Kate Mollett, Senior Director, Commvault Africa

The evolution of data management is continuous and the recent announcement of Commvault Platform Release 2023 (Commvault PR 2023) – is testimony of this, the latest development of a 27-year journey of customer-driven innovation.

Says Kate Mollett, Senior Director Commvault Africa, “Commvault PR 2023 introduces several new features and additions to strengthen our customers’ security posture, deepen our rich integration with all major hyperscalers and introduce more smart savings through operational efficiencies.”

Harnessing the power of multi-cloud

What differentiates Commvault’s approach to the ecosystem is how its integrations are seamlessly built-in rather than ‘bolted’ on for a quick mention. Mollett adds, “Deeper the integrations, greater the synergies enjoyed by our customers.”

Commvault PR 2023 carries new deep integrations to make it easier for customers to protect their data across Microsoft Azure, AWS Cloud, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

One such example is Commvault’s new integration with Microsoft Azure Restore Points. The company worked closely with Microsoft to be the first data protection platform to support Azure Restore Points. While Azure has had incremental snapshot capabilities, this new integration allows for application consistency across disks, while reducing costs with the option to use more cost-efficient storage tiers for backups. Commvault PR 2023 also introduces integration with Amazon FSx for NetApp which brings the same on-premises NetApp ONTAP policy-based protection to AWS. The new release also introduces support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) infrequent access and combined storage tiers to help reduce costs for protecting your cloud data.

Enhancing data security

“Our trusted approach to data protection is shaped by the fundamental customer direction that data security is an integral and inseparable component of data protection,” says Mollett. “Building on our robust multi-layered ransomware detection, protection and recovery framework, Commvault PR 2023 introduces new integrations to drive data protection insights into the broader security ecosystem.”

An important aspect of data protection is to leverage data awareness to proactively alert IT teams when threats arise. Commvault PR 2023 introduces a new Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) connector that makes it easy to feed alerts, events, and audit data to other platforms through webhooks APIs or even Syslog. Mollet says, “Leveraging standard protocols ensures we can work with virtually any SIEM or event management system giving security teams better visibility to anomalies and threats in their data.”

Driving smart savings

With the uncertainty of a global recession looming, customers in every industry are looking to optimise costs in their budgets to make up for the increased spending for security and mission-critical areas. Commvault is continuing to help provide options to lower the cost for data. For example, new capabilities to use single region snapshots vs. multi-region snapshots for GCP can save 30% of that cost to backup resources. Sometimes improving cost is as simple as reducing the time it takes to protect applications.

Furthermore, optimisations for Hadoop, leveraging snapdiff, can reduce hours long backup scans to just minutes thanks to the enhancements in how changed blocks are scanned.

Mollett concludes, “Businesses today are looking towards ways of closing the business integrity gap, the space between the data that a business actually has and the data it needs to make the most informed and responsible decisions, enabling them to unlock their potential and speed up business growth. Commvault PR 2023 assists companies to achieve this by boosting their data security and protection to better safeguard against ransomware attacks, while also delivering new features for cost savings and heightened operational efficiency in the face of data growth.”\\