Commvault has announced Recovery Studio, a new enterprise recovery platform designed to help organisations restore entire business services following cyberattacks, infrastructure failures or other disruptions, rather than focusing only on recovering data.
The platform will use automated, runbook-driven workflows to coordinate the recovery of applications, identity systems, infrastructure dependencies, configurations and datasets. The approach aims to reduce the manual effort involved in bringing interconnected enterprise systems back online.
For large organisations, recovering data does not necessarily mean that business operations can resume immediately. Applications depend on several connected components, including virtual machines, containers, network settings, security policies and identity systems. If these dependencies are not restored in the correct sequence, an application may remain unavailable even after its data has been recovered.
Commvault says conventional recovery approaches can take an average of 28 days to restore even a minimal level of business operations. The company argues that this approach is increasingly difficult to sustain as enterprises depend on interconnected digital systems and processes that operate continuously.
Moving from data recovery to business recovery
Recovery Studio is designed to coordinate the restoration of different components required to bring business services back online. Its runbooks will map dependencies between applications, infrastructure and other systems, helping determine what needs to be recovered and in what order.
For instance, restoring an enterprise application may require the recovery of its underlying virtual machines, application configurations, user identities, network connections and security settings. These components need to work together before the application can return to production.
The platform aims to automate these steps through context-aware workflows, replacing fragmented recovery processes that often require intervention from multiple IT and security teams.
The system is also designed to support different types of recovery, including operational recovery, disaster recovery and cyber recovery. This would allow organisations to use a common platform and set of workflows across different disruption scenarios.
Security checks during recovery
Another component of Recovery Studio is the integration of security checks into recovery workflows. The platform will support automated threat scanning for supported resources to identify potentially compromised systems before they are returned to production.
This is particularly relevant in cyber recovery scenarios, where restoring compromised systems without checking for threats could allow malicious activity to persist after recovery.
By incorporating threat scanning into the recovery process, Commvault aims to help organisations assess which resources are safe to restore and reduce the risk of reintroducing compromised components into their production environments.
The platform will also coordinate the restoration of security and network controls, including firewall rules and network security group settings, as part of the wider recovery process.
Addressing enterprise recovery challenges
As enterprises expand their use of cloud infrastructure, virtual machines, containers and interconnected applications, recovery planning has become more complex. A disruption affecting one part of the technology environment can have consequences for several dependent applications and business services.
Traditional backup systems primarily focus on protecting and restoring data. However, bringing business operations back online also requires organisations to rebuild the infrastructure and configurations that allow applications to function.
“India’s digital economy moves too fast for businesses to figure out recovery after an attack. Organisations need to know before disruption hits what comes back first, what depends on what, and how critical services will be restored,” said Balaji Rao, Area Vice President for India and SAARC at Commvault.