Commvault, BeyondTrust Pair Up For Privileged Access

The companies have unveiled a partnership to secure both human and nonhuman access.

Commvault, a provider of cyber resilience and data protection offerings, and BeyondTrust, which offers a privileged access management platform and identity security, unveiled a new partnership Tuesday.

The partnership integrates features of Commvault Cloud, Commvault’s cyber resilience platform, with BeyondTrust’s Password Safe privileged access management offering. The integration offers centralized credential management, “just-in-time" access that automatically revokes access privileges once a task is complete, and boosts auditing and compliance objectives, the companies said in a joint news release.

Driven by the rise in cybercrime and the influx of devices and AI agents requiring sometimes-elevated permissions to complete tasks within organizations’ operations, the privileged access management market is forecast to grow from $3.6 billion in 2024 to $28 billion in 20234, according to one report.

“Today’s organizations are facing increasingly complex identity environments, with every human, machine, application and agentic AI identity representing a potential threat. This new integration between BeyondTrust and Commvault provides our customers with exceptional visibility and control in managing privileged access within their backup and recovery environments, while advancing cyber resilience via Commvault Cloud,” said David Manks, vice president of strategic alliances at BeyondTrust, in a news release.

Continued adoption of agentic AI has complicated access management. Agents, just like human users, require permissions to internal systems to carry out the jobs they are programmed to do.

In an interview with MES Computing earlier this year, Ian Swanson, CEO of Protect AI, which offers AI and machine learning security, warned about securing AI agents.

“An agent makes an uncontrolled or unexpected decision that might lead to a security failure. [An example] could be an AI agent is carrying out automated incident response tasks and it incorrectly shuts down a critical production server, and it causes downtime, so the AI thought something wrong was happening but it made an unexpected decision, and maybe it shut down something that was super critical,” Swanson said.

AI agents are fast becoming “integral members of the corporate workforce,” according to a post on the Identity Defined Security Alliance’s site.

“The integration of AI agents into the enterprise workforce requires a fundamental rethinking of traditional IAM [identity access management] approaches. As these digital workers become more sophisticated, they require access to various systems and resources, much like human employees. However, their unique characteristics and capabilities demand enhanced security controls and monitoring systems,” IDSA’s post further read.

The Commvault-BeyondTrust partnership taps into the need for organizations to have a unified way to control identity access as part of their security posture, be those identities human or nonhuman.

“Securing access points is a critical component of a cyber resilience strategy,” said Alan Atkinson, chief business development officer at Commvault, in a news release. “In partnering with BeyondTrust, we provide customers innovative options to manage privileged access within their backup and recovery environments in order to combat threats tied to stolen logins and unauthorized access.”

The Password Safe and Commvault Cloud integration is available to customers at no additional charge, both companies said in a news release.