I just wrapped up watching the replays and digging through the announcements from Commvault’s SHIFT 2025 event in NYC last week and the Virtual event. And honestly? Wow, Just Wow!
They call it the Commvault Cloud Unity platform release, and for once the marketing hyperbole feels… earned. Here’s the jest of what they announced and why it actually got me excited in a world where most “big reveals” are just slideware.
The Big Picture: One Platform to Rule Them All
Commvault took their existing Commvault Cloud (already solid) and turned it into a true unified resilience platform that ties together:
- Data protection / backup
- Cyber recovery (including clean room stuff)
- Data security / governance
- Identity resilience (yes, they’re going hard after Active Directory and Entra ID threats now)
All of it AI-enabled, cloud-native from the ground up, and designed for the way modern enterprises actually work.
Key new goodies they shipped (or are shipping very soon):
- Synthetic Recovery After a ransomware hit, you can now you can preform an exorcism the malware-infected bits and recover everything else fast and clean. No more “restore the whole volume and pray.” This is the kind of precision recovery we’ve been begging for.
- Identity Resilience Goes Nuclear on Active Directory New detection, logging, and — get this — one-click rollback of malicious changes in AD. Spot some sketchy permission changes, credential stuffing attempts, whatever… and undo them instantly from the audit log. They even tied AD forest recovery into Cleanroom so you can test full recoveries without blowing up production (Like anyone would do that), and that is a nice option to have.
- Cloud-Native Overhaul
- Auto discovery across your entire cloud estate (AWS, Azure, GCP, 160+ regions, 200+ services) AI that classifies data and recommends protection policies and has a Built-in TCO calculator that shows exactly how much you’re money you are wasting on native snapshots vs. using CommVault risk scoring for unprotected workloads. All consumable straight from Azure and AWS Marketplaces with pay-as-you-go pricing
- Unified Intelligence Layer One pane of glass that actually works. Threat detection, anomaly spotting, policy enforcement, recovery readiness — all feeding off the same AI brain instead of five different consoles screaming at each other.
Rollout starts late 2025 into early 2026, with some pieces in early access sooner.
Why This Actually Matters to Me (and Should to You)
Look, I’ve been in this industry long enough to see all the anouncements as most vendors slap “AI-powered” on the box and call it a day. Commvault didn’t do that.
What got me genuinely pumped:
- They’re attacking the real pain points of 2025/2026 and identity is the new perimeter, cloud sprawl is is growing at an insane pace, and native tools from hyper-scalers are nowhere near enough when the ransom note shows up.
- Unification without vendor lock-in — works on-prem, cloud, hybrid, whatever. No “you must go all-in on our cloud or else.”
- The precision and automation level here surgical recovery, one-click AD rollback, and (AI policy recs) saves actual human hours and reduces blast radius when sh*t hits the fan.
- They’re making resilience something you can scale in minutes, not months ahead of most competitors who are still playing catch-up.
In a nutshell: Commvault just leapfrogged from “really good backup company” to “the platform you call when you want to sleep at night in a world run by AI and ransomware gangs.”
If you’re running any serious environment (and especially if you’re multi-cloud), go watch the SHIFT virtual replay on the 19th or poke your Commvault rep for a demo. Its been a while since I’ve seen a vendor ship something that feels built for the next five years, not the last five, as seems most people build to catch up to others. This is not the case.
What do you think — game-changer or just really good marketing? Drop your take in the comments.
This was a sponsored blog post.
childebrandt42 