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Commvault Makes a Case for 'AI-Enabled Recovery'
In a press briefing this week ahead of its annual Shift conference, Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said, "AI-enabled recoveries are the way of the future."
Commvault, a mainstay in the backup and recovery space, has adapted its approach to data and application resilience to meet business needs in the AI era, he and other company executives explained during the briefing and in the Tuesday general keynote. Commvault made multiple announcements to that end during the conference, including expanded partnerships with Nvidia, Zscaler, and Databricks; the launch of Recovery Studio, which promises full-stack recovery at "machine speed"; and new capabilities in its AgentRecover product including more detailed auditing to encompass agent dependencies, as well as support for Microsoft Foundry and AWS Bedrock.
All of these changes are meant to use AI to address business continuity challenges caused by AI, Mirchandani said during the keynote.
"When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck," he said. "AI is no exception."
There has been no shortage of headlines about AI shipwrecks in recent months. In October, researchers used an OpenAI model to discover two critical security flaws in PHP, the language underpinning millions of Web sites. The month before, Microsoft identified an AI-powered threat actor dubbed Storm-3168 identifying Azure environments with vulnerable service principals to delete Azure Storage accounts rapidly and at scale. And this past summer, an agent running on Claude's Opus model independently deleted the entire production database of PocketOS, a provider of automation software for cars.
Together, they're emblematic of the multiple layers of AI-driven problems enterprises face today, Mirchandani said. Malicious actors are using AI to make their attacks more effective; meanwhile, agents deployed internally are a risk on their own when able to perform destructive tasks because of a misconfiguration error.
"AI makes attacks faster [and] it makes mistakes faster," Mirchandani said.
Commvault is touting a "continuous recovery" model, powered by AI, as the new standard in security and resilience. As executives described it, this entails recovery across the full stack, going beyond data to include configurations, dependencies, policies, and identities; an understanding of data's business context; and the assurance that the data being restored is "clean."
As Commvault CTO and Chief AI Officer Pranay Ahlawat said later in the keynote, "The smartest place for your dollar might be AI recovery."
Notably, Ahlawat cautioned enterprises against thinking recovery is less important than security.
"Security and recovery can't live in separate worlds anymore," he said.
Ultimately, executives said, organizations should aim to close the security-recovery loop and, increasingly, at machine speed.