While the big change is the integration of the traditional Cloud Command and Metallic, most of the enhancements revolve around improved security, and enhanced partnerships with Microsoft and CyberArk were also announced.

Today, data protection vendor Commvault is announcing a broad range of capabilities to their platform, both new and enhancements of something that was there before. These include the integration of Commvault’s traditional Commvault Cloud Command with their Metallic SaaS offering into a single control plane, which will have the greatest impact on the old Cloud Command users while the Metallic brand will continue. New capabilities include Commvault Threat Scan and a new ThreatWise Advisor service, while Commvault Risk Analysis and Commvault AutoRecovery have been upgraded.

The changes begin at the top, with a new Commvault Cloud Command Interface.

“We have always had a global control plane, from both Commvault and our Metallic SaaS platform,” said Matt Tyrer, Head of Competitive Intelligence at Commvault. “This brings some functionality which had been more behind the scenes forward and consolidates it all in one platform. So in essence it is a rebirth of things customers had access to, and which some didn’t use.”

“Security IQ which is from our Metallic SaaS platform, is also now in this interface,” said Indu Peddibhotla, Vice President, Product Management, Commvault. “Metallic remains our branding for SaaS but it basically now refers to workload backup protection.”

“We had an integration between Metallic and  our previous Commvault Command Centre.” Tyrer noted. “Before, it was a UI level integration, and now it’s more command and control. Cloud Command is now a layer on top to provide more visibility, which takes things like a cloud metric service and makes them available for the broader community. This interface itself is brand new. The customer gating system wasn’t exposed to the customer interface before.”

“The previous Command Centre has been used for on-prem cloud deployments,” Peddibhotla said. “This new one is a SaaS platform, compared to the on-prem version, and brings together the on-prem platform and Metallic SaaS platform into a new platform.” This single platform has a single code base and single UI, offering universal management for all Commvault offerings in an integrated dashboard with full telemetry and observability into key Commvault software indicators.

“This will help Commvault customers get that unified view if they have not had SaaS platforms for this in the past,” he added. “It exposes what Commvault has there, and they could go fully in that direction. Or they can stay on-prem if they like with an enhanced view of requirements, and still manage on-prem if they chose to do that.”

Commvault Risk Analysis is a reworking of something that Commvault had had previously.

“It is in part a repositioning of our old data governance and file system optimization,” Peddibhotla stated. “It is a repacking from a security perspective to help understand where threats are evolving and let the customer take action.”

Commvault Risk Analysis is powered by machine learning, and quarantines and deletes sensitive data, letting organizations discover, analyze, and secure sensitive data to prevent cyber exposure and potential data exfiltration.

“The new capabilities provide a better ability to optimize policies, and a playbook,” Peddibhotla said.

Commvault Threat Scan, which inspects backup content to identify encrypted, corrupted, or suspicious datasets, is new.

“This is a net new functionality which allows scanning of backup capabilities for vulnerabilities and malware,” Peddibhotla indicated.

“It provides deeper analysis than what we have done in the past here,” Tyrer said. “This brings that next layer down to enhance protection against specific types of attacks, using a click-down approach.”

Commvault Auto Recovery is an enhancement of capabilities to help customers recover, using a new cyber analysis tool that tests recovery readiness at scale to ensure that environments which host backup can be brought back quickly.

“This is something that others do in backup, but they tend to be more focused on the virtual environment,” Tyrer said. “This is not just VMs but could be the entire database environment. We have always had strong cross platform recovery capabilities, including the ability to recover beyond the original location, which might not be the best recovery point.”

“We are now seeing more that the backups systems are being attacked, so we test to make sure we can bring the backup systems back up as soon as possible,” Peddibhotla noted.

Commvault is also enhancing their existing ThreatWise services with a new one. Threatwise Advisor. It delivers integrated logic into Commvault backup environments to intelligently recommend decoy placement, further harden critical workloads, and reduce cognitive load for users and administrators.

“We are shifting left and giving them live feedback with decoys and threat sensors,” Peddibhotla said. “ThreatWise Advisor analyzes their systems and provides recommendations about how many sensors are needed. This recommendation service will be part of the ThreatWise service we already launched.”

“Commvault is uniquely positioned here, in that we are the only ones who can look for and monitor threats in the live environment,” Tyrer said.

In addition to the enhancements around their own management features, Commvault is announcing the expansion of their security ecosystem to include deep product integrations with Microsoft and CyberArk.

“We already had a CyberArk integration, and we have now added  Just In Time Access,” Tyrer said. “We have been a huge Microsoft partner for years, and are now integrating with Microsoft Sentinel, evolving our partnership around security further.”

For partners, the key thing with these new enhancements is the ability to provide a full solution through customers.

“It gives MSPs GSIs and resellers more solutions they can present to their customers,” Tyrer said.

Peddibhotla highlighted in particular the impact of all this on MSPs.

“We have a large number of MSPs, and this enables them to provide an end-to- end solution to customers,” he said. “We are getting a lot of traction in this market with our capabilities.”