Cyber resilience is no longer just an option; it’s a necessity in today’s data-driven, threat-prone world. At AWS re:Invent, experts from Commvault Systems Inc. shared new advancements in data protection, cloud recovery and modern cyber resilience — which include its Cloud Rewind solution.

“The big piece in being here at re:Invent, it’s really about expanding our coverage to protect not only more workloads’ breadth, but also depth,” said Thomas Bryant (pictured, left), senior director of product marketing at Commvault. “We’re bringing our platform, our SaaS platform, into AWS so that customers can leverage it with all of the cloud-native capabilities that they’re already using in AWS. But also be able to take advantage of our platform natively within that platform, and then we’ve also made some acquisitions.”

Bryant and Govind Rangasamy (right), head of recovery solutions at Commvault, spoke with theCUBE Research’s Christophe Bertrand for theCUBE’s continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent, during an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Commvault is setting a new standard for safeguarding cloud environments with innovations such as Cloud Rewind, Air Gap Protect and Cleanroom Recovery. (* Disclosure below.)

Expanding platform coverage: The power of air gapping in cybersecurity

Commvault’s SaaS solutions are now deeply integrated with AWS’ cloud-native capabilities. This allows organizations to streamline data protection processes and reduce operational complexities. Key acquisitions, such as Clumio and Backtrack, have enabled IP additions to bolster the platform’s ability to protect diverse workloads while addressing gaps in existing data protection systems. By consolidating capabilities, Commvault ensures that enterprises can rely on a unified platform for seamless data management and resilience, according to Bryant.

“We’re trying to add more depth to our platform as well, because what we find a lot from customers is that they’re trying to consolidate right now,” he said. “They’re trying to reduce the gaps that they have with multiple data protection platforms. What we’re trying to do is meet customers where the demand is, and we do that with breadth and depth.”

With the rise of sophisticated cyberattacks, technologies such as Air Gap Protect are pivotal. Commvault introduced its air-gapped storage capabilities on AWS, offering an isolated environment for secure data storage and recovery. This ensures that backups remain close to the primary data, minimizing recovery times during incidents like accidental deletions or ransomware attacks, Bryant added.

“You tend to want to have some level of data gravity where your data protection, your cyber resilience and your backups are close to the data,” he said. “You’re not only protecting, but wanting to recover in the case of an accident, a deletion or a cyberattack. We’ve brought our Air Gap Protect capabilities to AWS Cloud.”

Cloud Rewind boosts cloud app resilience at enterprise scale

Commvault recently debuted its Cloud Rewind capability. Unlike traditional backups that focus solely on application data, Cloud Rewind provides comprehensive protection for the entire cloud environment. This includes critical components such as network configurations, databases, serverless services and containers, according to Rangasamy.

“Typically, an application that runs on AWS tends to utilize all kinds of services and their dependencies,” he said. “That really makes up a distributed cloud application. What do I mean when I say that I’ll protect the environment properly? I mean all the services along with application data … to be able to properly protect and also replicate to another region.”

By replicating an application’s environment across AWS regions, organizations can achieve near-high availability and quickly recover from regional failures. Recovery-as-Code, a feature of Cloud Rewind, automates this process, enabling businesses to resume operations with minimal downtime, Bryant explained.

“One of the biggest gaps that we see with folks right now is there’s this false sense of security with their disaster recovery plans,” he said. “In the case of a cyber recovery, you can’t really rely on or trust the data is clean, and so it throws a wrench in those disaster recovery plans and incident response plans. This Cleanroom Recovery technology allows anyone to be able to bring any of their workloads.”

Configuration drift — where changes in settings accumulate over time — poses another challenge. Commvault’s automated solutions address this by maintaining a Cloud Time Machine, which preserves consistent snapshots of both application data and configurations, according to Rangasamy.

“The first thing that we do is to go and discover all those services and understand automatically the dependencies between those services that make up the distributed cloud application,” he said. “The second thing that we do is to protect all those services in something called a Cloud Time Machine, which has two different walls. One wall protects all the services and the configurations, and it does it continuously on a Cloud Time Machine. The second one is the application data itself.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of AWS re:Invent: 

(* Disclosure: Commvault Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Commvault nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE