Key takeaways from Commvault Shift 2025
The vendor is positioning itself to face rising data protection challenges, such as identity resilience and fragmented multi-cloud strategies.
Commvault recently hosted its Shift event, announcing the Cloud Unity Platform release alongside breakthrough capabilities – multi-cloud protection and visibility, and Active Directory threat detection and rollback.
The vendor also unveiled AI-enabled Synthetic Recovery™ - a new approach to delivering clean, fast and verifiable recoveries at enterprise scale.
Commvault Cloud Unity Platform release
Commvault's Shift announcements centered on Cloud Unity, an AI-enabled evolution of its platform. Cloud Unity consolidates data security, cyber recovery and identity resilience across cloud, SaaS, hybrid and on-premises resources.
The strategic intent is to reduce tool sprawl and inconsistent protection in multi-cloud operations by providing unified control, visibility, and policy management from a single console, with an emphasis on AI-enhanced automation, scalability, and cost governance.
The Cloud Unity Platform is designed for organizations that struggle with the complexity of managing data across multiple environments. By offering a single pane of glass for data protection, Commvault simplifies operations, reduces costs and enhances resilience. This innovation is particularly critical as businesses increasingly adopt hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, which often lead to fragmented tools and inconsistent protection.
Building on the Cloud Unity Platform, Commvault has introduced multi-cloud-native data protection capabilities that address the challenges of protecting data across more than 160 regions and over 200 cloud services.
As organizations increasingly rely on cloud services, the need for robust and consistent data protection has never been greater. Commvault's multi-cloud-native capabilities ensure enterprises can protect their data wherever it resides, providing peace of mind and operational efficiency.
Identity Resilience: Detect and reverse Active Directory threats
One of the most significant announcements at Commvault Shift was the introduction of new capabilities to enhance identity resilience. These innovations focus on detecting, visualizing and reversing threats in Active Directory (AD), a critical component of enterprise IT infrastructure. With identity-related breaches on the rise, these capabilities are designed to address the growing risks associated with identity mismanagement.
The capabilities focus on practical identity operations in AD: Continuous auditing to surface unauthorized changes in real time; automated rollback that restores clean identities and policies without manual sequencing; visual timelines that show who changed what and when to support forensic review; and Cleanroom Recovery to validate that restored environments are free of hidden identity changes.
Recent research by Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget, determined that 63% of ransomware attacks target sensitive infrastructure configuration data, including AD, and often go undetected for weeks. Commvault's focus on identity resilience is a critical step in helping organizations strengthen their defenses and ensure rapid recovery in the event of a breach.
Synthetic Recovery™: Transforming recoveries
Perhaps the slickest new technology, and one for which they hold several patents, is Synthetic Recovery™, a different and better approach to recovery that uses AI to surgically remove compromised data while rapidly restoring clean data. This innovation addresses the traditional trade-offs between data loss and reinfection risk, providing a faster and more reliable recovery process.
During recovery, the approach isolates and removes compromised data so that only trusted content is restored; reconstructs the latest verified data set by bringing forward known-good files from prior restore points to deliver clean and current data without reinfection; and orchestrates recovery end-to-end to limit downtime and maintain operations even when an attack is ongoing.
The recovery can restore files of different dates, minimizing data loss. Omdia research on ransomware shows that 99% of organizations that experience a successful attack lose some data. Minimizing the amount of data lost improves resilience and can mean the difference between a costly breach and a minor inconvenience.
Commvault's announcements at Shift are a significant step forward in unified cyber resilience for enterprises. By addressing the challenges of fragmented tools, identity threats and recovery inefficiencies, Commvault is raising a new high bar for data protection. The vendor is well-positioned to address the challenges and opportunities in data protection and cyber resilience as enterprises invest in AI, cybersecurity and the cloud. The sessions from Commvault Shift 25 can be viewed here.
Jon Brown is a senior analyst at Omdia, where he researches IT operations and sustainability in IT. Jon has more than 20 years of experience in IT product management and is a frequent speaker at industry events.
Omdia is a division of Informa TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.
