Commvault Systems Inc. today introduced new features for its data protection platform that should put it in a better position to address the ongoing shift of enterprise workloads to the public cloud.

Publicly-traded Commvault is an established player in the enterprise backup market that traces its roots back to 1988. After a period of slowing sales, the company appointed Sanjay Mirchandani (pictured) as chief executive in early 2019 and has since been pursuing a cloud-focused growth strategy under the former Puppet Inc. CEO’s leadership.

Today’s platform release adds stronger support for three different public clouds. Commvault customers can now back up records in Amazon Web Services Inc.’s DynamoDB, DocumentDB and Redshift data management services, as well as migrate on-premises applications that run on Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. SQL databases to Microsoft’s Azure platform. The third new integration is for Alibaba Cloud, allowing users to convert, back up and migrate VMware workloads to the Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service.

Given how big a role the public cloud plays in enterprises’ technology roadmaps, the improved platform support represents an important development milestone for Commvault’s platform. But it’s not the only enhancement that was announced today.

The company is adding yet another cloud-focused upgrade, a feature that allows administrators to automatically switch Oracle databases running on Unix to Linux or vice versa. Commvault says that the capability will make it easier to migrate on-premises Unix Oracle instances to the cloud and, when necessary, bring cloud databases back in-house.

The update is capped off by a pair of usability improvements. Administrators managing multiple Commvault deployments now only have to sign in once instead of logging into each environment separately, while the Commvault Activate tool has a new feature feature for scheduling when its automatically generated audit reports should be created.

“In these challenging times it is important that organizations have flexibility when it comes to managing their data, and the cloud is a critical part of that,” Commvault Vice President of Product Management Ranga Rajagopalan said in a statement. “With these new capabilities we are making it easier for our customers to move more workloads into the cloud.”

Photo: Commvault