Protecting your data and ensuring business resilience is more important than ever. With the constant threat of ransomware attacks and malicious cyber activities, organizations of all sizes and industries need to prioritize cyber resilience. Adopting a comprehensive and proactive approach is crucial to stay ahead of threats.
At Commvault, we're radically reducing the cost and complexity of protecting your business. On November 8th, we announced Commvault Cloud®, powered by Metallic® AI, a revolutionary hybrid enterprise solution that unifies data protection, security, and AI-driven cyber resilience. And we're not stopping there. Our latest platform release empowers our customers to protect more, recover faster, and spend less.
Overview of Commvault Platform Release 2024
Commvault Platform Release 2024, combined with Commvault Cloud, enables true data security and recovery in the cloud. Customers can now backup, monitor, report, manage, and recover their data, wherever it lives, from one central cloud-based solution. It’s a revolutionary, unmatched approach to delivering cyber resilience for the hybrid enterprise.
This semi-annual release delivers security and monitoring enhancements, a new recovery validation service, usability improvements, extended multi-cloud support, and much more.
Let's take a look at some of the new feature highlights and use cases that are part of the Commvault Platform Release 2024.
Release Highlights
| Security | Intelligence | Recovery |
| Innovative capabilities and unique architecture secure all your hybrid workloads for visibility across your data and a unified way to protect and recover it. | Turn the tables on attackers, detecting ransomware sooner, accelerating recoverability, automating reporting and repetitive tasks, and assisting in generating code actions and workflows to keep your data safe. | Secures recovery - ensuring that data can be restored from anywhere to anywhere, rapidly, reliably, and at massive scale. |
| Threatwise Advisor GCP Object Retention Lock Agentless file activity monitoring for Virtual Machines | Risk Analysis Enhancements Netskope Threat Intelligence Integration DarkTrace HEAL Integration | Recovery Validation Service Faster Restores for Amazon S3 Glacier Amazon S3 Express One Zone Support Azure Cold Tier Storage |
Security - Cyber resilience across all hybrid workloads.
In the era of Ransomware, immutable, air-gapped, zero trust security is table stakes. Companies need a cyber resilience solution beyond hybrid cloud backup and recovery to protect against tomorrow’s evolving threats — reducing risk and ultimately controlling costs.
Combined with the security features of Commvault Cloud, we are bringing powerful security capabilities to predict and proactively fight evolving cyber threats.
Our new Threatwise Advisor capabilities continuously survey workloads in the backup environments to intelligently recommend decoy placement. This further hardens critical workloads, reduces deployment time, simplifies the configuration process, and decreases the manual processes required.
With this release, we are introducing Object Retention Lock for Google Cloud Storage, allowing customers to add data retention policies at the object level, with a defined retain until time. Built in conjunction with Google, this feature provides three main benefits. Firstly, it provides additional protection against ransomware attacks. Secondly, it prevents accidental or malicious deletion of data. Lastly, it offers considerable cost savings versus bucket level lock as you get much more granularity to retain only the specific objects in a bucket instead of the whole bucket. This can be as much as three times less, which is substantial.
Organizations need to ensure proper backup and recovery of their data, but cyber threats can compromise the process by attempting to infect and corrupt data prior to backup. Quickly detecting backup risks and immediate response is essential to guarantee clean data recovery. With this release, we are adding Agentless file activity monitoring for Virtual Machines, which uses Commvault’s AI-driven engine to identify when there have been anomalous file activity changes occurring within VM backups - without the need to install an in-guest agent.
This feature will significantly improve productivity for customers who manage large amounts of VMs by helping to identify potentially malicious backups and simplifying the process of locating clean VM backups for recovery.
Intelligence - Advanced AI, enabling next-generation capabilities.
Ransomware is a multi-billion-dollar, global business, and today, AI-based threats have the potential to be more sophisticated, adaptive, and damaging than traditional attacks. Commvault Cloud is powered by Metallic AI, which combines ML-driven automation and AI simplicity to deliver risk detection, readiness, and cloud-scale recovery with speed and certainty. Users will also have access to Arlie – short for “Autonomous Resilience” – a new AI co-pilot at their beck and call 24/7 and can respond to inquiries in plain, simple language.
Commvault Platform Release 2024 offers enhanced automation to identify sensitive data and define automated policies to ensure your data is secure and managed correctly. We are also expanding our partnerships with Security and AI leaders to empower customers against rising cyber threats, offering data insights and enhanced protection.
Managing and identifying sensitive data across multiple environments can be challenging for many organizations, especially with the vast amount of data generated in the cloud. Threat actors are increasingly targeting backups, including off-site backups, to hinder reconstitution post-attack.
Our Risk Analysis enhancements in Platform Release 2024 include two key areas. A Backup copy selection feature allows customers to improve their cloud and secondary defenses by classifying sensitive and dark data across their applications and server assets, regardless of whether they are in the cloud or on-premises. This helps to reduce the risk of data exfiltration and streamline incident recovery. User access controls provide clear and concise insights into user access to sensitive data, enabling organizations to safeguard this information from unauthorized users and mitigate the impact of potential security breaches.
Commvault has partnered with cybersecurity company Netskope to enhance customers' security posture, providing combined insights and visibility to help identify and respond to potential threats quickly. Customers can enrich their security insights by integrating Commvault Cloud’s anomaly insights into Netskope Cloud Exchange. This helps SecOP’s teams enrich and correlate their existing threat intel using new insights to drive protective actions. In addition, customers can receive threat intel from Netskope, such as compromised IP addresses, which can be displayed in Commvault’s Security IQ dashboard so protective actions can be taken to ensure data remains recoverable.
Security teams are challenged with responding to security events as quickly as possible to limit the impact of cyber threats and recover as rapidly as possible. Commvault’s integration with DarkTrace enables customers to orchestrate recovery actions as part of DarkTrace's HEAL. This helps organizations recover quickly as part of an incident response orchestrated action. It also provides SecOPs with the platform to utilize backups as a forensic analysis asset. Additionally, customers can take advantage of threat insights from DarkTrace. These insights are displayed within the Security IQ dashboard to inform the user that a backup asset may be at risk so protective actions, such as Threat Scanning, can be taken to ensure data is safe and recoverable.
Recovery - Your business, recovered with certainty, at scale.
Achieving enterprise-grade cyber resilience goes beyond fortifying defenses. Businesses must anticipate breaches and prioritize recovery in their cybersecurity strategy. Commvault Cloud secures the recovery—ensuring that data can be restored from anywhere to anywhere, rapidly, reliably, and at massive scale.
Our latest platform release extends our industry-leading coverage of cloud-native workloads to seamlessly protect private, public, and multi-cloud environments – in one cyber resilient platform.
Recovering critical workloads after a ransomware attack is essential, and customers often need to validate their recovery process for compliance purposes. However, the recovery testing process can be complex and impact both the production and backup environments, leading to incorrect execution or failure to validate.
Commvault Platform 2024 adds a new Recovery Validation Service. This new service enables organizations to quickly and easily test CommServe (aka control plane) recoveries into a cleanroom and perform data recovery testing to show evidence of recovery. This allows organizations to take advantage of lower insurance premiums, remain compliant with internal/external regulations, and be ready for a Cyber incident. It reduces the complexity of testing by removing the manual steps and doesn’t interfere with production backups.
Businesses are leveraging low-cost Amazon S3 Glacier archival storage today for long-term retention and to meet compliance needs, but restoring archives can take hours or days. Platform Release 2024 adds new Faster Restores for S3 Glacier, allowing organizations to receive the cost benefits of archive storage and restore that data quickly without any additional cost. The feature is easy to use, and the restore process works the same way it always has, so customers won't need to do anything differently.
Platform Release 2024 also introduces support for the Amazon S3 Express One Zone Storage Class. Commvault has collaborated with AWS to offer cyber protection and recovery services for S3 directory buckets, a new bucket type announced at AWS re:Invent. This new bucket type can support hundreds of thousands of requests per second with S3 Express One Zone. Customers can now back up their Amazon S3 directory buckets, store backups on cost-effective S3 storage classes, and restore data to S3 Express One Zone quickly, easily, and efficiently.
Lastly, Platform Release 2024 introduces support for the new Azure Cold Storage Tier. Aimed at customers looking for a storage option that offers a lower-cost alternative for mid to long-term data storage without compromising performance. So, customers get low-latency access to their data, so they won't have to wait long to retrieve their data when they need it while getting the cost benefits of being up to half, in some cases, of the cost of the existing Cool tier.
To sum up, Platform Release 2024, Combined with Commvault Cloud, offers a unique platform, purpose-built for cyber resilience, designed to enable users to predict threats faster, make clean recoveries, and accelerate threat response times – all at the lowest possible TCO.
Want to learn more?
If you're looking to maximize the protection of your data and stay up to date on the latest trends in security, then get an exclusive look at the latest announcements from Commvault! Watch our replay of our Commvault Cloud announcements led by our CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, Rajiv Kottomtharayil (Chief Product Officer), Tim Zonca (VP, Portfolio Marketing), and our industry panelists. This session will give you an inside look at Commvault Cloud, our revolutionary hybrid enterprise solution powered by Metallic AI, unifying data protection, security, and AI-driven cyber resilience.
Complete documentation of all the features and capabilities of this release is now available at documentation.commvault.com. You can manually download Commvault Platform Release 2024 today, too!
Stay tuned to our Community for upcoming blog posts and webinars that will delve deeper into the new features. Our product experts will be available to guide you through the features and answer your questions. Please leave a comment to let us know what you want to learn more about, and feel free to interact with us here!
