Commvault’s Shift to Cloud-First Resilience: A Strategic Move

Commvault's Shift to Cloud-First Resilience: A Strategic Move

Analyst(s): Krista Case
Publication Date: October 16, 2024

Commvault’s strategic shift toward cloud-first resilience is driven by the growing complexity of modern IT environments. As organizations increasingly adopt multi-hybrid cloud architectures, data protection and cyber resilience become paramount. Commvault’s acquisition of Appranix and Clumio and its deeper partnerships with a variety of cloud service providers along with its focus on integrating with security partners demonstrate its commitment to providing comprehensive solutions that address the evolving needs of its customers.

What is Covered in this Article:

  • Commvault’s strategic shift: The company is evolving from a traditional data protection provider to a comprehensive cyber resilience platform, focusing on multi-hybrid cloud environments.
  • Acquisitions: Commvault’s acquisitions of Appranix and Clumio have strengthened its capabilities in cloud application recovery and S3 data protection.
  • Platform approach: Commvault is building a cohesive platform that integrates various technologies to deliver comprehensive cyber resilience solutions.
  • Focus on cyber resilience: Commvault prioritizes cyber resilience, addressing the growing need for organizations to protect their data and applications in complex environments.
  • Partnerships: Commvault’s partnerships with other cybersecurity vendors enable bi-directional integration and enhanced threat detection and response capabilities.
  • Multi-cloud focus: Commvault’s solutions support various cloud environments, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, allowing for flexibility and scalability.
  • Continuous innovation: Commvault continues to invest in research & development to introduce new features and capabilities that address emerging cybersecurity challenges.

The News: Commvault hosts Shift, its annual customer and partner conference, in London, England, on October 8, 2024.

Commvault’s Shift to Cloud-First Resilience: A Strategic Move

Analyst Take: Evolving from Data Protection to Address Multi-Hybrid Cloud Business Resiliency

The main tagline of Commvault Shift, Cloud-First Resilience, reflects two of the most driving trends in the broader industry.

First is the shift of both production and protection environments to a multi-hybrid cloud model for practically all enterprises. Rather than obviating customers’ responsibility over their data, in fact it only heightens the need for customers’ diligence. In the words of Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani on the Shift mainstage, “if your business is in the cloud, then the cloud is your business.” This is due to a host of issues, including:

  • Data sprawl, which results in visibility and protection gaps as well as management complexities.
  • Divergent and ever-changing compliance requirements.
  • The need to recover the entire application stack, including all dependencies – a complex process in the public cloud.
  • More challenging identity and access control.

Second is the paramount need for cyber-resiliency given the onslaught of evermore sophisticated cyber-attacks. In fact, adding or improving cyber-resiliency capabilities was noted as a top motivating factor by more than 50% of respondents considering changing their primary data protection vendor in The Futurum Group’s Cybersecurity Decision Maker IQ data. Specifically, we see that organizations are most concerned with avoiding the loss of their most critical data and minimizing downtime of business services.

Commvault, for its part, is steadily evolving beyond its data protection roots to facilitate what it describes as continuous business operations in a multi-hybrid cloud context. In support of this strategy and very notably, two of its four acquisitions since its founding in 1988 were announced in the last six months – cloud application stack recovery specialist Appranix and AWS S3 data protection specialist Clumio. As demonstrated during mainstage and analyst-specific sessions, these acquisitions will augment Commvault’s organically driven portfolio development, such as its Cleanroom Recovery capability, a logically isolated cloud-based environment for cyber-recovery and forensics, as well as strategic, bi-directional integrations with a host of cybersecurity vendors. Ultimately, we see the company driving toward a cohesive platform that blends Commvault Cloud with the acquired Appranix and Clumio technologies to deliver required cyber-resilience outcomes.

From Data Backup to Full-Stack, Cloud-Native Recovery

Appranix, now rebranded as Cloud Rewind, was on prominent display during the Shift mainstage. The new name reflects the simplicity, speed, comprehensiveness, and flexibility that the technology brings to recovering cloud-hosted applications. It automatically discovers and catalogs resources, maps interdependencies, and allows for both testing and execution of recovery operations. Recoveries can occur across clouds, regions, and accounts.

Commvault is not wasting any time in highlighting the potential for integrating Clumio technology into the Commvault Cloud platform to address the unique challenges pertaining to cyber recovery for public cloud-native applications. Clumio co-founders Poojan Kuamar and Woon Jung joined Commvault’s CEO on the mainstage for a discussion of the massive scale to the tune of billions of objects, lightning-fast performance, and stringent RTOs that are inherent when recovering S3 applications. The Futurum Group has engaged with Clumio since its launch in 2019, and notes that the company brings fine-grained, point in time recovery capabilities utilizing a simple-to-use calendar view that complements Commvault’s platform capabilities.

In another demonstration of Commvault knitting in-house developed and acquired technologies to round out its cloud resiliency capabilities, the company also announced at Shift that it is extending Cleanroom Recovery, formerly an Azure-exclusive capability, to AWS. Also a component of this story is Commvault’s Air Gap Protect service, which creates immutable and indelible, logically isolated copies of data in a Commvault cloud tenant – and which will be available in AWS later this year.

Advancing the Multi-Hybrid Cloud Approach While Furthering Compliance

As alluded to, the recent AWS-driven investments complement Commvault’s previously Azure-driven developments, building a robust multi-cloud approach. For example, Commvault is allowing customers to simultaneously store and update immutable and indelible copies of data in multiple clouds. Critically important is the fact that it allows this to happen automatically, using a single policy and managed under a single pane of glass.

Commvault’s focus on cyber-resilience extends to compliance, as well – as evidenced by the joint offering with Pure Storage announced at Shift. The solution meshes Pure capabilities such as its SafeMode Snapshots and S3 Object Locking with Commvault features such as its anomaly detection and Cleanroom Recovery for resiliency as well as compliance with regulations such as DORA. In doing so, both companies are helping enterprises not only prepare and rapidly recover from unplanned events, but adhere to guidelines pertaining to risk management and operational resilience testing.

Bi-Directional Integration with Security Partners

Shift also served as a showcase for how Commvault is integrating with a network of security partners such as Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, and Splunk to allow security and infrastructure teams to quickly act on early warning signals and to drive better automation of incident response-related processes.

The Futurum Group notes that this is true, bi-directional integration that includes feeding Commvault’s signals of potentially malicious activity to enrich signals of security events, as well as its insights into data classification and protection policies to help inform a breach’s impact and to prioritize recovery operations. And vice versa, Commvault can automatically trigger security responses based on alerts from security partners, such as quarantining infected files or blocking malicious users.

What to Watch:

  • As Commvault builds out its platform approach, watch for modality to be added without adding complexity.
  • The need for predictability in recovery – and, as a result, regular and rigorous testing – continues to grow in tandem with cyberattacks and data privacy-related legislations. It will also grow with the adoption of multi-hybrid cloud environments – which are constantly changing, and no two of which are the same – as well as with the adoption of complex AI stacks. As a result, the testing use case for Commvault’s Cloud Rewind will increasingly headline.
  • In following Commvault’s multi-hybrid cloud focus, look for opportunities for Commvault to bring the Clumio architecture to other clouds. The Futurum Group notes that Clumio was not S3-focused at its inception.
  • As customers increasingly lean on the public cloud for critical workloads, TCO and speed and scale of recovery will become increasingly important. This coupled with the ability to protect metadata, firewalls, service mesh configurations, and other elements of the application stack will become an important battleground for data protection companies.
  • The ability to differentiate around security partnerships will also be important. There is a major push in the cybersecurity market away from point solutions and toward platforms. However, The Futurum Group anticipates that practitioners will still desire flexibility to use best-of-breed tools, and we are seeing some skepticism to go all-in on a single vendor following the July 2024 CrowdStrike outages. For Commvault, its close collaboration and bi-directional integration are strategic in its ability to differentiate here.

See Commvault’s News Room for all of its announcements coming out of Shift 2024. .

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.

Other insights from The Futurum Group:

Commvault Acquires Clumio to Strengthen AWS Cyber Resilience Capabilities

Subscription Revenue Drives Commvault’s Exceptional Q1 2025 Results

Commvault Acquires Appranix to Bolster Cyber-Resiliency

Author Information

Krista Case

With a focus on data security, protection, and management, Krista has a particular focus on how these strategies play out in multi-cloud environments. She brings approximately 15 years of experience providing research and advisory services and creating thought leadership content. Her vantage point spans technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her work has appeared in major publications including eWeek, TechTarget and The Register.

Prior to joining The Futurum Group, Krista led the data protection practice for Evaluator Group and the data center practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research. She also created articles, product analyses, and blogs on all things storage and data protection and management for analyst firm Storage Switzerland and led market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.

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