The IT Nerd

By Carol Clark, Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing, Commvault

In 2011 a digital consultant named Ismail Jadun created what has become World Backup Day after he saw a Reddit post where someone wished they had been reminded to backup their data. Eleven years later and we are still trying to remind people that their data is so valuable that they should make sure they can get it back. Enterprise data varies from email to files to images and databases and everywhere in between but it is the currency that runs today’s business landscape. Throughout the years the initial concept of World Backup Day has persevered and thrived, and it is rare to find even the smallest company that does not protect their data in some way, however the world has changed a lot since 2011.  The increase in cyberattacks is well documented and is now at the top of mind for board members, business owners and everyone throughout the corporate structure.    

Cyberattacks threaten the data being used day in and day out and often even the backups of the data. Today’s IT administrators and leaders often must think of the security implications of a change before they even get to consider the technical challenges. On World Backup Day 2022 we suggest the first thing you should do is to check those backups and your processes but the second is to reach out to your information security teams and find out what precautions they are taking and share your cyber threat specific recovery plans.

• Share and collaborate on your procedures – Learn if there are tests you can work together on to validate your recovery.
• Highlight security capabilities in your data protection solutions so security teams can factor in that intelligence into their overall telemetry. Capabilities such as security dashboards anomaly detection, air gapped backup copies can be essential components of an overall corporate preparedness plan – and speed your time to recovery.
• Review access control systems and who has access to critical back ups to better control the attach surface
• Investigate the use of public clouds that allow for secure airgap driving better redundancy and peace of mind (Our Metallic™  Cloud Storage Service (MCSS) is a GREAT place to start….)
• Collaborate on network connectivity to determine if you can speed up the recovery
• Understand if there are compliance regulations they need to adhere to and how your team can better help prove compliance.

Reaching out to the infosec teams is not only best practice but is also a way for you to proactively expand your team’s effectiveness in the event … of well, an event. The day-to-day world of back up is no longer about files and applications. As an administrator there are concerns over encrypted files due to ransomware, data that is exfiltrated and sold and probably one of the most worrying to others is the risk of your customer data being leaked. 

The collision of data owners that is the result of modern cyberthreats adds another level of complication or recovery and by extension to the core backup strategy. Security teams are only the start for the collaboration for today’s IT infrastructure teams. New groups have arisen that will also need to be consulted from the Chief Data Officer to data analytics groups. All of these teams can provide insight into the right data to protect and when. The Chief Data Office can help drive the conversation around what data is more mission critical with the analytics to back up the conversation. These cross functional conversations will continue to add efficiencies into your data protection strategy.

Data recovery can no longer be a siloed activity. World Backup Day is a day that reminds us to backup our data but remember that the key to any data management strategy is not the backup but the recoverability and for that you need to test, test again and then when you think you have completed all your testing, do it one more time, with your new info sec friends.

Sponsor a join table top exercise, bring in lunch and learn from each other as you refine your practices and build better defenses to protect your business. World Backup Day is not the day to relax assuming your backups are good but instead take the time to be ever more diligent and backup your data along with your relationships.

Help us celebrate our customers on World Backup Day by meeting them here https://www.commvault.com/customers

Commvault today announced General Availability for Feature Release 11.26. These enhancements to our best-in-class Intelligent Data Services help to harden infrastructure against attack and improve recoverability, continuing Commvault’s commitment to mitigating cyber threats—including ransomware—in any infrastructure: on-premises, in the cloud, and even across multiple clouds. 

The new enhancements include:

• Utilizing hardware-based security tokens, along with common access card support, helps to strengthen customers’ security posture
• Leveraging highly secure cloud authentication methods, including the AWS Key Management System (KMS) and Azure Key Vault
• Extended Disaster Recovery orchestration now includes Object Storage and Big Data File Systems, to accommodate larger datasets.

Complete documentation of all the features and capabilities included with this release can be found at https://documentation.commvault.com/11.26/essential/143030_feature_release_1126.html.

By Jeff Crum, Commvault

Data privacy has always been a hot topic but in today’s world of data sprawl, data security threats, and increasing data regulations, the stakes have never been higher.

Bad actors, human error, ransomware, and other security threats pose risks to data every minute of every day. Plus a more stringent regulatory environment is forcing organizations to enforce compliance – or risk fines. And as data increases in volume and sprawls across applications and storage, these efforts become increasingly complicated.

Let’s take a look at some key principles of data privacy:

• Protection & Recovery: One important area in ensuring data privacy is making sure that your data is protected. This includes the ability to recover data in the event of accidental deletion – and in the case of a malware or ransomware attack. Making sure you can recover your data in these scenarios mitigates the impact of some of these worst-case scenarios.
• Access & Prioritization: Once you have a protection mechanism deployed, ensuring that sensitive data and personally identifiable information (PII) is locked down tight is an important safeguard you can put into place. Prioritizing the protection of sensitive data, including PII, using technology such as AI/ML, reduces the risk of exposure. Additionally automation helps take the risk of human error out of the equation. Automation can also extend to detecting anomalous data access, raising the red flag so that you can step in and protect key data before it is compromised.
• Compliance & Governance: Together, all of the actions above can appropriately address compliance with key data regulations and help define your overall data governance regime, taking global scope and regional nuances into account. Read about how South Tyrol Civil Protection Agency overcame their challenges with GDPR compliance here.

This may sound simple but getting data privacy right can be incredibly complex. Let’s talk about some things you can do to make ensuring data privacy easier.

• Manage data sprawl. Data growth and an increasing number of data sources and repositories continue to challenge enterprise data management, with no end in sight. But there are some things you can do to mitigate this, including  looking at the number of tools that you’re using to manage data across your environment, breaking down data silos in the process. This blog by Commvault’s Don Foster goes into further detail about what data sprawl is and how to help solve for it.
• Take a comprehensive approach to data management. The principles mentioned above require a number of different data management capabilities – including data protection, data security, data compliance and more, which make use of advanced techniques with AI/ML as well. Look for data management platforms and solutions that provide deep capabilities in  these areas.
• Simplify your environment. Let’s face it—most companies have many, many vendors, some of which do the same or similar things, and all of which have access to your data. By scaling back the number of trusted vendors and streamlining deployments, you can capture efficiencies and mitigate risk. By introducing a single data management platform, you can simplify the user experience and reduce errors related to data privacy, and help allow your data to work for you instead of against you.

Data privacy is a deep and complex topic, but at Commvault, we can help you crack the code. For more information, visit www.commvault.com/data-compliance.

Commvault today announced Metallic Security IQ. Embedded as an optional feature across the entire Metallic portfolio, Security IQ is a unified security dashboard that provides customers with quick and meaningful insights into threats impacting their data landscape and their data backup security posture in their Metallic cloud environments.

IT administrators responsible for data protection are facing cyberattacks, ransomware and new and sophisticated threats that make it challenging to meet internal security mandates. With all of the new threats that are being developed by malicious actors, no tool can guarantee protection. However, with Security IQ, Metallic customers get intuitive tools and advanced insights to bolster their data backup and recovery posture broadly across cloud applications, SaaS applications, endpoints, and hybrid cloud workloads. The Security IQ dashboard empowers IT professionals and admins to spot risks and vulnerabilities in real-time, limit their exposure to cyberthreats with zero-trust controls at scale, and make more informed data recovery decisions – from one central location.

And it’s not just ransomware. Cybercrime and threats on the whole are rapidly increasing everywhere, putting data security front-and-centre as a top concern for businesses and government agencies. Security IQ, alongside Metallic’s zero-trust, enterprise-grade security approach, provides businesses of all sizes with advanced tools to protect data, detect threats, and recover from attack – helping reduce risks and deliver business continuity across their entire data estate. 

To learn all there is to know about Metallic Security IQ Dashboard and for details on the complete technical features, visit their blog page.

Commvault today announced three new Managed Service Provider (MSP) partners are joining the Metallic MSP ecosystem, growing the number of MSPs offering Metallic Data Management-as-a-Service (DMaaS) solutions, while increasing the reach by bringing access to the industry’s leading data protection solutions to more organizations in more geographies. New partners Veristor, GM Sectec, and Data Management Professionals South Africa (DMP SA) join global design partner SoftwareONE in delivering Metallic-powered solutions to customers through the new, easy-to-use Metallic MSP partner portal.

The need for cloud-based managed services continues to rise, with many MSPs moving to a SaaS model for their offerings. Building on Commvault’s already strong commitment to MSPs as well as its recent MSP design partnership with SoftwareONE, today’s news amplifies the company’s focus on helping customers drive their digital transformation. Metallic for MSPs helps customers solve for resource constraints and simplify management of data wherever that data lives – from hybrid cloud datacentre workloads like SAP HANA and Oracle, to SaaS apps like Office 365 or Dynamics 365, to endpoints. With Metallic for MSPs, Metallic is offering MSPs the unique opportunity to have a single solution of coverage across the broadest set of workloads to solve their customers’ toughest data challenges – all while reducing infrastructure and management overhead costs and providing a quick time to value through accelerated services.​

Metallic’s SaaS offerings alongside its Metallic MSP Portal and Metallic Hub enables MSPs to deliver the gold standard in DMaaS. Metallic offers partners a globally available, scalable, always up-to-date, secure and monitored platform, so that partners can focus on what is most important – their customer’s data needs. Built on Commvault industry-leading technology, Metallic offers data protection for a wide range of workloads, helping customers to avoid data loss and downtime, to safeguard against cyberthreats, and to meet growing data demands for data compliance and governance – with simple SaaS delivery and fast onboarding. ​

To learn more about Metallic’s portfolio of solutions for MSPs, please visit: https://www.metallic.io/msp-partner

Commvault today announced the availability of Commvault Backup & Recovery and Commvault Professional Services in AWS Marketplace, an online store that makes it easy for customers to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS. Commvault continues to innovate in delivering industry-leading technology to customers to help them face digital transformation head-on with solutions that protect data anywhere, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid model. 

Stephen Orban, GM for AWS Marketplace & Control Services, will address this topic further during his keynote session at Commvault Connections21, Commvault’s best-in-class global event centred around empowering data-minded information technology (IT) professionals to modernize their data protection environment, manage their data more efficiently, and mitigate risk, on October 28.

Expanding the reach of Commvault’s industry-leading backup and recovery solutions, AWS Marketplace availability of Commvault Backup & Recovery, with optional add-ons of Commvault Disaster Recovery and Commvault Professional Services, provides AWS customers with simple, scalable, and secure enterprise-grade data protection at infinite scale and rapid recovery of any workload. Commvault and AWS already share dozens of joint customers together. Through AWS Marketplace, customers have additional flexibility and choice to efficiently manage critical data, both in the cloud and on-premises, protect and recover from threats like ransomware, and use intelligent automation to optimize efficiency and reduce costs.

Orban will discuss this topic at length during the keynote panel at Commvault Connections21. To register for Connections21, visit: www.commvaultconnections21.com. 

To learn more about Commvault solutions in AWS Marketplace, visit our Seller Profile.

Commvault today announced new ransomware services designed to help businesses prepare for, protect against, and respond to today’s growing cyber threats.

Ransomware attacks continue to rise, and they are expensive—on average, it costs 10 times the cost of the ransom payment to restore the data.

70% of ransomware attacks include a threat to leak exfiltrated data, and firms who have been attacked experience about 21 days of downtime afterwards. The hard costs of ransomware are astronomical; most companies are not prepared to respond to an attack, and even fewer are planning ahead of time.

Commvault is a trusted partner to its global customers in data protection and recovery, for all types of risk vectors. Ransomware is the latest persistent threat facing our customers and the new ransomware protection and recovery services are based on Commvault’s expertise and knowledge of data management design, planning, and recovery.

The new offering, Commvault Ransomware Protection and Response Services, provides the resources and expertise needed to harden customers’ Commvault solutions from an attack, review the state of their data protection solution over time, and help them recover critical data when an attack does occur.

The Ransomware Protection Design and Plan service assists customers in validating their preparedness for ongoing threats and attacks. The offering will help organizations understand potential threats and risks impacting their ability to be ready. It offers tangible outcomes such as a readiness scorecard, key findings, and recommendations and a prioritized action plan.

The Commvault Ransomware Response Service provides the expertise and resources to help recover from an attack. As part of the service, Commvault provides a Ransomware Recovery Incident Manager backed by the Commvault Recovery Operations team. The service works with customers to identify and recover critical data and expedite a return to normal business operations.

These services complement Commvault Ransomware Protect and Recover solutions that deliver the critical capabilities for ransomware data protection. Utilizing this new service offering along with Commvault software and cloud offerings allows an enterprise to detect, protect, and recover from ransomware attacks and other data breaches as a core component of the Commvault Intelligent Data Services. 

Commvault Data Management and Protection products and Compliance and Governance solutions work hand in hand with this data security solution.

To learn more about Commvault’s ransomware services, please visit https://www.commvault.com/resources/commvault-ransomware-protection-service.

Today Commvault a recognized global enterprise leader in Intelligent Data Services across on-premises, cloud and SaaS environments, announced that Gartner, Inc., which delivers actionable, objective insight to executives and their teams, has given it the highest Product Scores across all three use cases in the 2021 Critical Capabilities report: datacenter environments (4.13/5), cloud environments (4.02/5), and edge environments (4.01/5). ­This is the second year in a row that Commvault has achieved the highest scores in all three Critical Capabilities use cases as identified by the Gartner report. Commvault was also recently named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions.

Commvault’s proven technology doesn’t just protect the data —it also helps increase visibility, reduce data sprawl, and accelerate transformation in datacentre, cloud and edge environments. Engineered from the ground up to protect data in data centre, cloud, and edge environments, Commvault’s backup and recovery solutions, along with its Metallic SaaS solutions, ensure data is protected and recoverable wherever it lives.

Today Commvault, a recognized global enterprise leader in Intelligent Data Services across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments, announced that Gartner has named the company as a “Leader” in its most recent report: “2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions.” 

The 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions recognizes the dynamic backup and recovery market, focusing on a large range of workloads and capabilities from vendors in the space. 

To read the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions report, visit: https://www.commvault.com/itleaders. 

Gartner, 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions, Jerry Rozeman, Santhosh Rao, Nik Simpson and Michael Hoeck, July 19, 2021.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant report was titled “Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions” from 2016-2020.

Commvault today announced the launch of a new partnership with SoftwareONE, a leading provider of end-to-end software and cloud technology solutions. SoftwareONE is Metallic’s first Managed Service Provider (MSP) global design partner for delivering Metallic-based SaaS data protection solutions in the form of BackupSimple powered by Metallic. BackupSimple is SoftwareONE’s cloud-based managed service offering to deliver critical data backup and recovery capabilities for companies of all sizes. Built on Metallic solutions and delivered by SoftwareONE, BackupSimple protects and manages data from SaaS applications to endpoints to hybrid cloud workloads.

As the market continues to move quickly to the cloud, BackupSimple powered by Metallic provides an easy entry point for service providers like SoftwareONE to deliver industry-leading data management capabilities, enabled by the simplicity of a SaaS model. SoftwareONE enjoys simplified management, with reduced infrastructure, quick customer onboarding, and fast time to value for its customers. Leveraging a secure and scalable cloud infrastructure, with remote management and rapid tenant onboarding through a seamless, targeted program and APIs. MSP partners can also seamlessly offer Metallic capabilities, including breadth of coverage for SaaS applications, endpoints, hybrid cloud datacenter workloads, and unique Metallic SaaS Plus storage flexibility – eliminating the need for disparate point solutions and siloed data.

Metallic worked with the SoftwareONE Managed Services team to define a model that allows MSPs to choose the type of engagement model that best works best for them – whether that is utilizing the combined power of the new Metallic MSP portal and Metallic operational portal, the Metallic Hub, to handle all end-user management needs, or creating a custom interface that offers Metallic solutions via an API.

Together SoftwareONE and Metallic are leveraging Metallic MSP services to disrupt the data management market for the benefit of customers. To learn more about SoftwareONE and BackupSimple, join their upcoming webinar where SoftwareONE and Commvault experts will explain the threat to SMBs from ransomware and other data loss situations that can have a catastrophic impact on an organization’s bottom line.