After Major Partnership Announcements, Commvault Soups Up Its Cyber Resilience Portfolio

New capabilities have been added ‘in the context of cyber attacks,’ Commvault vice president of portfolio marketing, Tim Zonca, tells MES Computing.

June has been a busy month for Commvault. The company, which specializes in data protection and data management, has recently announced several weighty partnerships to enhance its cyber resilience offerings.

On Tuesday, Commvault announced a “strengthened” relationship with existing partner Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

HPE’s hybrid cloud platform GreenLake already integrates with Commvault Cloud. As part of the deepened partnership, Commvault is integrating and offering HPE Zerto Software, which provides continuous data protection, to Commvault Cloud customers. This integration will enable Commvault customers to manage virtualized on-prem and cloud workloads, HPE said in a news release.

And last week, Commvault announced a partnership with Kyndryl, an enterprise tech services provider. The partnership includes a collaboration with storage company Pure Storage.

Tim Zonca, Commvault VP of portfolio marketing, spoke with MES Computing on how the partnership with Kyndryl helps Commvault’s customers “maintain a continuous” cyber resilient business and helps them “fight through” outages and attacks.

Zonca said Commvault’s cyber resilience capabilities exceed a typical backup and restore solution.

Clean Point Recovery

“It’s in the context of cyberattacks,” he explained. “Backup and restore is largely a solved problem when it is an operational outage or a disaster recovery due to a natural disaster or something like that. In all those cases, you can trust the data,” he said.

With a cyberattack, customers aren’t always certain that any data they may restore isn’t compromised.

“We automate and add AI and ML to these processes. We help you have a higher degree of confidence that indeed you found the clean point to recover to, and then you can quickly get that clean data that you can trust back online and delivering on your mission,” he added.

Commvault’s platform gives customers the ability to restore their data to a clean, isolated location in the cloud. That capability ensures that if any recovered data is compromised, that data is outside the live production environment. And, for smaller to midsized companies that may be resourced strapped, provides a way for them to regularly test their cyber recovery process.

Zonca said that with the added capabilities of Kyndryl and Pure Storage, they can also service customers with more complex cyber recovery needs.

Kyndryl "is a fantastic solution provider that really understands the mechanics of cyber resilience and cyber recovery,” he said. Moreover, with the Kyndryl partnership, they can offer cyber resilience to customers in heavily regulated industries.

Kyndryl has “mechanics in place help organizations adhere to DORA legislation, or, whatever the regulatory body or legislation is, and so they’re also experts at that,” he said.

He also had praises for Pure Storage citing their “innovation around data storage and recovery process,” and described their offerings as “blazing fast.”

Gives Midmarket Organizations Enterprise-Level Recovery

The executive also spoke about the benefits the trifecta of Commvault, Kyndryl, and Pure Storage can deliver to midmarket customers.

“One of the things that our platform does is it will go and look across your estate, and it finds your sensitive data and helps categorize it,” he said, automating what could be a lengthy, resource-gobbling task for midmarket IT teams.

Also, “I had mentioned some of this around bursting to the cloud in this isolated location to recover to where you can run forensics that’s called ‘clean-room recovery,’” he said.

“It’s part of our capability within our platform. It’s a really novel way to approach this problem. Before Commvault brought this to market, this was a really expensive problem to solve, and so organizations would often have to have to set up a recovery environment, and you have to ensure that it’s clean, and you have to have all the different permutations of applications and services available if you wanted to test recovery. What we found is only the biggest, baddest companies on the planet can afford something like that. What about the regional hospitals or the midsized organizations? A lot of times they can’t, and so they would rely on things like checklists, simulation exercises, or tabletop exercises,” Zonca said.

“We’ve introduced this capability that allows you to burst into the cloud so you’re not paying for it until you actually use it to recover in this isolated fashion. And we have this unique capability that allows you to take data, even if it lived on-prem or even in another cloud and recover it to this location. For organizations that don’t have massive IT teams or recovery teams [or] don’t have a big budget to have a dedicated recovery location, they can now do frequent testing. They can have these isolated forensics environments, and they could do so all on demand,” he said.

“We believe this has really unlocked best practices around cyber resilience for midmarket organizations,” he added.