Harnessing AI to Unlock Cyber Resilience with Commvault

The risk of cyberattack has never been greater, or a clean recovery more complicated. Year over year, there has been a steady rise in cases with the numbers reaching peak in 2023.

At Commvault Shift in New York, Commvault announced Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI, a solution that proactively detects when organizations are under attack, and helps roll back systems to a clean working state.

Following the event, panelists, Jim Jones, Karen Lopez, Eric Wright and Adam Fisher, discussed their impression of the solution at the Gestalt IT Roundtable.

A New Security Paradigm

Our digital society thrives on the many tools and technologies that were created in pursuit of betterment. But technology that powers the megatrends of the digital age also makes cyber weapons easy to design and wield for bad guys. White-glove ransomware services selling in the dark web have brought enormous power within the grip of bad actors who are no longer encumbered by cost and availability factors. The cyber resiliency and preparedness required to counter these threats demand a new paradigm in security.

For Commvault, this means charting out a gameplan that meets the needs of the shared infrastructure. Cyber resiliency thrives on the extent of protection and the reach of defense technologies we use. This new strategy will provide organizations the ultimate cyber resilience with advanced detection and clean rollback. Their secret sauce is to merge backup and security.

This is already an industry-wide trend. “We’re seeing an interesting dynamic in the industry as a whole, where security and backup are becoming intertwined. Putting security into backup and recovery to try to make sure that the data is well secured, and recovery takes note of where you are coming from with those workloads and where that data was may not potentially be in a state to where it’s going to be available to you,” notes Jim Jones, Product Architect.

With the launch of the new Commvault Cloud, Commvault shifted gears, moving from its usual backup business to cyber resilience. The new gameplan involves a holistic approach to data protection. Commvault Cloud clubs all their SaaS and software solutions bringing them under one platform. This platform is designed to deliver maximum cyber resiliency with accurate threat detection, accelerated response times, and clean recovery.

Commvault is forerunning the concept of shift right, the opposite of shift left where security is put into development, Jones says.

Adam Fisher, Sr. Cloud Architect agrees, “It seems like backup and data protection were always really just a function of IT, and the boxes were checked to make sure that we’re prepared for the worst-case scenario. But with all the risk that’s out there, organizations are realizing that they can’t just pawn this off to it. This is something that could really impact their business and they should be thinking about that. The conversations, as well as some of those shifts in the product, are geared towards that line of thinking.”

AI-Powered Cyber Resilience

Predictably, behind this cloud platform is a host of AI technologies. “It always struck me that machine learning is really a great tool to find unknown needles in unknown stacks, and that really makes it a great fit for data protection, security, ransomware, essentially dealing with unknown threats,” notes host, Stephen Foskett.

But for Commvault, this is not just hopping into the trend wagon. The inclusion of AI in Commvault Cloud is aimed at helping customer take faster action. This took changing the outlook and the reason for entering the AI game. Commvault has a confident and seasoned crew that, instead of being fixated on the idea of AI, is cognizant with the ground realities such as the limitations of using AI. “Their AI is not going to be just a series of if statements, sort of AI washing of what they’re planning on doing. It’s time for a lot of backup and recovery or data protection vendors as we call them, to start thinking about how they’re going to be specialized too,” says Karen Lopez, Data Evangelist.

Commvault joined forces with a large number of AI partners across the ecosystem to work for this. The advanced threat prediction and root-cause remediation capabilities of the solution are all powered by AI. “The AI capabilities are there to really to enhance the product, the end user usability and the administration of it. It isn’t really that they are just going to AI all stuff, but how to make this easier to operate and so that you don’t necessarily need to spend hours combing through manually,” says Fisher.

The solution also has no-code integrations which makes consumption all the easier.

Among other things, Commvault Cloud also features an AI chatbot that drives the search function. “That gets back to better enabling the users to do what’s important and to more easily navigate the product and make it useful for the organization,” he adds.

Host Stephen Foskett and the delegates at the Gestalt IT Roundtable

Best Features

Typically, it takes days, even weeks before a compromised system is discovered. Commvault Cloud harnesses the power of AI to deliver rapid threat identification. “It is around finding, summarization and building context in real time data. There’s no way that any other systems can correlate the information at the speed that it needs to,” said Eric Wright, Chief Content Officer.

Imagine a system that has advanced intelligence coded into its workflows that can make predictive detection and analysis of the sneakiest threats like shape-shifting malware. Commvault Cloud’s AI-powered features help shut these threats off before they can enter and compromise the backup systems.

One of the features that almost all panelists gave a shout-out to is Cleanroom Recovery. It provides a sterile cloud environment on demand to cleanly recover data.

“We need to think about not only protecting data, but how we can more reliably recover it and deal with the kind of disasters or attacks that could require needing to do something on the fly to get business back up and running at a critical moment,” insists Fisher.

Being available to spin up a cleanroom on demand takes away the overhead of keeping it on standby in the cloud. “This one will hopefully hit the balance of capabilities and cost optimization because for us to use the cloud more as a protection store than we need to, makes sure that it’s economical to do so,” says Wright.

As an enterprise solution, Commvault Cloud has a myriad of built-in and bespoke features. To make the solution slightly more navigable and easy-to-consume, Commvault has categorized the capabilities into four service bundles. Platinum Resilience, which is the premium service, offers the highest level of protection with the full suite of enterprise-grade backup and recovery features, AI and automation, recovery testing, a 24/7 support for testing and validation in recovery, and more. It a fully managed and is covered under the Commvault Protection Warranty.

Be sure to check out other coverages from the Commvault Shift 2023 event on Gestalt IT to learn more about Commvault Cloud.