How can organizations protect their most valuable asset, data, while unlocking its full potential through AI-driven insights? That is the question I explored on the IT Press Tour in Silicon Valley during a face-to-face conversation with Sanjay Poonen, President and CEO of Cohesity.

In this episode, Sanjay shares how Cohesity evolved from reinventing backup and recovery to leading the market in data security and cyber resilience. We discuss the game-changing acquisition of Veritas’s NetBackup business, the company’s growing footprint across healthcare, finance, government, and retail, and why uniting cultures and customers is key to their next chapter.

We dive into how Cohesity is using AI to transform backup data into a source of real-time intelligence, including its patented Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities developed in partnership with NVIDIA. Sanjay also explains how this innovation is enabling businesses to meet strict data sovereignty requirements while benefiting from cloud agility.

From cyberattack recovery and on-premises innovation to working with some of the biggest names in AI and cloud, Sanjay offers a candid look at leadership in a time of rapid growth. If you want to understand how AI and cybersecurity are converging to shape the future of enterprise data, this conversation delivers practical insight, strategic thinking, and a clear vision for what is ahead.

In this episode of Infrastructure as a Conversation, I’m joined by Tommi Kannisto, founder of Storadera, a cloud storage company based in Estonia that’s quietly building a smarter, simpler alternative to hyperscalers like AWS.

We dive into how Storadera has engineered its own storage software from scratch to deliver secure, S3-compatible cloud storage with a unique hyper-converged architecture. It’s all about cutting unnecessary hardware, avoiding bottlenecks, and delivering transparent pricing that makes sense to growing businesses.

Tommi explains:

• How Storadera’s hyper-converged design replaces gateways and load balancers with lean software
• Why performance with small files became a key differentiator
• What makes their multi-tenant system attractive to retail partners
• The impact of data sovereignty concerns on customer growth across Europe
• Why Canada is now looking eastward, not southward, for storage partners
• The Estonian tech culture that helped birth 10 unicorns from a country of just 1.3 million

We also talk about the cultural mindset that powers Estonia’s startup scene, from engineers cold-messaging CEOs for advice to a national infrastructure designed for digital innovation. Tommi shares Storadera’s future roadmap, including plans to use AI to optimize disk read and delete operations without raising prices.

If you’re curious about what comes after hyperscale, why storage software still matters, or what makes Estonia such a hotbed for digital infrastructure innovation, this is an episode you’ll want to hear.

🔗 Learn more at storadera.com 📍 Want Storadera in your country? Join their regional waitlist on the website.

What if running databases in Kubernetes could be as simple as spinning up a container—without cloud lock-in or complexity?

In this episode of IT Infrastructure as a Conversation, I’m joined by Tamal Saha, founder of AppsCode, a company rethinking how we manage data on Kubernetes. We met during the IT Press Tour in London, and this conversation dives deep into how AppsCode is tackling one of the most stubborn challenges in enterprise IT: stateful workloads.

From CubeDB to Stash, Voyager, and KubeVault, Tamal walks us through the full story—from his early days at Google and the emergence of Kubernetes to bootstrapping a company through open source tools and evolving it into a full-fledged enterprise platform. We explore:

• The challenges of running databases in Kubernetes and why traditional VM-based infrastructure falls short
• Why database provisioning, backups, secret management, and ingress need Kubernetes-native solutions
• How AppsCode pivoted from open source tools to a sustainable business model
• Real-world enterprise use cases—including a major European telco’s cloud-native transformation
• The road ahead: vector databases, open telemetry, and AI-driven automation

If you're a platform engineer, DevOps leader, or just curious about where Kubernetes is headed next, this conversation offers rare insights into building data platforms from the ground up, with a practical, product-led mindset.

So tune in to hear how one founder turned a container-native vision into a global business that’s helping companies modernize data operations without losing control.