Case Study: Move AS – Sovereign Backup-as-a-Service Powering Ransomware-Resilient BaaS with Cohesity and Cloudian HyperStore

Move AS, is one of Norway’s leading IT infrastructure specialists, delivering managed services, cybersecurity, data centre solutions, and consulting to medium and large enterprises and public sector organisations nationwide. The company operates through three divisions: Move Consulting, Move Solutions, and Move Operations. It employs about 90 professionals and generates annual revenue exceeding NOK 500 million.

A core differentiator is Move’s investment in sovereign infrastructure: three geographically redundant data centres located entirely on Norwegian soil, enabling customers to store and process data without exposure to foreign jurisdiction or external access risks. Move has recently entered into a collaboration agreement with Andersen Consulting, extending its reach and capabilities further across the Nordic market.

The Challenge

As enterprise customers faced escalating ransomware threats and tightening data sovereignty regulations, Move saw a clear market opportunity to launch a premium Backup as a service (BaaS) offering: one that could guarantee immutable, offsite backup copies stored exclusively within Norway.

The service needed to address several requirements simultaneously:

• Ransomware resilience with immutable backup copies that attackers cannot encrypt or delete.
• Long-term retention at an economically viable cost per TB, supporting compliance and archival policies.
• Secure multi-tenancy so that dozens of enterprise customers could share infrastructure without risk of data leakage or performance interference.
• A complementary, S3-compatible storage tier that extended Move’s existing Cohesity DataProtect environment for offsite and archive use cases.
• Scalable, API-driven operations that could expand in line with Move’s growing customer base, avoiding a proportional increase in management overhead.

The Solution: Cohesity DataProtect + Cloudian HyperStore

Move conducted a rigorous evaluation, considering factors such as multi-tenancy, S3 compatibility, ransomware recovery workflows, economics, and platform integration. This led to the selection of a best-of-breed architecture: Cohesity DataProtect for primary backup and recovery, paired with Cloudian HyperStore as the scalable S3 object storage target.

Cloudian HyperStore: S3-Native, Scale-Out Object Storage

Cloudian HyperStore delivers fully S3-compatible object storage with a multi-tenant architecture purpose-built for service providers. Move validated several capabilities during its evaluation:

• Secure tenant isolation via per-customer buckets and namespaces, role-based access controls (RBAC), quotas, and QoS policies that prevent “noisy neighbor” impact across shared infrastructure.
• Object Lock (WORM) ensures data immutability for policy-defined retention periods, making backup data cryptographically resistant to ransomware encryption or deletion, even by privileged users.
• Linear scale-out: capacity and performance grow by simply adding nodes, with automatic data rebalancing—no forklift upgrades and no downtime.
• Comprehensive API and SDK interoperability, enabling automated provisioning and lifecycle management aligned with Move’s operational workflows.
• Predictable cost per TB as data volumes grow, supporting healthy service margins for Move’s BaaS pricing model.

Cohesity DataProtect: Data Protection at the Core

Cohesity DataProtect serves as the primary backup and recovery engine for Move’s BaaS platform. Its global deduplication and compression significantly reduce the effective storage footprint, while its built-in immutability and cyber-vaulting capabilities add a first layer of ransomware protection at the backup cluster level. Move’s evaluation confirmed strong deduplication ratios, verified immutability/WORM protections, and validated ransomware recovery workflows before going to production.

Integrated Architecture

The Cohesity–Cloudian integration is native and policy-driven: Cohesity tiers backup data directly to Cloudian over S3, enabling fast local restores from the DataProtect cluster alongside cost-efficient long-term retention on HyperStore. Object Lock on Cloudian adds a second, independent layer of immutability, creating a layered defense where neither platform alone represents a single point of failure for data integrity. Cyber-vaulting workflows further isolate backup copies, supporting air-gapped recovery scenarios.

Move’s operations team designed and implemented the platform primarily in-house, with vendor-assisted sizing and design support from both Cloudian and Cohesity during the initial phase.

Results

Since deploying Cohesity DataProtect with Cloudian HyperStore as the S3 backup target, Move has successfully launched a production BaaS offering that meets the security and compliance expectations of Norwegian enterprise and public sector customers.

Key outcomes realized include:

• Ransomware Resilience: Defense-in-depth against ransomware attacks that target backup infrastructure is achieved through layered immutability. This combines Cohesity’s Write Once, Read Many (WORM) protections at the backup cluster with Cloudian Object Lock at the object store level. Furthermore, cyber-vaulting workflows offer isolated recovery copies for the most severe scenarios.
• Sovereign data storage: Every backup byte resides in Move’s three Norwegian data centers, giving customers and their regulators confidence that data is never exposed to foreign jurisdiction.
• Operational resilience: Cloudian HyperStore’s distributed architecture provides a large, resilient storage pool that can absorb drive and node failures transparently, maintaining high availability for Move’s customer SLAs.
• Multi-tenant service platform: Bucket- and namespace-level isolation, combined with RBAC and quotas, allows Move to serve dozens of enterprise customers on shared infrastructure with strict separation and predictable performance.
• Cost-efficient tiering: Data tiered from Cohesity to Cloudian HyperStore delivers lower cost per TB for long-term retention compared to maintaining all data on primary backup appliances, improving the economics of Move’s service portfolio.
• Implementation quality: Move’s operations team reported a good implementation experience with strong support from the Cloudian team, and has observed continuous improvements in Cohesity integration support across successive HyperStore releases.