Cyber resilience moves from backup to ResOps at Commvault

The resilience conversation has moved from infrastructure teams to the chief agenda — because when identity and data can’t be trusted, uptime alone isn’t enough. As AI-driven systems speed up 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 corporate is sharpening its deal with unified cyber resilience as organizations face rising ransomware pressure and hybrid-cloud sprawl need greater 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, based on Sanjay Mirchandani (pictured), chief executive officer of Commvault.

“The best way you recovered an application stack once I was CIO looks lots different than virtual machines 10 years ago [or] a cloud-native application you built yesterday that runs entirely within the cloud,” he said. “You may’t use the identical technology to try this.”

Mirchandani spoke with theCUBE Research analyst Dave Vellante, as a part of theCUBE + NYSE Wired Mixture of Experts Series. The discussion focused on Commvault’s evolving approach to cyber resilience and the way 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 guts 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 inspiration 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 basically penetrating the enterprise,” Kumar said. “With agentic AI, the speed of change of information and the variety of applications is just exploding. Resiliency becomes very, very essential.”

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

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

“Within the case of a cyber event, you will have to have a zero-trust approach, and that’s where it starts mattering where you’ll want to essentially go determine at which point do I would like to go and get better,” Kumar said.

Slightly than forcing organizations to make a choice from rolling back too far and losing data, or restoring recent data which 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 automatic clean-room environment before production systems are overwritten, Kumar explained.

“This was a really manual, error-prone process,” he said. “These must be one single click. Obviously, you ultimately make the ultimate decision, but all of that complex stuff behind the scenes must be automated for you.”

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

Identity resilience moves into focus

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

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

Commvault’s approach focuses on giving teams visibility into what’s changing from an identity perspective and the power to get better identity systems when something goes unsuitable, Kumar added.

“We’re essentially allowing you to principally have a look at what’s changing out of your identity perspective,” he said. “And within the event of something bad happening, we’re capable of essentially go and get better 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 answer provides Iceberg-aware, transaction-consistent backups with air-gapped isolation, enabling point-in-time recovery without disrupting live analytics workloads.

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

The corporate can be rethinking how administrators interact with resilience systems. Its MCP-based conversational interface allows teams to question 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 shouldn’t be to interchange operators, but to speed up 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. Slightly than treating backup, recovery and security as disconnected functions, the corporate is emphasizing tighter integration across data protection, identity resilience and cyber recovery — particularly in hybrid and multicloud environments where fragmentation has turn into 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 only inside isolated stacks, based on Vellante.

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

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

Market pressure, adoption challenges and why timing matters

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

“Gone are the times where you might principally operate on this siloed environment,” Kumar said. “On the planet of AI, with the extent of change that’s happening and agentic AI, in the event you operate in these silos, you’re never going to be in a situation where you’re going to find a way to get better within the event of an issue.”

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

At the identical 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 turn into 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.

“That is where continuous business matters,” Kumar added. “The entire object of cyber resilience goes and putting all these items together, because that essentially reduces the period of time it’s going to take for getting your corporation back.”

Looking ahead, the corporate’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 corporate competes within the yr ahead.

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

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

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE