Commvault sponsors this research note. To find out more about Commvault, visit www.commvault.com.
TECHunplugged had the opportunity to attend the Commvault SHIFT 2024 event in London, on October 8th, 2024. During the event (also available on-demand), the company outlined its latest announcements including figures, acquisitions, innovations & partnerships.
The Evolving World of Data
Commvault’s CEO Sanjay Mirchandani started his keynote with some key figures:
- 40% increase in cloud data storage usage
- 20% rise in spending on public cloud services
- 19% AGR (Absolute Growth Rate) growth in the AI market
- Governance, risk, and compliance are seeing 9% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) growth.
- Average recovery time is currently 24 days
- 95% of IT leaders plan to consolidate vendors within the next 12 months
From these data points, and although we do not have data sources quoted, we can derive the following insights:
- Cloud spend is not going anywhere, and the growth trends contradict data repatriation claims from on-prem storage vendors
- AI market growth combined with increasing demand from regulatory topics are fueling demand for data storage and data protection solutions
- It still takes nearly a month on average to recover from a cyber incident. It is not clear if Commvault is talking about partial or full recovery, but we are assuming partial recovery of business-critical operations, full recovery could take weeks to months.
Announcements
Commvault SHIFT London saw a flurry of announcements, which can be split into the following categories:
- Acquisitions & Major Cloud-Native Data Protection improvements
- Improved Cyber Resiliency capabilities
- SaaS Data Protection portfolio expansion
- Enhanced Active Directory Resiliency
- Edge Data Protection support
Acquisitions & Major Cloud-Native Data Protection improvements
Commvault recently acquired two cloud-native data protection companies: Appranix, and Clumio.
Appranix excels with comprehensive multi-cloud data protection (including the ability to discover and protect attached service dependencies such as databases, VPCs, etc.) and orchestrated disaster recovery, with multi-tenant, multi-region, and multi-zone support.
At the event, Commvault introduced Cloud Rewind, which is not only Appranix’s new name, but also signals the integration of Appranix’s capabilities directly into Commvault Cloud. The offering allows organizations to quickly recover or rebuild cloud application stacks after outages and ransomware attacks.
Clumio has been the data protection solution of choice for cloud-native organizations predominantly running their mission-critical workloads on AWS, protecting not only EC2 instances, databases, and SaaS workloads, but also providing continuous backup capabilities at scale for S3 buckets, keeping up with even millions of changes per second.
Clumio’s capabilities will be gradually integrated into Commvault portfolio, likely under the Commvault cloud umbrella.
Improved Cyber Resiliency capabilities
With its focus on continuous business, there is no surprise that cyber resiliency innovations are important for the company. Two announcements stand out:
- Commvault Air Gap Protect is now available on AWS and offers enhanced cyber protection through air-gapped, immutable cloud storage. This expands the initial offering previously available only on Azure and offers more flexible options for organizations that embrace multi-cloud strategies.
- Commvault Clean Room Recovery, the company’s“Cleanroom-as-a-Service” has been improved to include on-demand isolated recovery sites, extensible recovery workflows, Active Directory validation, XSOAR-driven incident response, and the ability to factory-reset hosts to clean copies.
Those capabilities are critical for organizations and greatly simplify post-cyber incident recovery activities by providing a clean environment to initiate recovery steps. The preparation aspects should not be understated either: both greatly reduce the burden of design and set-up, since custom-made clean room architectures can be very time-consuming to design and maintain.
Modern Workloads & SaaS Data Protection
Commvault demonstrated commitment to modern workload protection by introducing support for Azure Data Lake Gen 2 as well as RAG extensions for Postgres, Databricks, and MongoDB.
On the SaaS application front, the following capabilities were introduced:
- Air-gapped immutable storage with extended retention and e-Discovery through Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery for Microsoft 365
- Premium Microsoft 365 Backup Storage, providing faster restores and large-scale recovery capabilities
- Google Workspace backup, initially comprising of Gmail and Google Drive
Enhanced Active Directory Resiliency
Commvault also introduced Enhanced Active Directory Resiliency by adding Forest-Level Resilience. This is a major milestone that greatly simplifies Active Directory recovery activities: the solution includes interactive topology mapping and auto-generated runbooks.
The recovery process allows the detailed tracking of recovery progress in a structured, step-by-step manner.
Edge Data Protection support
Finally, Commvault also introduces dedicated edge workload data protection support with HyperScale X Edge, delivering seamless data protection for edge environments, integrated into a single control plane.
Key Takeaways
Key messages conveyed by Sanjay Mirchandani include the need to shift from business continuity to continuous business operations, and the necessity for organizations to own their cloud and embrace the multi-cloud, while also accepting the reality that organizations must naturally manage diverse workloads, making one-size-fit-all solutions ill-suited to meet enterprise-grade data protection requirements.
From a portfolio and capabilities perspective, Commvault continues to expand and enrich its capabilities, closing the few gaps that the company had in cloud-native data protection. The acquisition of Clumio allows Commvault to gain best-in-class AWS data protection capabilities for mission-critical cloud workloads, while Cloud Rewind (formerly Appranix) delivers unmatched disaster recovery and cyber resiliency capabilities for cloud-native applications. This should not underplay the other announcements made, which all bring significant improvements and benefits for customers.
From a strategic perspective, the company continues to excel with sparse but laser-focused & strategic acquisitions that are usually fully integrated in Commvault’s product portolio at an accelerated pace. This allows the delivery of a unified, complete set of capabilities to customers, and further strengthens the company’s position as the leader in data protection and cyber resilience.