Commvault's Top Down Approach to Cyber Resilience

Resilience is defined as the ability to recover quickly from adversities. IT has traditionally relied on data backup and disaster recovery as the primary method of response to a cyber breach. Commvault has been a trusted partner for customers that rely on its breadth of products for IT resilience. But as more enterprises navigate a digital world rife with rapidly evolving threats, Commvault recognizes a need to redefine resilience.

At the Commvault Shift 2023 in NYC, Commvault announced their new Commvault Cloud SaaS platform. Powered by Metallic AI, Commvault Cloud is geared towards helping customers put cyber resilience into action.

Taking Shelter from Ransomware

Hybrid cloud has become a staple for enterprise IT. It has not only introduced a landscape full of possibilities, but with it also came steep technical challenges and security concerns that are now front and center for most organizations.

Ransomware is one such pervasive threat. According to experts, it is expected to cost companies $30 billion in 2023. With no sign of slowing down, the trend has pushed companies to put their guards up in all fronts to shelter from the spate of notorious attacks.

But, the rise of AI has been a disruptor to practicing tried and tested security policies of the previous years. New attack tactics fueled by AI render these defense mechanisms inadequate. Attackers now target both data, and the recovery tools businesses rely on to quickly restore operations in the event of a breach.

Given the outpouring of attacks, preparedness for an inevitable breach is paramount. This requires alignment and synchronization of all business units, organizational practices, and vigilance platforms to build the ultimate cyber resilience.

Redefining Cyber Resilience with Commvault Cloud

Commvault Shift unveiled a new platform that aims to “give customers an unfair advantage in protecting data in a complex world.” Commvault Cloud unifies Commvault’s existing offerings under one SaaS platform and tops it off with exciting new features. The Commvault Cloud platform disaggregates the control plane, the data plane and the data storage. This foundational architecture allows for:

Global data indexing to provide application awareness
Data consumption in an application-aware format through native protocols
Storage-agnostic flexibility

Commvault Cloud is powered by Metallic AI that provides users a level playing field against the most sophisticated cyber-attacks. Its Threat Scan Predict feature uses AI to flag unusual or suspicious file activities and actively remove corrupt data from the recovery chain.

Risk Governance is a new AI-powered service that provides a comprehensive overview of customer data. It can detect sensitive data by analyzing the entire data plane, and provide the ability to take appropriate action. A unique new Gen AI feature called Arlie brings natural language processing (NLP) to make the platform easily consumable. Things like compliance, governance and error reporting are easily attainable by users, freeing IT personnel from having to learn every little feature required to customize the platform to their needs.

Another breakthrough addition is the Clean Room Recovery. The partnership between Microsoft and Commvault sparked this feature. It provides the ability to reliably perform a full recovery of clean data. Once again AI is leveraged to ensure that all data used during the recovery is clean and unaffected. The clean room is deployed on demand as a stop gap to run a clean recovery environment.

Cyber Resiliency Takes More Than Just Good Products

The product announcements at Commvault Shift were an impressive sneak peek into Commvault Cloud. But cyber resilience isn’t something a single product can achieve. Preparedness too was a big theme at the event, where organizational awareness required to address the chaos of AI-driven threats came into focus. Commvault customers and partners shared insights from their experiences with the challenges that are facing many organizations today, to corroborate this.

Breaking down silos between IT, security and other groups within the business are paramount to successfully navigating cyber security. Clearly defined roles, responsibilities and plans can take away some of the chaos and frenzy when responding to a cyber-induced business outage. Testing those plans and implementing them is significantly more effective than hoping for the best during an outage. Buy-ins from leadership to break internal silos, and unchanging commitment to practice cyber resilience will be the things that will pay off when a breach is eventually realized.

Commvault’s CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, discussed the forming of a Cyber Resilience Council, consisting of the Commvault board and executive team. The council is chaired by Melissa Hathaway, President of Hathaway Global Strategies, who helps advise the body on cyber resilience strategy. Over and over, the focus was on the need for enterprise risk management to prioritize cyber risk across the business.

IT and security teams must operationalize strategies to address cyber risks, but businesses are ultimately responsible for their digital assets. Regulations are evolving to make sure that businesses are taking cyber risk management seriously. The Commvault Cyber Resilience Council can help inform the leadership of their large customer base about the preparedness required to protect their digital business.

Conclusion

Commvault Shift wasn’t simply the unveiling of a new platform. It was a holistic discussion about the current state of cyber threats and the top-down leadership that is required to tackle cyber resilience. Enterprises still have many silos to break, and these conversations are necessary to help align IT, security and the business towards a unified goal.

Once cyber resiliency becomes a priority for businesses, IT should be empowered to operationalize solutions. Commvault’s leadership in driving this shift can naturally lead to addressing cyber risk by harnessing the power of Commvault Cloud.

Find out more about Commvault’s Cyber Resilience initiative and Commvault Cloud on their website and be sure to check out other interesting articles from Commvault Shift on Gestalt IT.