Commvault Says New Unity Platform Can Help Midmarket Clear Resiliency Hurdles
Commvault executives speak about the data resiliency challenges that enterprises face, and the capabilities its new Unity platform release can offer midmarket organizations.
(Vidya Shankaran, field CTO, cloud, security, emerging technologies, Commvault)
Commvault, a provider of cyber resilience and data protection offerings, recently unveiled its Commvault Cloud Unity platform release – its new resiliency solution designed to address current challenges widespread across enterprises: an explosion of data caused by AI adoption, the need to recover data from siloed products, and how to effectively deploy data resiliency and security across hybrid environments.
The Unity platform supports data security and recovery, and identity resilience. It’s built with AI enhancements that support discovery, governance, active monitoring, and more. In addition, Unity offers updated AI-enabled threat scanning, and a new Synthetic Recovery feature—which allows admins to recover data with any compromised data or threats removed.
The company is surely looking to disrupt data resiliency in the enterprise. But is Unity a fit for midmarket organizations?
MES Computing spoke with Commvault executives and a customer at the company’s Shift event held earlier this month in New York City.
They spoke about the data resiliency challenges that enterprises face, and the capabilities Unity can offer midmarket organizations.
Midmarket’s Data Resiliency Challenges
“We’ve not talked with a single customer CISO or CIO in the last couple quarters that isn’t struggling with ... trying to implement their best practices around cyber resiliency,” said Tim Zonca, vice president, portfolio marketing, solutions and product marketing, Commvault, at the event.
AI, he said, is adding to the complexities. “One of the CIOs who’s with us here this week, he said out of all their critical applications that they’ve been safeguarding for the last five, six years of production ... they don’t have the luxury of pausing their resilience strategies just to figure out the AI,” he added.
Avi Boru is the senior director, cloud engineering, network and telecom at Lennar Corp. While his company is a global enterprise, Boro spoke of tackling data resiliency challenges faced by enterprises of all sizes.
One issue Boru said his company had to confront in its mission to enhance resiliency has been fragmented data.
As a result, “the key thing we started to do was centralize the data on the platforms,” he said.
However, there were other questions. “How were we going to make the data accessible, very specific to AI models or AI agents ... the analytics, how are we going to keep them accurate and auditable and ensure the agents and analytics are only able to access centralized data? How to protect the underlying data?” were all concerns, he said.
“[We’re a] hybrid environment ... we are a data center. We are multiple clouds, and then the complexity of managing the data, the data production, and the resiliency ... depending on how many environments, how many platforms you are in. Commvault has been one of the strategy platforms in terms of helping us in a modernization journey,” he added.
Making The Midmarket ‘Recovery Ready’
Midsize enterprises especially can often suffer from “fractured, fragmented” data environments, but through “no fault of their own,” said Vidya Shankaran, field CTO, cloud, security, emerging technologies, at Commvault.
“When we look at what is the big problem that everyone is trying to go for, it’s cyber resilience. And with such fragmented solutions with fragmented tools, what does that recovery look like for you? What does resiliency mean in that situation? Definitely a lot more filled with friction. It’s less seamless, a less uniform experience, even from a business users’ perspective,” she said.
Because the midmarket tends to lack resources, Unity’s ability to handle on-prem and cloud workloads, as well as SaaS apps, can make recovery “much more seamless, that much more intuitive,” Shankaran said.
With the new Unity offering, “the focus is definitely on distilling it down into more simplified interfaces, making it intuitive, and most importantly, a competitive TCR (total cost of risk), because, again, midmarket, I won’t say it’s just the midmarket, everybody is in the process of figuring out where they can save money while making sure that their perimeter is protected, while they are also recovery ready,” she added.
According to Shankaran, Synthetic Recovery is a key new capability of Unity that may be particularly beneficial to midsize organizations.
“The Synthetic Recovery capabilities have been extremely important because back to again, mid-segment, IT enterprise customers [it] gives you a time machine. So, Tuesday I could go back to Monday’s backup, Sunday, Saturday and so on,” she said.
Getting to a clean point time in a restore from backup that includes compromised data can be “arduous” and “manual,” she said.
“Because now you have to recover Monday’s data, salvage what you can, stitch it all up and bring it back into a clean room. But now, with synthetic recovery because of all the AI-led intelligence that we are weaving in, we can tell you based on entropy changes or signature matches hashes exactly what’s going on, what is viable, recoverable, and usable for business in one click. That literally shrinks your window of recovery significantly,” Shankaran said.
Although the Unity platform incorporates AI-led intelligence, Shankaran stressed that human involvement in data resilience and backup and restore operations remain vital.
“Because human-in-the-loop is a must-have tenet that we strongly advocate for,” she said. “Human eyes” are needed to validate restored data, making sure it is “business consumable” before being rolled out into production, Shankaran added.