Key Takeaways

• VM migration to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is a phased journey that requires consistent protection across hybrid environments.
• A unified, Kubernetes-native data protection platform helps reduce complexity and eliminate the need for separate tools or processes.
• Reliable resilience – including immutable backups and threat detection – is critical during migration, when risks are highest.
• Flexible recovery options allow organizations to quickly adapt if migration steps fail or timelines shift.
• Consolidating protection for VMs and containers helps reduce tool sprawl and maintain consistent governance.

If you’re an IT leader today, chances are your virtualization strategy is under active review.

Rising costs, licensing uncertainty, and long-term vendor lock-in have many organizations reassessing their reliance on traditional hypervisors. At the same time, Kubernetes has matured into the operational foundation for modern applications.

These two realities are converging – and for many enterprises, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is emerging as a preferred destination for running virtual machines within a Kubernetes-native operating model.

This transition is accelerating across industries. As organizations modernize infrastructure on their own terms, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is increasingly viewed as a way to modernize the platform without the need for application refactoring. With that momentum comes a critical question:

How do you migrate virtual machines while maintaining consistent protection, resilience, and recoverability throughout the process?

To answer it, you need to examine how most enterprise migrations actually unfold – and where protection and resilience become critical.

Migration Is a Journey, not a One-Time Event

Seasoned IT leaders know that infrastructure transitions rarely happen all at once.

For enterprises opting to move from hypervisors like VMware to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, the transition typically unfolds in phases. During this time, organizations inevitably operate in a mixed state:

• VMware-based VMs continue to support core business operations.
• VMs newly running on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.
• Containerized applications sharing the same Red Hat OpenShift clusters.

This coexistence period introduces complexity and risk. Data is in motion, environments are changing, and protection gaps can appear if tooling and processes don’t evolve alongside workloads.

Maintaining Reliable Protection Is Essential

Commvault has long delivered data protection and recovery for both VMware environments and Kubernetes workloads running on Red Hat OpenShift. That same Kubernetes-native, policy-driven protection model now extends to VMs running on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

What really resonates with customers is the consistency:

• A single platform for protection and recovery.
• Policy-based operations applied uniformly across workloads.
• Designed to work with your existing tools and processes as environments evolve.

VMs running on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization are protected using the same workflows and governance constructs as containerized applications. This unified approach is being embraced by organizations standardizing on Red Hat OpenShift that want a simpler, more consistent way to manage data across environments.

This capability is available today. Commvault Cloud supports protection for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization environments aligned with Long-Term Support Release 11.40 and Innovation Release 11.42, meaning customers can put these capabilities into production now.

You Shouldn’t Need to Manage Protection Differently

Once VMs move to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, they shouldn’t require special handling from a protection standpoint.

Commvault Cloud discovers and protects Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization VMs alongside containerized applications, helping give teams centralized visibility, consistent policy enforcement, and simplified recovery operations. Virtualized and containerized workloads are managed together – without introducing operational silos.

For organizations managing diverse application portfolios, this treatment of VMs inside Kubernetes helps reduce operational friction while maintaining enterprise-grade controls.

Cyber Resilience Is Key When Migration Increases Risk.

Migration periods represent a uniquely vulnerable window. Change creates complexity, and complexity increases exposure to data loss and ransomware.

Commvault Cloud helps maintain resilience throughout this phase with:

• Air-gapped and immutable backups for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization workloads.
• Backup data that supports threat hunting and forensic analysis, helping teams validate recovery readiness before restoring workloads.
• Advanced recovery capabilities designed to help organizations minimize operational disruption.

Whether workloads are pre-migration, mid-transition, or fully operating on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, the resilience posture remains intact.

Recovery Flexibility Provides Confidence

Every modernization initiative needs room for adjustment.

Commvault supports both in-place and out-of-place recovery for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization virtual machines, including full VM context and configuration. If a migration step doesn’t go as planned – or timelines need to shift – teams may recover quickly and move forward without compromising availability or data integrity.

Kubernetes-Native Protection Beyond VMs

For many enterprises, virtualization is only one piece of a broader application modernization strategy.

Commvault Cloud also provides application-centric, Kubernetes-native protection for containerized workloads, including persistent volumes and application metadata, across all CNCF-certified Kubernetes distributions. This enables mobility and recovery for cloud-native applications while helping maintain operational consistency across environments.

Reducing Tool Sprawl as Infrastructure Evolves

Platform transitions often introduce new tools, new processes – and new complexity.

By using Commvault Cloud as a unified protection platform for:

• VMware VMs.
• Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization VMs.
• Containerized applications.

Organizations can help reduce tool sprawl, simplify administration, and maintain consistent governance even as infrastructure strategies evolve.

How it all Comes Together

During any migration, it helps to understand how the pieces work together. Red Hat’s Migration Toolkit for Virtualization takes care of moving VMs from VMware into Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

Commvault Cloud helps provide the protection and resilience that stays with your workloads throughout the process, so data can remain protected before, during, and after migration. This can help keep recoverability from falling behind as workloads move.

Continuing the Conversation at Red Hat Summit

We’re already working with customers that are actively moving virtual machines onto OpenShift Virtualization – and we’re continuing these discussions at Red Hat Summit, May 11–14 in Atlanta.

At the Commvault booth, we’ll be:

• Talking with IT leaders about real-world resilience challenges.
• Sharing practical guidance on migrating with confidence.
• Demonstrating Commvault Cloud protection for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

If maintaining resilience and recoverability throughout your virtualization strategy is a priority, we’d welcome the opportunity to connect.

Moving Forward with Confidence

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is becoming a foundational component of modern enterprise infrastructure. But you can’t rush migration at any cost; you must build protection, resilience, and recovery into the process from the beginning.

With Commvault Cloud, protecting Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization workloads isn’t a future aspiration. It’s something customers already are doing – using a unified platform to modernize confidently while staying resilient and recoverable.

“Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization delivers a reliable, consistent foundation for organizations to support their entire virtualized estate,” says Steve Gordon, Senior Director, Product Management, Hybrid Cloud Platforms, at Red Hat. “By leveraging an optimized integration like Commvault Cloud with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, our customers can move forward with greater confidence, knowing their workloads are protected consistently before, during, and after migration.”

FAQs

Q: Why is VM migration considered a multi-phase process?

A: Most enterprises cannot migrate all workloads at once, so they operate in a hybrid state with legacy and new environments running simultaneously. This phased approach introduces complexity, making consistent protection and visibility essential throughout the transition.

Q: What role does resilience play during VM migration?

A: Resilience enables organizations to maintain data protection, recover quickly from failures, and defend against threats like ransomware. During migration, when systems are in flux, strong resilience measures can help prevent data loss and operational disruption.

Q: How does Commvault Cloud simplify protection across environments?

A: Commvault Cloud provides a single platform with policy-driven protection for VMware VMs, OpenShift Virtualization VMs, and containerized applications. This unified approach enables consistent operations without introducing new tools or workflows.

Q: What makes Kubernetes-native protection important?

A: Kubernetes-native protection aligns with how modern applications are deployed and managed, covering both containers and virtual machines. It enables simple data management, mobility, and recovery within cloud-native environments.

Q: How does recovery flexibility improve migration confidence?

A: Flexible recovery options, such as in-place and out-of-place restores, can help teams quickly recover workloads if something goes wrong. This adaptability helps reduce downtime and enables organizations to adjust migration plans without risking data integrity.

Q: How can organizations reduce complexity during infrastructure transitions?

A: By adopting a unified data protection platform, organizations can manage all workloads – virtualized and containerized – through a single interface. This approach helps reduce tool sprawl, simplify administration, and maintain consistent governance across evolving environments.

Jason Giza is Senior Manager, Global Content Partner Marketing, at Commvault.

Key Takeaways

• The Readiverse Academy has introduced a structured, tiered certification path from foundational knowledge to advanced cloud engineering expertise.
• Certifications are aligned to real-world roles, helping enable learners to build skills relevant to their responsibilities in Commvault Cloud environments.
• The program includes four tiers – Practitioner, Specialist, Professional, and Expert – each increasing in depth and operational capability.
• Learning is built across three core pillars: platform skills, cyber resilience, and workload expertise.
• Flexible learning options, including self-paced and instructor-led formats, allow professionals to progress based on their schedules and goals.

The environments you protect with Commvault® Cloud are increasingly complex, and the expectations on your teams that run them are higher than ever. It’s no longer just about knowing the platform. It’s about being able to operate, protect, and recover, often under pressure.

If you’ve already started your learning journey in the Readiverse Academy, welcome back. And if you’re new here, you’re joining at the right time.

Today, we’re introducing a structured, tiered certification approach that gives learners a clear, skill‑based path from foundational platform knowledge to advanced cloud engineering expertise.

We Build Content for You

Commvault Cloud environments demand expertise across multiple responsibilities, often within the same role. Administrators, security specialists, cloud engineers, and workload owners require different depths and breadths of knowledge. And not everyone needs to learn the same things, in the same order, to be effective.

The new Readiverse Academy certification tiers reflect that reality. Learners progress through clearly defined levels that build on one another so that your certification aligns to what you actually do and validates those capabilities to the teams you work with.

• Commvault Cloud Practitioner – foundational platform and resilience knowledge.
• Commvault Cloud Specialist – expanded operational and security depth.
• Commvault Cloud Professional – advanced recovery and workload expertise.
• Commvault Cloud Expert – full cloud engineering and resilience leadership.

Each tier is earned through a combination of coursework, hands‑on lab activities, and validated assessments. As learners progress, the scope and depth of operational capability demonstrated increases accordingly.

A Clear Path Practitioner to Expert

The certification program is built around three core skill pillars that run through every level:

• Foundational platform skills
• Cyber resilience concepts
• Workload and feature expertise

Each tier adds focused requirements across those pillars. Learners can complete individual courses or combine designated requirements to reach certification goals.

Already in Readiverse Academy? What this Means for You.

With a new structure like this, the most important question is what it means for the progress you’ve already made. If you’ve already completed courses or earned certifications in the Readiverse Academy, congratulations! Your investment matters, and we want to be clear about what happens next.

Those certifications represent your history and accomplishments with Commvault. The new program is aligned to our expanded portfolio of cyber resilience features for Commvault Software, Commvault SaaS, and hybrid environments. As your needs grow to require more from Commvault, these courses and certifications will help you configure, manage, and optimize Commvault to meet your organization’s unique needs.

There is no direct progression from the previous certification tracks to the new program, but your existing certifications validate your expertise on the former product releases. As those releases are retired, those certifications will reach end of life as well. Learners who are already invested in the Readiverse Academy are well positioned to progress quickly.

Who Should Take Readiverse Academy Courses and Certifications

Readiverse Academy certifications are designed for professionals working across Commvault SaaS, Commvault Software, and hybrid environments.

• Platform administrators managing day‑to‑day operations.
• Security specialists focused on protecting data and hardening environments.
• Cloud engineers responsible for control plane configuration and advanced resilience.
• Workload owners needing proficiency in specific data domains.

All training is available for self‑paced learning, with select courses also offered in instructor‑led formats, so learners can progress in a way that fits their role and schedule.

How To Get Started or Continue Your Learning Journey

Whether you’re starting fresh or continuing your journey, the next step is simple and designed to meet you where you are.

• Login or register at commvault.com.
• New to Commvault? Start with the Commvault Cloud Administrator course.
• Responsible for workload support? Check out our catalog of courses covering just about everything.
• Looking for strategies to support recovery from a cyberattack? The Cyber Resilience course is your first stop.

What Is Coming Next

Our goal is to make advancement predictable, transparent, and aligned to real‑world roles to help learners know what’s next and how to prepare for it.

We are committed to giving every Commvault Cloud user the knowledge to operate, protect, and recover their environment with confidence. Because when it matters most, certification isn’t about credentials. It’s about being resilient and ready to recover.

FAQs

Q: What is the purpose of the Readiverse Academy certification program?

A: The program provides a structured, skill-based learning path that helps professionals progress from basic platform knowledge to advanced cloud engineering expertise. It aligns training with real-world responsibilities to enable learners to apply their knowledge effectively in complex environments.

Q: What are the different certification tiers available?

A: There are four tiers: Commvault Cloud Practitioner, Specialist, Professional, and Expert. Each level builds on the previous one, increasing in technical depth, operational scope, and leadership capability.

Q: Who should enroll in Readiverse Academy courses?

A: The courses are designed for platform administrators, security specialists, cloud engineers, and workload owners working across SaaS, software, and hybrid environments. Each role can follow a tailored learning path based on their responsibilities.

Q: How are the certifications earned?

A: Certifications are achieved through a combination of coursework, hands-on labs, and validated assessments. As learners progress, they demonstrate increasing levels of expertise across platform, security, and workload domains.

Q: What happens to existing Readiverse Academy certifications?

A: Existing certifications remain valid as proof of past expertise but are tied to earlier product releases. As those releases are retired, the certifications will reach end of life, encouraging learners to transition to the new program.

Q: How can someone get started with the new program?

A: New learners can begin with the Commvault Cloud Administrator course, while existing users can log in to continue their progress. Additional courses are available based on specific goals, such as workload management or cyber resilience strategies.

Suzanne Klausner is Director, Customer Enablement Strategy, at Commvault.

Key Takeaways

• Most tabletop exercises validate performance instead of exposing real gaps in incident response.
• For exercises to be effective, they must introduce friction, ambiguity, and pressure to reflect real-world incidents.
• Limiting the scope of the exercise to a few critical scenarios and defining success as finding problems rather than looking good can lead to more meaningful and actionable insights.
• Cross-functional participation, not just that of technical teams, is essential to accurately test organizational response.
• True resilience is proven through actual recovery testing, not just discussion-based scenarios.

There is a moment most security leaders recognize, even if they do not say it out loud. The tabletop just wrapped. The team is filing out. Everyone looks reasonably satisfied. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a quiet question surfaces: Did we actually learn anything?

If you are honest, the answer is often no.

That is not because tabletop exercises are a bad idea. They are one of the most valuable tools a security leader has. The problem is how most organizations run them – and what they are actually measuring when they do.

The Performance Trap

The most common mistake in tabletop exercises has nothing to do with the scenario. It has to do with the goal. Most teams, consciously or not, build exercises designed to demonstrate competence rather than discover gaps.

The scenario generally follows a clean arc. Information arrives in a logical sequence. The right people say the right things. Everyone feels prepared. And that feeling – confident, well-rehearsed, almost collegial – is exactly the problem.

Real incidents do not run on clean arcs. They arrive with incomplete information, conflicting signals, unavailable people, and a business demanding answers faster than the facts support. If your tabletop does not create that kind of friction, you have not tested incident response. You have practiced a conversation.

When the exercise is designed to validate rather than stress-test, a second problem follows: People stop being honest. Nobody says, “I don’t know who owns that decision” or “we have never actually tested that recovery path.” They say what sounds right. And the gaps that should surface in a controlled environment stay hidden until they surface in a real one.

What a Good Exercise Actually Tests

Before you build a scenario, you need to answer a simpler question: What do you actually want to learn? Not 20 things. Three or four.

Can your team make a shutdown decision fast enough, and does everyone know who has the authority to make it? When security, IT, legal, and communications are all in the room with conflicting priorities, can they actually reach decisions together? Can you explain the business impact of an incident clearly enough for leadership to act – not just understand? And if you had to restore a critical system in the next four hours, could you really do it?

Once you know what you are testing, build a scenario with real friction. Make a key person unavailable mid-exercise. Introduce a customer escalation. Have a regulator ask a question the team cannot answer from the runbook.

Give people incomplete information and see how they make decisions anyway. The value is not in watching people succeed under pressure. It is in finding the places where the process breaks down while the stakes are still low enough to fix it.

Say this out loud at the start: Success today means finding problems, not looking good. That one sentence changes what people are willing to say in the room.

The People Problem

A tabletop that only involves security and IT is a technical conversation, not an incident response exercise. If legal is not in the room, if communications is not in the room, if business owners and executive leadership are absent, you are not testing how your organization actually responds to a crisis. You are testing how a subset of smart people talk through a hypothetical.

Real incidents are handled across the business. The exercise should reflect that.

Talking Through It Is Not Enough

This is where most organizations stop short. A paper exercise is important – but it is not confidence.

Talking through a recovery scenario tells you something. Actually restoring a system tells you something different. Can you bring identity back to a clean point in time? Can you validate that what you are recovering is trustworthy? Can you restore a Tier 1 application and confirm it comes back cleanly, without carrying the infection with it?

Those are not questions you can answer in a conference room. At some point, the plan has to meet the environment – and you need to know whether they match.

After the Exercise Ends

The debrief tells you whether the exercise mattered. If the hot wash is quiet, vague, or full of “good reminders,” the exercise did not push hard enough. A well-run tabletop should leave you with a short list of real findings, clear owners, and deadlines. If you cannot answer what broke, who is fixing it, and by when, you ran an event, not an exercise.

The goal was never to pass the exercise. It was to learn something important while the cost of being wrong was still just time.

Watch our recent episode of the STRIVE podcast, where I join my colleague Chris Mierzwa, Senior Director, Portfolio Marketing, for an in-depth conversation about tabletop exercises.

FAQs

Q: Why do most tabletop exercises fail to deliver real value?

A: Many exercises are designed to make teams look prepared rather than uncover weaknesses. This leads to scripted discussions that miss the unpredictability and pressure of real incidents.

Q: What should a tabletop exercise aim to achieve?

A: It should focus on answering a small number of critical questions, such as decision-making speed, ownership clarity, and recovery capability. This focus helps teams uncover meaningful gaps instead of surface-level insights.

Q: How can organizations make exercises more realistic?

A: Introduce uncertainty, missing information, and unexpected disruptions during the scenario. These elements force teams to think critically and act under pressure, closer to real incident conditions.

Q: Who should be involved in a tabletop exercise?

A: Beyond security and IT, teams like legal and communications, business leaders, and executives should participate. This enables the exercise to reflect how real incidents are managed across the organization.

Q: Why is talking through recovery not enough?

A: Discussion can highlight plans, but only real testing proves whether systems actually can be restored cleanly and quickly. Practical validation is necessary to confirm recovery readiness.

Q: What defines a successful tabletop exercise outcome?

A: A strong exercise results in clear findings, assigned owners, and defined timelines for remediation. If these are missing, the exercise likely did not challenge the team enough.

Chris Bevil is Principal, Global Cyber Resilience & AI, at Commvault.

Every organization that has ever failed a recovery – and there are more than anyone publicly acknowledges – had one thing in common: They believed they could recover before they tried.

The belief came from somewhere. A completed tabletop exercise. A backup system that showed green. An annual disaster recovery test that passed. All of it documented. All of it, at some point, accurate. None of it current when the incident actually hit.

This is the confidence gap. And it is the gap that continuous recovery validation is designed to close.

What ‘Testing’ Actually Means in Most Organizations

Ask most security or IT leaders how often they test their recovery capability, and the answer is typically annual, sometimes biannual. The test involves restoring a subset of systems from backup into a test environment, confirming they come up, and filing a report. Sometimes a tabletop exercise is conducted alongside it.

What this kind of testing does not do: validate that backup data is free of malware. Confirm that recovery sequencing works for interdependent services. Test identity recovery, which is essential when compromised credentials are what enabled the attack. Confirm that the team that would actually run the recovery knows the current runbooks. Or produce evidence meaningful enough to satisfy a regulator, an auditor, or a board that recovery capability is real and current.

In short, it validates a point in time. Resilience operations (ResOps) requires validation as a continuous state.

The Continuous Validation Model

Continuous recovery validation is not a single test run more frequently. It is a set of integrated practices that produce ongoing, evidence-based proof of recoverability across critical services.

Automated backup integrity scanning. Every backup, continuously evaluated for anomalies, encryption patterns, and malware signatures. Not at restore time – before restore time. The goal is to know whether your recovery points are clean before you need them, not during an incident.

Scheduled Cleanroom Recovery drills. Bi-annual at minimum, restoring from immutable backup points into an isolated Cleanroom Recovery environment – not production, not a production-adjacent test environment, but a genuinely isolated space where forensic analysis can happen without risk of reinfection. These drills produce documented evidence of recoverability against defined impact tolerances.

Identity recovery validation. With credential abuse the most common breach vector, Active Directory and Entra ID recovery must be tested alongside data recovery. Organizations that restore systems without restoring a verified-clean identity layer may find attackers re-enter through the same door.

Service Resilience Indicator (SRI) dashboards. SRIs – continuous signals drawn from backup telemetry, dependency mapping, and test results – that give CISOs, CIOs, and boards a live view of recoverability posture. Not a point-in-time report. An ongoing operational signal.

Each of these practices feeds what Deloitte and Commvault call the resilience backlog: a continuously updated, prioritized list of gaps identified through testing and tracked to resolution. It is the mechanism by which validation drives improvement rather than just producing reports.

What Mean Time to Clean Recovery Changes

Traditional recovery metrics – recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) – measure speed and data recency. They say nothing about whether the data being restored can be trusted. Mean Time to Clean Recovery (MTCR) fills that gap: It measures the time required to restore data that is verifiably clean, not just technically available.

MTCR matters because in a ransomware incident, the adversary’s goal is often to corrupt recovery options, not just encrypt production systems. An organization that restores quickly but restores from a compromised backup has not recovered. It has re-infected itself.

Building MTCR into your resilience measurement framework, alongside RTO and RPO, changes what you optimize for and what you report to the board. Speed plus recency plus integrity: that is the complete picture of recovery readiness.

Resilience You Can Prove

The organizations that navigate cyber disruptions with the least damage share one characteristic: They treat recovery capability as something to be continuously demonstrated, not periodically asserted. They know their MTCR. Their SRIs are current. Their cleanroom recovery has been tested in the last 90 days.

That posture is not the result of better technology alone. It is the result of an operating discipline – ResOps – that makes resilience continuous, measurable, and governable. Commvault’s platform provides the technical foundation: clean recovery, automated validation, and the unified visibility across data, identity, and services that ResOps requires at scale.

For the organizational side of that equation – how to define impact tolerances, align executive leadership, and build the governance structure that sustains the discipline – see the Deloitte companion blog, The Resilience Conversation Your Board Isn’t Having Yet. And for the complete ResOps framework, including the six ResOps domains and the measurement model that ties technical recoverability to board-level accountability, read the joint whitepaper: From Minimum Viability to Operational Resilience: ResOps in Practice.

Bill O’Connell is Chief Security Officer at Commvault.

Key Takeaways:

• Cyberattacks increasingly target both production and backup environments, making clean, verifiable recovery essential.
• Integrated anomaly and threat detection strengthen cyber resilience by identifying compromised data, validating trusted recovery points, and accelerating restoration.
• When embedded into data-protection workflows, anomaly and threat detection capabilities can help provide the evidence needed to recover quickly, safely, and confidently.

Why Cyber Resilience Hinges on Integrated Anomaly and Threat Detection

Anomaly detection identifies unusual behavior in backup data that may indicate compromise. Threat detection identifies known malicious activity using signatures, heuristic analysis, and scanning techniques. Together, they help validate recovery points and enable clean data recovery.

For years, security leaders focused on preventing breaches. In today’s era of persistent attacks and AI-driven threats, organizations increasingly assume compromise and design systems that can withstand disruption and recover safely when it occurs.

Modern adversaries don’t always hide their presence – they reveal it when it serves their objective. Attackers try to infiltrate environments quietly, observe systems over time, and position themselves inside critical infrastructure. The moment an attack becomes visible is rarely the moment it begins; it is the moment the attacker chooses to act.

By then, compromised data may already be woven into backup copies. Integrated anomaly and threat detection can help organizations identify compromised backup data, validate clean recovery points, and assist recovery after a cyberattack.

For security and IT teams, the challenge is no longer simply detecting an attack but predicting and managing an attacker’s possible impact. Understanding what was affected, what remains trustworthy, and how the organization can recover safely without escalating business disruption is the solution.

This is why cyber resilience benefits tremendously from integrated anomaly and threat detection. When detection capabilities are embedded into data protection and recovery workflows, they help provide the shared intelligence that teams need to identify compromised data, validate trusted recovery points, and guide response decisions with evidence rather than guesswork.

This approach aligns with the emerging ResOps™ operating model, where security, IT, and recovery teams work from shared visibility and validated recovery paths to respond to incidents together.

The New Reality: Recovery Requires Proof, Not Assumptions

Traditional threat detection tools focus on spotting threats along the perimeter. But once attackers are inside, visibility can become fragmented and determining which systems and data have been affected becomes a challenge.

Further, attackers increasingly target backup environments specifically to undermine recovery. And the moment organizations cannot confidently prove that backups remain untouched, suspicion becomes unavoidable. The result is uncertainty. Restore quickly and risk reinfection? Or delay recovery while investigating which copies remain trustworthy? IT teams are forced to guess which data is safe while downtime accumulates.

By building intelligence directly into data protection workflows, anomaly and threat detection helps transform recovery from a reactive guess into a disciplined, evidence-driven process. These capabilities can help organizations pinpoint tampered copies, validate data cleanliness, and assemble the most recent uncompromised recovery points – helping you accelerate cyber recovery and reduce operational impact.

Anomaly Detection: Your Early Signal of the Unknown

Anomaly detection acts as a sentinel, guarding your protected data integrity. It establishes a baseline of normal behavior – file sizes, growth patterns, deduplication changes, access attempts – and alerts teams when something deviates from that norm. These deviations can surface signs of silent tampering long before malware signatures do. In an era of novel and polymorphic threats, anomaly detection helps offer what static tools can’t: visibility into the unexpected.

Threat Detection: Targeted Defense Against Known Malicious Activity

While anomalies reveal what’s unusual, threat detection exposes what is malicious. By scanning protected data directly for ransomware, malware signatures, encryption patterns, and custom indicators of compromise (IoCs), threat detection helps validate that the data you protect is not already compromised.

Why a Combined Approach Matters

Neither anomaly nor threat detection alone provides the full picture. Together, they deliver a defense-in-depth strategy: Anomaly detection can highlight suspicious signals while threat detection can probe deeper to verify malicious intent. This combination helps organizations distinguish harmless anomalies from true compromises and maintain reliable, validated data for rapid recovery.

Meeting Today’s Challenges with Commvault® Cloud

Attackers increasingly target backup environments, and hidden malware within backup data can increase the risk of reinfection during recovery. Organizations need data-driven validation for their clean recovery with certainty.

Commvault Cloud addresses this by combining data protection workflows with anomaly detection, threat intelligence, AI-enabled analytics, and isolated clean instances. With anomaly and threat insights applied before, during, and after backup operations, Commvault can help empower organizations to recover faster, cleaner, and confidently.

Read the full white paper, “Can You Prove You’re Recoverable Right Now?” for more information.

FAQs

Q: What is anomaly detection in data protection?

A: Anomaly detection identifies unusual behaviors – such as unexpected backup size changes or abnormal file activity – that may signal tampering, ransomware, or emerging threats within protected data.

Q: Why do CISOs need threat detection in their backup workflows?

A: Backup environments are now prime attacker targets. Threat detection helps prevent organizations from storing or restoring compromised data, which helps reduce reinfection risk and improve chances for clean recovery.

Q: How does Commvault help enable clean data recovery?

A: Commvault uses AI-assisted threat scanning, encryption detection, custom IoC matching, and cyber deception to help validate backup integrity and assemble the most recent uncompromised data for rapid recovery.

Q: Why combine anomaly and threat detection?

A: Anomalies identify the unknown; threat detection validates the known. Together, they provide comprehensive visibility into suspicious activity, helping enable faster investigation and more confident data recovery.

Pauline List is Product Marketing Manager at Commvault

Key Takeaways

• Rising operational disruption makes scalable resilience essential, but organizations commonly fall into traps like seeking “silver bullet” technology or relying on “hero worship” of individual experts.
• ResOps provides a scalable framework that integrates people, processes, and technology across ITOps, SecOps, and DevOps.
• Executive sponsorship at the CEO level helps drive accountability and prioritize resilience as a strategic discipline.

Cyberattacks, cloud complexity, and AI-enabled threats are creating constant operational challenges for enterprises. To help meet business requirements in this increasingly disruptive environment, organizations need to move beyond separate recovery tools, teams, and plans to resilience as an integrated operating model.

In a recent webinar, Phil Goodwin, research vice president for IDC’s worldwide infrastructure programs, joined me for a fireside chat to explore how organizations can move beyond fragmented approaches to build resilience that scales.

Why Organizations Need a New Resilience Framework

As organizations engage in daily firefighting while keeping up with new technologies and addressing new initiatives, they rarely have time to step back and reassess whether their approaches still meet requirements. But as isolated incidents become systemic disruption, this conversation has become essential.

In a simpler era, organizations focused primarily on backup and recovery. Large-scale disruptions such as Hurricane Sandy brought disaster recovery onto the agenda. Intensifying cyberthreats like ransomware added cyber resilience and business continuity to the list. Each evolution brought new capabilities, but many organizations simply bolted new approaches onto what they were already doing rather than addressing these expanding requirements holistically.

When separate teams manage different pieces with different tools and policies, gaps may emerge that can slow recovery. Despite years of investment in cybersecurity, organizations are still struggling with recovery.

More recently, AI has accelerated the urgency for a more integrated approach by reshaping both threats and defenses. Despite increasing AI investments, many businesses are delaying AI rollouts due to ongoing concerns about governance and security vulnerabilities.

On the other side of the cyber front, bad actors are using AI to create deepfakes, target users with more sophisticated and convincing phishing, and exploit vulnerabilities at scale.

Resilience operations – ResOps – treats resilience as a continuous operating discipline rather than a collection of separate tools and teams. By bringing together ITOps, SecOps, and DevOps under a unified framework, ResOps helps transform resilience to keep pace with systemic disruption.

Avoiding Common Mistakes in Resilience Planning

Even organizations that recognize the need for change often fall into traps. One is the “silver bullet” problem, which focuses on technology as the solution. Leaders want to believe that buying the right tools will solve everything, but technology alone can’t deliver positive business outcomes without proper integration and process.

“Hero worship” is another common pitfall – relying on talented staff members with expertise residing in their heads rather than in documented processes. Heroism can’t scale, and reliance on specific individuals creates vulnerability when people leave or responsibilities shift.

To move past these traps, you have to think differently about your operating model. Instead of focusing primarily on technology and people, consider the team you’ll need to build, including executive sponsorship, IT operations and security leadership, and senior leaders from the business side.

The team’s charter should focus on defining business outcomes first: What does resilience need to achieve for the organization? What KPIs, SLAs, and processes should be established to meet these requirements?

Building Resilience Operations from the Top Down

As a board-level priority, resilience requires support from the highest levels. ResOps gains the most traction when the CEO is involved, helping set resource priorities and driving accountability across the organization. With executive sponsorship in place, senior leaders including the CIO, CTO, CISO, and general managers can task their staff with implementation.

This approach can scale across organizations of all sizes. Even small to midsize companies can bring together cross-functional teams that include business stakeholders, IT teams, and people tasked with data security and network security. As they grow, this structure can scale with them, adding headcount within specific resilience disciplines while maintaining an integrated approach across the resilience operations chain.

ResOps reflects the ways teams across IT operations, SecOps, and DevOps need to work together within organizations. Data recovery and data security have become so closely aligned that within IDC, researchers across these disciplines now collaborate frequently on client engagements.

Applications now need to be designed with threat actors in mind, incorporating zero trust architectures and assuming that something will go wrong. ResOps provides the framework for this convergence, bringing security and operations tools together into a unified model to address threats and disruptions of all kinds.

ResOps as a Shared Industry Framework

ResOps is an operating model, not a product, and can benefit companies regardless of the specific tools they use. As Phil observed during our chat, “It really requires that community involvement where people pitch in from different perspectives, different vendors, different organizations, and different teams, just like DevOps or SecOps.”

For organizations struggling with constant disruption and the growing complexity of AI-enabled threats and defenses, ResOps offers a path beyond fragmented resilience approaches. By bringing together people, processes, and technology in a unified operating model, ResOps turns fragmented recovery efforts into enterprise-wide readiness.

Watch my full fireside chat with Phil to see how ResOps can help you build enterprise resilience that scales.

FAQs

Q: What is resilience operations (ResOps)?

A: ResOps is an operating model that integrates IT operations, security operations, and DevOps into a continuous discipline. Rather than treating disaster recovery, cyber resilience, and business continuity as separate capabilities, ResOps brings people, processes, and technology together under a unified framework to help create scalable enterprise resilience.

Q: Why is executive sponsorship important for cyber resilience?

A: Executive sponsorship – ideally at the CEO level – helps drive accountability and priority for resilience initiatives across the organization. This top-down support is essential for organizations trying to move beyond fragmented approaches to integrated resilience operations.

Q: Can small and midsized organizations implement ResOps?

A: Yes. ResOps applies across organization sizes. The framework scales in complexity as organizations grow, making it accessible to mid-market firms while remaining effective for large enterprises.

Q: Why do IT and security teams need to work together for resilience?

A: When IT operations, security operations, and DevOps teams collaborate rather than work in silos, organizations can help build more resilient infrastructure to address evolving threats.

Q: How should organizations get started with resilience operations?

A: Start at the top by securing executive sponsorship at the CEO level. Next, form a cross-functional team including IT operations, SecOps, and business stakeholders, and have them define the business outcomes resilience needs to deliver for your business. Conduct a threat assessment to understand the risks you need to address. Only after these foundational steps should organizations focus on selecting technologies and developing detailed processes.

Chris Mierzwa is Senior Director, Portfolio Marketing, at Commvault.