When a cyberattack hits, organizations face an impossible choice: Roll back to a known, clean copy and accept significant data loss or push forward with potentially compromised systems. That no-win gamble has defined disaster recovery for years. A new approach, synthetic recovery, is reframing the equation entirely.

The concept, introduced by Commvault Systems Inc. at its recent SHIFT Conference, automates what was previously painstaking manual work. Instead of forcing organizations to choose between safety and data preservation, the patent-pending technology identifies clean data across multiple recovery points and reconstructs systems with minimal loss, according to Poojan Kumar (pictured), chief product officer of Commvault.

“Gone are the days where you could … operate in this siloed environment,” Kumar said. “In the world of AI, with the level of change that’s happening and agentic AI, if you operate in these silos, you’re never going to be in a situation where you’re going to be able to recover in the event of a problem. AI is the catalyst, why our customers need to take a step back and say, ‘I actually need a single platform.’”

Kumar spoke with Dave Vellante during theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, explored synthetic recovery, the Commvault Cloud Unity Platform and the company’s deepening Amazon Web Services Inc. partnership.

Synthetic recovery: Building for the worst day

Commvault’s technology uses threat-scanning capabilities to map exactly what happened during an attack. Rather than treating the entire environment as suspect, the company’s Unity platform identifies which data remains clean and which has been compromised, then assembles a hybrid recovery that minimizes loss, according to Kumar.

“Then, what happens in the case of an event when you need to go back, the Commvault platform, the Unity platform, knows exactly what has happened in the past,” he said. “We are able to automatically go in the past and take all the clean stuff for you where we know this is not infected, and this is something we can get back. You don’t need to worry about data loss because we know that stuff is clean.”

Once assembled, the recovered data is moved to an automated cleanroom environment for testing against a clean operating system, Kumar noted. The synthetic recovery process — from threat analysis through cleanroom validation — happens with a single click, replacing what previously took days or weeks of manual work.

“This is where continuous business matters,” he said. “The whole object of cyber resilience is going and putting all these things together. [It] is important because that essentially reduces the amount of time it’s going to take for getting your business back.”

The synthetic recovery capability sits atop Commvault’s deepening integration with AWS. The partnership includes immutable air-gapped copies in AWS storage, zero-trust integrations, post-quantum cryptography and exclusive support for the Apache Iceberg open-source table format, according to Kumar. During this year’s re:Invent, AWS recognized the company with both resilience competency status and the Global Storage Partner of the Year Award.

“Ultimately, I think [the architecture] buys a customer peace of mind in the sense that we know that we have the ability to essentially go and detect threats,” Kumar said. “And in the event of something happening, we have the ability to make sure that we can essentially get your business up and running as fast as possible because of the architecture we have built. That’s ultimately what we try to achieve, to make sure.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE