Like many people, I began my career working with physical servers in corporate data centres. I started out as a systems administrator, then progressed into a solutions architect role, designing IT systems in the financial services industry. After years of working with mission critical systems, I know first hand how important it is to protect your most valuable asset - your data.

As more and more companies adopt a cloud-first, multi-cloud approach, securing critical business data against accidental or malicious attack, while ensuring business continuity in the event of a failure has become an incredibly complex task.

Last week I was fortunate to attend Commvault SHIFT in London, to understand how global companies like Americold Logistics, LLC. and ECU Worldwide handle continuous resilience, and automated recovery. Managing a complex, ever-changing footprint of infrastructure, applications, data, network configurations, and security across multiple cloud providers is a huge challenge, so I was interested to find out how Commvault are helping to simplify the world of site reliability engineering and cyber resilience. It was a day of launches, demonstrations and thought-provoking conversations, here are my key takeaways!

1. Cyber Resilience for Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is one of the most popular cloud services, it was actually one of the very first cloud services that AWS launched back in 2006, changing the world of IT forever.

Following the recently announced acquisition of Clumio - experts in AWS data protection, Commvault also announced the introduction of autonomous backup and recovery for Amazon S3 data.

This means that in the event of an attack, this technology will enable customers to seamlessly revert back to a clean copy of data from before the attack even took place, allowing customers to recover their data within seconds.

2. Transforming Cloud Security with Cloud Rewind

When an organisation is attacked, restoring data is only part of the story. There's also the task of restoring the metadata, any state data, and distributed cloud applications that are needed to maintain, update, and utilise that data.

That's where Commvault's latest innovation, Cloud Rewind (formerly known as Appranix, and now part of the Commvault Cloud platform), comes into play. With this new launch, organisations can turn back time to pre-breach moments, restoring not only data but also the critical metadata that keeps their cloud infrastructure humming.

Available on the AWS Marketplace, Cloud Rewind empowers organisations to protect cloud their estates across AWS, GCP, and Azure, including:

Data backup and recovery

Enabling organisations to seamlessly backup everything from VPC configurations and Load Balancers to Lambda setups as code.

Push-button restoration

Reconstruct applications, or your entire cloud estate at the push of a button.

Incident analysis

Restore to the moment an attack happened and conduct forensics in a safe, isolated environment.

3. Compliance Meets Cyber Readiness: The PureStorage Partnership

Commvault also announced a strategic partnership with data management experts

Pure Storage to help customers prepare for the EU's DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) compliance.

This collaboration is going to be a game-changer for organisations in highly-regulated industries, offering a cyber-readiness solution that will enable customers to address two key pillars of DORA - risk management and digital operational resilience testing.

Components of the joint offering include:

A cyber resilient vault that is air-gapped, isolated, and immutable, and with internal controls limiting communication when not in use.
Isolated recovery environments for validating clean recovery, performing digital forensics, or for cyber recovery testing.
Rapid recovery capabilities, to restore critical operations either to an on-premises location or the cloud.
Ultra-low RTO recovery, using storage based point-in-time snapshots for near instant restoration of mission critical applications.

This is going to be great for customers who need to quickly get ready to meet the strict requirements of DORA.

Empowering organisations to demonstrate to regulators that they are ready and compliant and benefit from state-of-the-art detection, rapid response, and recovery for critical data.

With data being the number one asset of any organisation, it’s never been more important for companies to ensure they have a solid plan for protection and recovery, not just of their data, but also the critical systems that their business relies on.

Want to Learn More?

Exciting times for Commvault, for AWS, and for those of us responsible for mission critical workloads in the cloud! If you’re interested in hearing more about all of these announcements, you can watch all the SHIFT sessions on demand.

Commvault at re:Invent 2024

If you’re heading to AWS re:Invent this year, visit the Commvault team in the Expo Hall at booth #722 for a VR data recovery experience showcasing Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery, as well as plenty of demos and more, at booth #513.

At the time of writing there are still a few seats left for their breakout session SEC225-S - Best practices for cyber readiness, recovery and rebuild. Reserve your seat now!