Beyond Data Recovery: Why Application-Level Rebuilding Makes Commvault Cloud Rewind the Superior Choice for Cloud Resilience

The shift to cloud computing has become more than a strategic advantage – it’s now a business necessity. According to Gartner, by 2028, cloud computing will shift from being a technology disruptor to becoming a necessary component for maintaining business competitiveness. But with this transformation comes a critical challenge that most organizations haven’t fully addressed: true cyber resilience.

The Hidden 70% Risk in Cloud Environments

Here’s a startling reality that most cloud and security leaders don’t realize: According to our research, in a typical cloud environment, application data makes up only 20% to 30% of the resources, while 50% to 70% consists of cloud configurations that remain completely unprotected by traditional backup solutions.

Think about what this means during a cyber incident or outage. Your backup solution might restore your databases and files, but you also need to consider:

• Load balancers and security groups.
• VPC configurations and network policies.
• Container orchestration settings.
• API gateways and microservice dependencies.
• Identity and access management configurations.
• Infrastructure-as-Code templates.

This is where traditional backup falls catastrophically short.

Beyond Data Protection: The Application-Centric Recovery Revolution

Commvault® Cloud Rewind represents a fundamental shift from data-centric to application-centric recovery. Rather than simply backing up and restoring data files, Cloud Rewind treats your entire cloud environment as code – discovering through collecting configuration metadata not application data, and rebuilding cloud ecosystems with all their dependencies intact.

The Cloud Rewind Advantage: Recovery-as-Code

Cloud Rewind’s patented Recovery-as-Code approach automatically codifies your application’s cloud resources, dependencies, and data for hyperfast rebuild capabilities. This isn’t just backup ­– it’s a complete Cloud Time Machine that can rewind your entire environment to any point in time.

Key capabilities include:

Continuous discovery and learning:

• Leverage native backup and snapshot APIs provided by cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and GCP.
• Maps complex application dependencies in real time.
• Adapts as your auto-scaled, load-balanced environments change.
• No agents, no installation, and no maintenance required.

Comprehensive protection:

• Protects cloud configurations and dependencies for rapid rebuilding.
• Point-in-time copies with forever incremental backups.
• Multi-region and cross-cloud replication management.
• Agentless protection for auto-scaled applications.

Intelligent recovery orchestration:

• One-click recovery of entire multi-stack environments with dependencies.
• Cross-zone, cross-region, cross-account, and cross-tenant recovery.
• Automated resilience simulations and testing.
• Dependency-aware sequencing for complex applications.

Why Traditional Competitors Fall Short

While competitors like Cohesity, Rubrik, and Veritas focus primarily on data protection, they fundamentally miss the application-centric nature of modern cloud environments. Even traditional cloud service providers, while responsible for protecting customer data, do not secure the underlying cloud infrastructure – leaving customers with limited ability to minimize downtime and recover quickly in the event of a cyber incident.

Drawbacks of traditional resilience tools include:

• Limited scope: They protect data but ignore the 70% of cloud resources that are configurations.
• Manual resilience testing: Time-consuming, cumbersome, and often not done enough to establish cyber resilience.
• Fragmented approach: Applications and infrastructure are treated separately, creating recovery gaps.
• Legacy architecture: Solutions adapted from on-premises thinking rather than cloud-native design.

Cloud Rewind eliminates these limitations by treating applications and their underlying infrastructure, data layers, networking, and security as a unified, code-based system.

The Three Pillars of Cyber Resilience

Cloud Rewind delivers comprehensive cyber resilience through three core capabilities:

1. Reduce risk:

• Continuous drift analysis identifies misconfigurations before they become vulnerabilities.
• Proactive resilience monitoring across all cloud resources.
• Immutable backups prevent ransomware encryption.

2. Increase readiness.

• Automated resilience simulations test recovery procedures.
• No runbooks or scripting required.
• Always up-to-date protection that scales to 100,000+ cloud resources.

3. Enable recovery.

• Recovery-as-Code helps eliminate manual rebuild processes.
• Cross-cloud recovery flexibility prevents vendor lock-in.
• One-click restoration maintains continuous business and helps reduce unforeseen downtime.

Looking Forward: The Continuous Recovery Era

As cloud environments become increasingly complex with microservices, containers, and serverless architectures, the gap between traditional backup and true resilience will only widen. Cloud Rewind’s Recovery-as-Code approach represents the future of continuous business – where applications and their complete ecosystems can be rebuilt near-instantly, automatically, and reliably.

For organizations serious about cyber resilience, the question isn’t whether you need application-centric recovery – it’s whether you can afford to operate without it. In an era where application availability directly impacts business success, Cloud Rewind provides the comprehensive protection that competitive offerings simply cannot match.

The time to act is now. Every day your organization operates without complete application protection is another day of unnecessary risk. Cloud Rewind helps reduce unknown vulnerabilities by continually discovering and mapping your cloud environment, thus helping enable your business to rewind, recover, and rebuild from cyber incidents in minutes, not weeks.

Learn more about how Cloud Rewind can help your organization rewind and rebuild dynamic and distributed applications hyper-fast from outages and ransomware attacks.