Cyber resilience moves from backup to ResOps at Commvault – News

The resilience conversation has moved from infrastructure teams to the executive agenda — because when identity and data can’t be trusted, uptime alone isn’t enough. As AI-driven systems accelerate the pace of change across data, applications and access controls, enterprises are being forced to rethink what recovery actually means in a cyber event.

That shift is reshaping how vendors position themselves, and Commvault Systems Inc. is leaning into it. The company is sharpening its focus on unified cyber resilience as organizations face rising ransomware pressure and hybrid-cloud sprawl need more than backups. Commvault now positions its platform around securing data, protecting identity and recovering clean, trusted systems — not simply restoring files.

The rise of cloud-native architectures and AI has fundamentally altered the recovery equation, according to Sanjay Mirchandani (pictured), chief executive officer of Commvault.

“The way you recovered an application stack when I was CIO looks a lot different than virtual machines 10 years ago [or] a cloud-native application you built yesterday that runs entirely in the cloud,” he said. “You can’t use the same technology to do that.”

Mirchandani spoke with theCUBE Research analyst Dave Vellante, as part of theCUBE + NYSE Wired Mixture of Experts Series. The discussion focused on Commvault’s evolving approach to cyber resilience and how those priorities are being shaped by customer demand and cloud-native environments. (* Disclosure below.) 

From backup to ResOps

The disconnect between legacy recovery models and modern, AI-driven environments is at the heart of Commvault’s push toward what it calls “ResOps” — operationalizing cyber resilience across data, identity and recovery workflows. That platform strategy crystallized with the launch of the Cloud Unity platform, which Commvault has positioned as the foundation for delivering ResOps across hybrid and multicloud environments.

Speaking with Vellante during theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent, Poojan Kumar, chief product officer of Commvault, described ResOps as a response to how quickly data and identities now change in agentic AI environments.

“AI is really penetrating the enterprise,” Kumar said. “With agentic AI, the rate of change of data and the number of applications is just exploding. Resiliency becomes very, very important.”

Kumar outlined three pillars that anchor Commvault’s ResOps model: data security, identity resilience and cyber recovery. Together, they are designed to help organizations maintain continuous business operations even when trust in systems and data has been compromised.

One of the most significant technical shifts in Commvault’s approach is synthetic recovery — an AI-driven method for reconstructing clean recovery points after a cyberattack.

“In the case of a cyber event, you have to have a zero-trust approach, and that is where it starts mattering where you need to essentially go figure out at which point do I need to go and recover,” Kumar said.

Rather than forcing organizations to choose between rolling back too far and losing data, or restoring recent data that may be infected, synthetic recovery analyzes historical changes, isolates infected objects and reconstructs a clean dataset. The recovered data can then be validated in an automated clean-room environment before production systems are overwritten, Kumar explained.

“This used to be a very manual, error-prone process,” he said. “These have to be one single click. Obviously, you ultimately make the final decision, but all of that complex stuff behind the scenes has to be automated for you.”

For customers under regulatory pressure to rehearse recovery — including financial services firms governed by DORA and NY DFS Part 500 — the ability to test recovery in isolated environments without disrupting production is increasingly table stakes.

Identity resilience moves into focus

Identity has become a critical part of cyber resilience, especially as AI increases the number of non-human actors interacting with enterprise systems. Kumar tied that directly to ResOps, noting that organizations can’t treat identity as separate from recovery.

“The AI agents — and these are non-human agents in a lot of scenarios — you essentially have to look at identities that are going and manipulating your data, which is where identity resilience becomes very important,” he said.

Commvault’s approach focuses on giving teams visibility into what’s changing from an identity perspective and the ability to recover identity systems when something goes wrong, Kumar added.

“We are essentially allowing you to basically look at what is changing from your identity perspective,” he said. “And in the event of something bad happening, we’re able to essentially go and recover your whole entire identity platform.”

Lakehouses and AI pipelines under protection

AI workloads have shifted the battleground for cyber resilience toward data lakehouses, where massive volumes of structured and unstructured data feed analytics and model training pipelines. Commvault’s Clumio for Apache Iceberg — announced ahead of re:Invent — targets this challenge directly. The solution provides Iceberg-aware, transaction-consistent backups with air-gapped isolation, enabling point-in-time recovery without disrupting live analytics workloads.

Commvault is currently the only vendor supporting Apache Iceberg recovery at this depth, extending cyber resilience deeper into AI data pipelines where native snapshot tools often fall short, according to Kumar.

The company is also rethinking how administrators interact with resilience systems. Its MCP-based conversational interface allows teams to query protection status, failed jobs and risk exposure using natural language — without bypassing enterprise guardrails.

Early access for conversational controls began at Commvault’s SHIFT 2025 event, with broader availability planned in 2026. The goal is not to replace operators, but to accelerate decision-making when time matters most.

A platform approach to resilience, not point tools

Commvault’s strategy is built around reducing tool sprawl by positioning its platform as a resilience control plane across heterogeneous environments. Rather than treating backup, recovery and security as disconnected functions, the company is emphasizing tighter integration across data protection, identity resilience and cyber recovery — particularly in hybrid and multicloud environments where fragmentation has become the norm.

That approach relies heavily on ecosystem integration. Partnerships with Platform9 extend unified protection into private cloud and Kubernetes deployments, while collaboration with Kyndryl supports regulatory-driven architectures that require immutable cyber vaults and clean-room recovery. BeyondTrust integrations add privileged access controls around backup and recovery systems, reinforcing the platform’s zero-trust posture. Together, these integrations reflect Commvault’s push to make resilience operational across real-world, mixed environments — not just within isolated stacks, according to Vellante.

“Traditional backup has become a fundamental component of cyber resilience,” he said. “AI has taken this to a new level.”

In that context, Commvault’s platform strategy is less about adding features and more about unifying functions that enterprises already struggle to manage independently.

Market pressure, adoption challenges and why timing matters

The opportunity for unified cyber resilience is clear, but execution comes with real challenges. Commvault competes in a crowded market, facing Rubrik and Veeam on recovery capabilities and security vendors such as CrowdStrike and SentinelOne on threat detection. Many organizations still depend on snapshot-based recovery and legacy processes, largely because they have not yet experienced a failure severe enough to force change.

“Gone are the days where you could basically 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.”

Moving to synthetic recovery and identity-aware resilience requires a shift in mindset — from assuming recovery will work to continuously validating that it will. That shift is increasingly being driven by regulation. Frameworks such as DORA and NY DFS Part 500 demand demonstrable isolation, immutable data and repeatable recovery testing. Enterprises that cannot prove clean recovery are exposed not only to operational risk, but also to audits, penalties and reputational damage.

At the same time, board-level awareness of cyber resilience is rising as AI adoption accelerates faster than governance models can keep pace. Recovery time objectives are shrinking as digital systems become inseparable from revenue and customer trust. Commvault is betting that resilience will ultimately be measured not by how well systems are backed up, but by how quickly and cleanly businesses can resume operations under zero-trust conditions.

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

Looking ahead, the company’s roadmap centers on synthetic recovery, identity resilience, lakehouse protection and AI-assisted operations — all anchored in a unified platform model. In a market crowded with vendors claiming “resilience,” Commvault is positioning itself around operational proof. Whether enterprises consolidate around that model will shape how aggressively the company competes in the year ahead.

Here is the complete video interview with Commvault’s Sanjay Mirchandani, part of theCUBE + NYSE Wired Mixture of Experts Series:

And here is the complete video interview with Commvault’s Poojan Kumar, part of AWS re:Invent coverage:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS re:Invent. Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

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