Telemetry data fuels modern business decisions – but it often resides in data lakes designed for storage rather than security. Traditional replication was built for disaster recovery, not cyberattacks. As a result, it may not distinguish between clean and compromised data, and storage-based architectures developed for early big data environments can struggle under modern data volumes. When ransomware strikes, organizations may find that replicated data has also been compromised.

The eBook draws a clear distinction between backup and cyber resilience: backup creates copies of data, while cyber resilience focuses on helping organizations recover data quickly and reliably during cyber incidents. It examines why replication can fall short as a recovery approach, where factors such as data growth, storage constraints, and network throughput can increase recovery complexity. The chapter also explores architectural approaches designed to align with existing IT environments, support large-scale data recovery, and help reduce cybersecurity risk.

Many organizations evaluate data protection solutions before fully assessing the architectural requirements needed to support recovery objectives. Challenges can emerge after deployment, including per-node data transfer limits that affect recovery performance at scale, proprietary formats that can limit data portability, infrastructure constraints that affect large-scale recovery operations, and workload coverage gaps across hybrid environments. Architectural simplicity at deployment does not always translate to recovery readiness.

The eBook provides a pre-selection checklist across five architectural dimensions: current data protection environment (front-end data volume, server and VM count, disk library type); data center topology (number of sites, geographic distribution, DR site count, and inter-site bandwidth); recovery requirements (RTOs and RPOs by application tier, including single-VM and large-scale recovery targets); forensic and investigation requirements across distributed infrastructure; and identification of network, storage, and compute constraints that can affect recovery performance.

Recovering from a cyberattack differs from recovering from a hardware failure. Systems and applications must be restored alongside data, and recovery activities performed within a compromised environment can increase the risk of reintroducing threats. Many organizations find that recovery architectures vary in workload coverage, portability, and recovery validation capabilities. Without an isolated recovery environment, validating recovery readiness can become more challenging.

The chapter explores six cyber resilience capabilities of Commvault Cloud: Data Plane Separation (a decoupled architecture); Comprehensive Security (broad workload coverage); Any-to-Any Portability (flexible recovery across locations); Risk Remediation (automated scanning and remediation across live and backup data); Early Warning (AI-enabled threat identification); and Cleanroom (an isolated environment designed to support recovery validation and testing).