Graham Brown, country manager for South Africa/SADC at Commvault.
Data protection and disaster recovery company Commvault will intensify its focus on AI-and cloud driven cyber resilience amid an escalation in the volume and severity of attacks.
The company made the announcement at its Shift South Africa 2024 customer and partner event hosted in Johannesburg last week and confirmed the availability of the Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery service to its channel.
Speaking on the sidelines of the event, Graham Brown, regional manager for South Africa & SADC at Commvault, who rejoined the company to replace outgoing regional head Kate Mollett in October 2023, said the company views South Africa as an important market.
With cyber attacks becoming more frequent and more sophisticated, local organisations need a more thorough response, he added. It has been reported that cyber criminals are directing attacks on backup and recovery systems, making it harder for organisations to restore operations and easier to demand substantial ransoms.
Brown said the Shift campaign, which began officially in November 2023, is about helping customers protect their data, but also stay in business should they be attacked. The message is that achieving cyber resilience is imperative.
“As organisations face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, it is crucial to adopt proactive measures such as ‘clean room’ technology to fortify their defences,” Brown said.
Commvault has positioned its cleanroom recovery solution at the forefront of the recovery process. It provides a secure and isolated environment in the cloud for testing and implementing ransomware recovery strategies.
Fady Richmany, VP for emerging markets, CEE, CIS & META regions, explained that organisations that have taken a hit often struggle to recover in their current environment.
“This is where our cleanroom technology helps. It uses mature, unified, and automated platform to enable restoration at scale, accommodate workloads and offers the organisation a safe space to restore and recover.”
Using Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure, Commvault’s Cleanroom Recovery facilitates incident response testing and enables on-demand recovery into a clean, isolated cloud location, with payment only upon usage.
Richmany added that the company’s acquisition of cloud cyber resilience company Appranix in April 2024 will help drive the ‘cleanroom for recovery’ concept.
In April, Commvault president and CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said the company is taking resilience to the next level by “marrying Commvault’s extensive risk, readiness and recovery capabilities with Appranix’s next-generation cloud-native rebuild capabilities”.
Richard Gadd, senior VP and GM, EMEA and India, said, “We are all aware of the rising threat of cyber crime … it’s all about data, we know that this is the most valuable asset, the lifeblood of every organisation. Our research shows that 98% of organisations believe cyber resilience is the existential imperative, an absolute ‘must-have’.”
