Shift 2024: Commvault Cloud Rewind Transforming How Cloud-First Organizations Rapidly Recover After Cyberattack

At SHIFT 2024, Commvault Systems, Inc. announced the availability of Cloud Rewind on its cloud platform.

This offering, which integrates cloud-native distributed application recovery and rebuild capabilities from the Appranix acquisition, gives cloud-first organizations a secret weapon to transform their cyber resilience capabilities.

Today, when organizations are attacked, restoring the data is only half the battle. The truly laborious task is actually restoring the distributed cloud applications, which are used to run and power that data.

Think of it like this: a typical enterprise organization may use as many as 371 ⁽¹⁾ cloud applications spanning various services like finance, HR, and operations. After an attack, organizations often can’t resume ‘business-as-usual’ operations until many of those applications are rebuilt in a step-by-step, systematic, time-consuming way. The majority of enterprises report that it takes more than a week to return to normal operations, according to Commvault’s latest research. That’s too long. But, with Cloud Rewind, that’s all changing.

Cloud Rewind offers an approach that transforms and simplifies cloud cyber recoveries. It is designed to restore an organization’s entire cloud application and data environment – including all the necessary cloud infrastructure configurations – in an automated way. By combining data recovery – the sole focus of traditional data protection tools – with cloud-native application and infrastructure rebuild automation, it helps customers get back to business within minutes after a cloud services outage or ransomware attack, akin to a ‘cloud time machine.’

Advanced Cloud Rewind capabilities
It introduces an advanced set of capabilities designed to help businesses bounce back from cyber incidents with speed and efficiency:

• Reduce organizational risk with resource discovery: automatically identifies and catalogs all cloud components in use, offering full visibility into what assets need protection and recovery. So that nothing critical is missed in the recovery process, even in complex, multi-cloud environments.
• Reduce operational confusion and toil with app-centric dependency mapping: analyzes and defines the intricate relationships between various cloud components. This feature accelerates the task of piecing these dependencies together after an incident, making the rebuild process much faster. So, when a system is restored, all connected resources and services are aligned, with little to no human involvement.
• Keep security teams in-sync with drift analysis: helps return restored systems to their correct state by identifying and correcting any deviations (or ‘drifts’) from the original configuration. This proactive capability keeps tabs so that restored systems are aligned with their secure and functional state after an incident.
• Automated cyber recovery testing with Recovery-as-Code: captures not only the data but also the full map of applications, infrastructure, and networking configurations. This means that systems can be restored with their complete operational blueprint intact, reducing guesswork for a thorough recovery.
• Avoid wasting cloud resources with on-demand cloud reconstruction: puts it all back together, helping customers swiftly rebuild both the data environment and its supporting infrastructure. This provides organizations with a secure and operational cloud environment, ready for immediate use following a disruption.
• Integrated application-centric cyber recovery and DR: Cloud Rewind integrates with Commvault Cloud data resilience capabilities to help organizations rapidly recover from short-term failures to debilitating cyber-attacks with a few clicks.

Cloud Rewind manages active-active PaaS databases
with backup to allow no data loss scenario along with recoveries from ransomware attacks
Click to enlarge

Cloud Rewind supports all major public and private cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure, for customer cloud choice.

Cyber resilience dashboard
Complementing the company’s cloud-native rebuild technology is its Cyber Resilience Dashboard. This dashboard provides continuous ransomware readiness assessments that make it for organizations to understand where they have gaps in their resilience plans. It also delivers actionable insights to improve resilience and recovery readiness. It dashboard provides a view across the entire data estate, assessing components such as testing frequency and success, and availability of immutable air-gapped copies of critical data. Leveraging that information, organizations receive a grade based on their readiness to recover and recommendations on improving it.

“Commvault’s Cloud Rewind enhances data management by covering every step of a data breach – protection, recovery, and rebuilding,” said Venkata Sudhakar Nagandla, SVP and global head-IT infrastructure and cloud, Allcargo Group Companies. “Additionally, we can achieve better RTO and RPO to meet our business needs without requiring a parallel hot standby IT infrastructure and with minimal manual effort.”

“What we are doing with Cloud Rewind is unlike anything offered on the market today. In the ransomware era, recovering data is important, but it’s table stakes,” said Brian Brockway, CTO, Commvault Systems, Inc. “We’re ushering in an entirely new chapter in cyber resilience that not only expedites data recovery, but recovery of cloud applications. This is the gold standard in recovery for a cloud-first world.”

“With Cloud Rewind, Commvault helps organizations quickly recover in the case of a cybersecurity incident,” said Melinda Marks, practice director, cybersecurity, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Its resource discovery, dependency mapping, drift analysis, and automated cloud reconstruction capabilities provide much-needed relief for teams to save them from the intricate and time-consuming process of rebuilding their applications. For enterprises managing hundreds of cloud services, this is a huge advantage for minimizing downtime after a breach.” 

Cloud-first cyber resilience
Cloud Rewind and the Cyber Resilience Dashboard will be generally available in the coming months.

⁽¹⁾ Productive. (June 6, 2024). State of SaaS

Resources:
Blog: Recover and Rebuild Your Cloud Operations with Cloud Rewind    
Ebook: Achieve Cloud Applications Recovery with Cloud Rewind    
Ebook: Applications Resilience Use Cases with Cloud Rewind    
Ebook: Cloud Native Data with Cloud Rewind