Commvault's New Directions and Announcements at SHIFT Event
In this blog
Commvault's new directions and announcements at SHIFT Event
World Wide Technology's (WWT's) Global Solutions and Architecture (GS&A) Data Protection Team attended Commvault's 'SHIFT' event in New York City on March 13, 2025. The event highlighted Commvault's latest strategies and announcements that aim to address the evolving challenges in data protection and management.
The presentation focused on Commvault's paradigm 'SHIFT' from Data Protection to "Continuous Business... a new state of always-on business availability and resilience for the cloud-first enterprise."
"Continuous Business" also includes:
- The transformative impact of artificial intelligence and cloud technologies on data management and security.
- The reality of cyber threats and the necessity of regulatory compliance. It highlighted the constant risk posed by cyber threats to both individuals and businesses,
- The concept of resilience emphasizes that it involves more than just short-term operational continuity during crises.
- The value of understanding your business infrastructure.
Commvault's 'SHIFT' event showcased the company's dedication to innovation in data protection. Commvault's new directions and announcements are set to make a significant impact, and we are proud to be part of this journey.
Let's look at each of these topics in detail:
Continuous business
The first portion of the event introduced the concept of "Continuous Business," emphasizing always-on availability and resilience in a cloud-first world. It highlighted the importance of personalized approaches for different workloads, the introduction of Commvault Cloud Rewind for quick recovery, the universal adoption of multi-cloud for flexibility and security, and the integration of Continuous Security within Continuous Business. It also underscored the inadequacy of traditional business continuity approaches and the significant enterprise IT spend on cloud-based workloads.
Breaking that down:
- Continuous Business: This new approach emphasizes always-on availability and resilience in a cloud-first world. It advocates for owning and managing your cloud environment with flexibility to scale, shrink, and secure it as needed.
- Personalized Approach: Different workloads require tailored methods of protection and recovery. Commvault Cloud leverages machine learning, AI, and automation to provide constant security and readiness.
- Continuous Recovery: The introduction of Cloud Rewind aims to quickly rebuild cloud applications, infrastructure, and data, ensuring resilience across all environments.
- Multicloud Flexibility: Multicloud is now universal, offering flexibility, diversity, and portability. Commvault extends its platform to AWS and Google Cloud to mitigate threats and ensure predictable recovery.
- Continuous Security: Continuous Business starts with Continuous Security. Commvault Cloud integrates security and automation out of the box for end-to-end data and environment protection.
The AI elephant
The talk track then pivoted to the transformative impact of artificial intelligence and cloud technologies on data management and security. It highlighted the rapid growth of cloud data driven by generative AI and the increasing threats to data security, with an average recovery time from cyberattacks now being 24 days.
Commvault showcased new solutions, including new support for Azure Data Lake Gen 2, Databricks, Cosmos DB, and DataRAG extensions for Postgres, along with improvements in recovery performance. The importance of architecture in managing and securing data amidst unlimited growth was discussed, focusing on the separation of control plane, data plane, and storage destination. The rise of next-gen workloads and cloud-native architectures introduces new complexities in data resilience and security, necessitating new strategies for backup and recovery.
Cyber threats and compliance
The middle portion of the event looked at the reality of cyber threats and the necessity of compliance. It highlighted the constant risk posed by cyber threats to both individuals and businesses, evidenced by incidents like password leaks and credit card data breaches. Governments worldwide have responded with a complex web of regulations to minimize harm and increase cyber resilience.
The session also discussed the increasing role of governments in promoting cyber resilience, resulting in a rapidly evolving landscape of regulations designed to ensure safety and security. Looking ahead to the next decade, cyber compliance is expected to shift from being a competitive advantage to a basic requirement.
In this era of rigorous compliance mandates, businesses must adopt a strategic approach to cyber resilience. This involves thoroughly understanding the business, identifying critical supplies and vendors, and building a readiness plan in the event of a disruption.
The future of cyber compliance lies in the hands of rapidly advancing technologies like AI. While these technologies have immense potential to innovate and improve business processes, they also present new challenges for the cyber resilience landscape.
Resilience
The session focused on resilience and emphasized that it involves more than just short-term operational continuity during crises. True resilience is a strategic advantage that allows companies to seize opportunities when competitors are less prepared. It represents an organization's capacity to absorb stress, recover critical functionality, and thrive in new circumstances.
Resilience is created by building four primary organizational capabilities: anticipation, buffering shocks, rapid adaptation and learning, and the ability to reimagine in new circumstances. These capabilities are critical for an organization's survival and growth in a rapidly changing business environment.
Resilience plays a significant role in cybersecurity, with artificial intelligence and automation potentially playing an evolving role in preventing cyber incidents and speeding up recovery. Resilient organizations should consider leveraging these technologies to strengthen their cybersecurity measures.
The concept of resilience is also applicable to individuals and teams within an organization. Resilience emphasizes anticipation, buffering shocks, rapid adaptation and reimagining.
Infrastructure
Finally, the importance of understanding your business infrastructure was addressed. Using Cloud Rewind allows users to automatically discover, map, and visualize complex cloud-native and SaaS workloads, which is critical for recovering data and applications.
The session emphasized the need for proactive and regular recovery testing. Regular recovery testing before an incident is crucial, and the Cleanroom Recovery capability can be used to regularly test recovery across all workloads.
Maintaining regulatory compliance was highlighted as a necessity. Compliance can minimize risk and exposure while fulfilling mandatory requirements. Commvault Cloud helps demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements while minimizing risk and exposure.
Protecting vital business resources was discussed, with Commvault Cloud comparing your Active Directory environment before and after an attack to help quickly recover the identity services your organization relies on.
The importance of data storage diversification was also emphasized. Organizations should diversify data storage and take advantage of the scalability of cloud storage to maintain an air-gapped copy of their data in another cloud.
Conclusion
Commvault's 'SHIFT' event in New York City showcased the company's dedication to innovation in data protection and management. The event highlighted the transformative impact of artificial intelligence and cloud technologies, the reality of cyber threats, and the importance of resilience and understanding business infrastructure.
Moreover, Commvault is demonstrating that they understand the shift that is going on in the Data Protection market today. Driven by the escalating threat of ransomware and data exfiltration, Data Protection is increasingly becoming part of the overall security landscape.
To remain relevant in this market, Data Protection vendors need to understand that this change is occurring and make it simple to integrate their products with a Cyber Resiliency solution and add value to the organization's overall security posture. Commvault has consistently been in a leadership position here and the announcements from the SHIFT events demonstrate that they are continuing to lead on security innovation.