Commvault this week embraced the de facto S3 application programming interface (API) standard to make its data protection service more accessible to a wider range of applications.
Currently available under an early access program, the Commvault Cloud Unified Data Vault is expected to be made generally available in the spring of this year.
Brian Brockway, vice president and global CTO for Commvault, said the Commvault Cloud Unified Data Vault enables IT teams and application developers to move backups into the Commvault platform without having to rely on custom scripts or agent software that have to be developed, deployed and maintained.
Additionally, that data will automatically inherit the encryption, deduplication, immutability, and policy-based governance that Commvault enables, he noted.
The overall goal is to reduce the level of friction that organizations encounter when backing up data to a cloud service, said Brockway.
It’s not clear if organizations are backing up more data but there is little doubt a lot more of it is being created. Much of that data, however, is not of equal value so organizations need to better understand what data, much of which is unstructured, is worth backing up.
More challenging still, recovering that data not only requires time, it usually needs to be accomplished in a specific order as organizations rehydrate an IT environment in the wake of, for example, a ransomware attack. Commvault to facilitate that recovery process has been developing a series of playbooks that IT teams can invoke to streamline those workflows, noted Brockway.
The Commvault Cloud Unified Data Vault comes on the heels of a Commvault effort to make it simpler to backup and recover workloads running in multiple cloud computing environments, including instances of Kubernetes clusters, across more than 200 cloud services running in regions around the world.
Commvault has also developed artificial intelligence (AI) tools that automatically discover cloud workloads and recommend policies to apply based on how data is classified to help accelerate the recovery of an organization’s most crucial data.
In general, there is more focus than ever on cyber resilience, much of which revolves around backup and recovery to enable organizations to recover from unexpected service interruptions. The challenge is that backup and recovery has, historically, been a task intermittently performed, which means critical data might not actually be recoverable. All too often IT teams have also failed to test whether the data backed up hasn’t been corrupted or, worse yet, tampered with by cybercriminals that injected malware into a backup file. Data protection should, ideally, be part of a larger data management strategy.
Ultimately, the level of sophistication applied to data management is going to vary widely from one organization to the next. However, the more sensitive that data is the more likely it is to be critical to the business. The challenge as always is finding ways to classify data so that when it comes time to recover it the photos of someone’s cat don’t wind up being prioritized over customer invoices.
