Every entry was inspiring. These four rose above.
When we opened nominations for the Commvault Impact Awards, we asked you to show us what resilience looks like in practice: staying ready, recovering under pressure, and adapting to evolving threats. You answered with stories of teams that rebuilt after ransomware attacks, unified recovery across continents, tested their limits without disrupting patient care, and safely put AI to work.
Thank you to every organization that shared its story. Here are this year’s winners.
The Luminary Award: LC Waikiki
For securely connecting its enterprise AI to its backup environment, drastically reducing the time spent on manual backup log analysis.
The Protector Award: University of Rochester Medicine
Eight Hospitals, 250+ Locations, and Recovery Proven Without Pausing Patient Care
The Navigator Award: Siemens Healthineers
Five Engineers Now Protect 32.8 PB Across 15 Geographies on One Platform
The Steward Award: B.L. Harbert International
Back Online Five Days After Ransomware Attack, Avoided the “Double Tap”
The Luminary Award: LC Waikiki
LC Waikiki Cuts Manual Backup Log Analysis by With Protected, Isolated AI
LC Waikiki wanted LCWAI, its internal enterprise AI, to monitor and report on the backup environment quickly. That would end hours of manual log reviews. But giving a large language model direct access to core backup systems is risky. A hallucination, prompt injection, or compromised session could all reach backup configurations.
LC Waikiki deployed the Commvault MCP Server as an isolated translator between LCWAI and its Commvault environment. The team built it on zero-trust principles:
- The AI connects through a view-only service account with token-based authentication.
- The token is injected from a locked vault straight into memory, so there are no hardcoded credentials.
- The service runs as a sandboxed, restricted user.
LC Waikiki designed and built the entire architecture in-house. It based it on Commvault’s AI Security Risk Analysis for MCP report.
Engineers now spend less time on manual backup log analysis. Work that required extended periods of time now takes seconds through rapid AI queries, and the AI never touches the core backup network.
The Protector Award: University of Rochester Medicine
Eight Hospitals, 250+ Locations, and Recovery Proven Without Pausing Patient Care
University of Rochester Medicine (URMC) is an academic medical center with eight hospitals and more than 250 ambulatory locations. Its team had to prove that the most critical Tier 0 patient safety applications would recover without disrupting the patients who depend on those systems every day.
URMC’s Server Infrastructure Group worked with Senior Technical Account Manager Lou Zambuto from Commvault Enterprise Success Services. Together, they built an isolated on-premises disaster recovery environment. There, the team restores critical applications from Commvault backups at scale and validates the data. URMC also added Commvault AirGap to keep an isolated, ransomware-resistant copy of its data.
Most systems are tested once a year. URMC tests its Epic Electronic Health Record platform twice a year. Each test must meet strict restoration time objectives to stay compliant with Epic’s performance requirements, and URMC meets them without pausing patient care.
“Today’s healthcare environment presents increasingly complex cybersecurity challenges. While we can’t predict the next disruption, we can prepare for it. With the resilience we have built together, we have confidence that our data will remain protected, our operations can recover, and our mission of patient care will continue.”
– Daniel Abamonte, Assistant Director, Server Infrastructure Group, URMC
The Navigator Award: Siemens Healthineers
Five Engineers Now Protect 32.8 PB Across 15 Geographies on One Platform
Siemens Healthineers operates in more than 70 countries. Last year, its technologies and services reached three billion patient touchpoints. At this scale, protecting data across manufacturing, R&D, service, and core IT is essential. A five-person team is responsible for managing this data across four platforms: NetBackup, Cohesity, Azure native backup, and Commvault. Each platform had its own tools, controls, and recovery procedures.
Over 12 months, the team moved three major programs onto Commvault Cloud: Diagnostics, R&D India, and Varian.
- A single control plane now standardizes policies, retention, RBAC, and reporting across the entire estate.
- Cross-hypervisor restore across 36 clusters gives the team more recovery options.
- Varian gained a hardened on-premises recovery tier on Commvault Grid.
- Commvault Professional Services supported the two most complex programs.
The team migrated 7,769 servers and 17.8 PB in a single year. Varian’s 6,722 servers moved in under two months, against an estimate of about three. Today, Commvault helps protect 10,672 servers across 20 sites and Azure regions, which works out to more than 2,100 servers per engineer. Deduplication cut 32.8 PB of source data down to 5.51 PB, an 83.2% reduction. The team also retired NetBackup, Cohesity, and Azure native backup.
“When I look back at this journey, I don’t think first about petabytes or servers. I think about a small team that refused to accept complexity as a given.”
– Rohit Agrawal, SVP IT, Head of Hybrid Cloud, Siemens Healthineers
The Steward Award: B.L. Harbert International
Back Online Five Days After Ransomware Attack, Avoided the “Double Tap”
B.L. Harbert International supports high-stakes U.S. government and international construction projects. It has leveraged Commvault for several years to support its disaster recovery and security needs.
When IT Director Seth Dunsker joined the company over 10 years ago, he took the lead in maturing the company’s platform, starting from scratch with Commvault. With a decade of hardening and a recent best practices review of the now-functional Commvault environment, Dunsker and his team are prepared to face the challenges that come their way.
One particular incident required partnering with several cyber specialists to leverage Commvault to restore critical infrastructure. The team, made up of security, infrastructure, and applications, worked together to restore certain parts of the environment.
Starting with an online disaster database backup, freshly downloaded ISOs for OS, and Commvault software, they were able to verify that the on-premises backups remained viable and had not been encrypted.
The team took a systematic approach to recovery, restoring some core systems within 24 hours and the majority within five days. Due to the logistics of being an international company, the team was able to resolve the majority of users and projects in 4 weeks – and avoid the “double tap.”
B.L. Harbert International continually strives to mature its security posture. It has moved several core services from traditional networking, infrastructure, and self-hosting models to SaaS partners like Commvault and Microsoft.
“We recovered from a real ransomware attack. A clean backup from the night before gave us our way back.”
– Seth Dunsker, IT Director, B.L. Harbert International
Your Story Could Be Next
Congratulations to LC Waikiki, University of Rochester Medicine, Siemens Healthineers, and B.L. Harbert International. You show what resilience looks like when it’s put to the test.
Stories like these are why we make room for customer voices at SHIFT 2026, live and virtual on November 18. Join us to hear customers and partners talk about what recovery looks like under real pressure, with 20+ sessions across six tracks. Register here.
If your team has a story of its own, we want to hear it. Join the Commvault Voice of Customer program to share your story, connect with peers, and get recognized for the work you’re doing to keep your organization ready.
