Commvault Shift:- Leaving Chaos Behind

So the last few weeks have been super busy from work, to VMware Explore and meeting many of my customers and partners but I really wanted to start summarising all this but started with the Commvault Shift event this other week as it also ties nicely into the industries latest buzz being AI

The event certainly started off with an impact as you can see below

AI and Cloud Chaos seem to be terms that are coming up in discussions on a regular basis, why is this? Well in my opinion we are all victims of our own success in the industry and that along with technical debt is starting to catch up but this is a time where we can take a stand and move forward ensuring we can mitigate against any historic risk along with ensuring we do not create the same mistake again.

Ransomware is not getting any cheaper and if not more prevalent thanks to AI, it is expect to cost up to $30B this year. With Generative AI this can embolden cyber criminals so they can pivot much more quickly and even adapt attacks and scripts in seconds causing further destruction and disruption

So where does that leave us, Commvault believes that we need 4 pillars to be successful in recovery.

• A true cloud based approach
• Security and Recovery
• Use of an AI Powered Engine
• A cost that makes sense

I can highly recommended watching the playback here to go into these bits in more detail but so many great points in here. We need to utilise the cloud to scale and recover when possible, no security platform is perfect you can still suffer internal attacks or bad actors, using the power of AI to augment your human teams to be as effective as they can be but also at a cost that all makes sense.

Everything has been coded as Cloud Native from the ground up to ensure that no resources go to waste, also note that it is powered to Metallic AI, Commvault recognise that they have even disrupted themselves internally so they could come to the market with disruption.

Remember when these attacks happen you have a ring side seat and there are more questions than answers, they key role you need to play is how do you assist the business in continuing to function and how can you get back to a good known state. Are we ready to recover?

So how does Commvault start to do this, well this is down to the way they layer their architecture and ensuring that the data planes are separate but tied together with a single pane of glass

One of the first tools they have launched is the data governance to help ensure that sensitive data is kept secure, maybe a developer has taken a snapshot of your production data for testing and not secure the PII or what happens if someone is writing down passwords in an insecure location

You can even check the file and take action on it such as delete it

With next feature Threat Scan Predict this uses AI to help operators highlight odd behaviour, when the system see these changes it also flags these as not to restore and you can even manually check the health of the file in a safe zone platform

Arlie is the next tool in the portfolio, this is the AI engine of which you can interact with the platform using natural language. You can even use it to perform a root cause analysis for any failures… meaning you can remediate this swiftly and get back to the other things in your day. You can even ask it to schedule you reports and context sensitive help.

The API has now also been updated to have a unified API across the stack and also enhanced all the partner integrations such as below. This is a two way API so things can also pass data into other security systems.

Cleanroom recovery also helps guide you into testing any compromised line of business applications so you can restore with confidence and also check they are functioning as expected prior to releasing into production

What is quite unique here is the way you can recover across clouds and formats and even back on prem!

What has also been interesting is they have kept the packages simple with only 3 and all the key architecture within all the packages.

Now a few interesting stats also came out, 72% of business worldwide were affected. It may not necessarily be you but think of your whole supply chain. We should be helping each other out to ensure the world is resilient

Another great statistic that came from Melissa only 16% felt they were well prepared for a digital disaster and more scary that up to 50% do not have an incident response, disaster recovery or and integrated plan.

A few closing thought from me is that AI is here to stay, be this a disruptor or enabler in a good or bad form we need to ensure we can use it to better the world. We also need to be ready for anything and start to look back at what we have done to be successful now and how can we ensure we are resilient for the future. Much like the approach Commvault has taken we also need to make this consumable be this with natural language interaction or having everything one place on a single dashboard

Honestly find some time to catch up on the videos here, there are in a great 4 part series and have some amazing insights.

A link to the announcement is here and press releases are here

I have a mission to get my home lab up and going with a view to do some follow up demos of the product as I am super keen to see how we can restore workloads across different platforms. Please do also keep an eye on this post as I may update it with some further notes.