Commvault expands Cloud Rewind to cover more Azure resources

The expanded coverage takes in 62% of the Azure resource types Commvault considers relevant to enterprise deployments. The service targets configuration data rather than application data itself.

Commvault launched Cloud Rewind in October 2024. The service runs on technology from Appranix Inc., a Boston cloud resiliency startup Commvault acquired that April. Cloud Rewind continuously discovers cloud resources and maps the dependencies between them.

When something breaks, the software orchestrates a rebuild of the application along with the infrastructure and configurations underneath it. Teams can also run recovery simulations before an incident, including inside isolated air-gapped environments.

Rebuilding by hand is the alternative, and it is slow. Absolute Security’s “The Resilient CISO” survey of 750 chief information security officers, published in January, found 57% took more than 4.5 days on average to fully recover from an attack or incident. Not one respondent restored operations inside a day.

Two other changes come with the update. Protection Groups pull application data and cloud configuration into a single air-gapped recovery workflow. Policy-based protection enrolls newly discovered resources automatically by tag, region and type. That runs across multiple clouds from one workflow.

“Modern applications depend on interconnected cloud services, infrastructure, and configurations that must be recovered together,” said Pranay Ahlawat, chief technology and AI officer at Commvault. “Cloud Rewind helps organizations recover cloud applications through a unified experience in Commvault Cloud, increasing customers’ confidence in their ability to recover following a cyberattack or outage.”

Melinda Marks, senior research director and chief analyst at Omdia, said many organizations discover their recovery plan is incomplete “only after an incident has occurred,” and pointed to the growing tangle of cloud resources sitting behind modern applications.

The announcement follows the multiyear agreement Commvault signed with Microsoft Corp. in June to make its recovery and resilience technology available as a native Azure service.

Cloud Rewind is available now as an add-on workload within Commvault Cloud. The broader Azure protection is targeted for release in the coming months. Pricing is metered on the number of protected cloud resources.