closing the Cloud Recovery Gap
Cloud rebuild is available now as part of Cohesity Data Cloud Enterprise Edition, with existing Cohesity customers running Data Protect or Cohesity NetBackup able to upgrade for access. As AI continues to compress the time attackers need to find and exploit weaknesses, the offering points to a broader shift in enterprise security: recovery plans built for manual rebuilds are increasingly being treated as a liability rather than a safety net.
