Fady Richmany, Regional Vice President, Emerging Markets, Commvault, tells Anita Joseph in a candid chat, all about cyber resilience and how the company is focused on enhancing the cyber resilience of companies by providing them with options that suit their specific business model.
Why is cyber resilience important today?
A robust cyber resilience strategy is imperative for ensuring business continuity. Its significance transcends merely fortifying an enterprise’s security framework and mitigating risks to its critical infrastructure. Indeed, cyber resilience serves as a defensive wall against financial losses and reputational damage.
Cyber resilience is crucial for safeguarding a company’s continuity, financial stability, and reputation. Recent studies, like the one by IDC commissioned by Commvault, reveal that 61% of organizations see data loss due to cyber threats as increasingly likely within a year. Cyber resilience is about preparedness—not if, but when attacks occur, and how often.
Furthermore, the adoption of a well-crafted cyber resilience strategy by businesses fosters heightened trust among clients and customers in their day-to-day operations. This, in turn, bolsters an organisations’ competitive edge by facilitating streamlined and effective performance, ensuring that operations run smoothy even under threat.
How and why has Commvault shifted its focus to cyber resilience this year?
For over 30 years, Commvault has led with innovative solutions for safeguarding and recovering customer data. Now, recognizing the evolving cyber threats, we’ve deepened our focus on cyber resilience. As such, Commvault simplifies data protection, cyber recovery and cyber resilience – in one cloud platform – while striving to make the world a better place for everyone. Throughout our long rich history, we have developed more than 1,400 patents, which help more than 100,000 companies and organizations with their data security & recovery.[1]
Over the past year specifically, Commvault has focused on enhancing the cyber resilience of companies by providing them with options that suit their business models, such as Commvault Cloud, powered by Metallic® AI,[2] a cyber-resilience platform built for the hybrid enterprise. This solution delivers the protection that any company needs in a single platform to eliminate security gaps. The platform uses Metallic AI to power early warning, threat detection, incident readiness, rapid response and cyber recovery – offering the speed, insight and confidence to deal with cyber-attacks across any workload in any environment.
With products such as the aforementioned, we’re enhancing companies’ abilities to detect threats and recover quickly, ensuring they stay resilient against any cyber challenge.
As well as this, we have recently announced the acquisition of cloud cyber resilience company, Appranix. We have made this acquisition to help enterprises get up and running even faster after an outage or cyberattack. As we already know, Commvault is helping organisations reduce downtime by recovering data rapidly – but fast data recovery is only part of the equation.
There are necessities vitally needed to rebuild critical cloud applications and the cloud infrastructure that runs it all. These include networking, DNS configuration, application load balancing, security group access, and much more that enable cloud applications to operate at optimal efficiency. Appranix automates all of this and can reduce the time it takes to rebuild from days or weeks to, in some cases, hours or minutes.
We are marrying our extensive risk, readiness, and recovery capabilities with Appranix’s next-generation cloud-native rebuild capabilities. Acquiring Appranix was the next logical step for our company, in order to achieve true cyber resilience-at-speed, and enabling our customers’ goals of complete cyber resilience to become a reality.
What are the potential integration methods for AI within organizations’ data protection and cyber resilience strategies?
Organizations of all shapes and sizes face unprecedented volumes of cyber threats that can disrupt business operations and tarnish brand reputations. It’s chaotic to say the least. As this threat landscape continues to evolve, it’s crucial for businesses to stay ahead of the bad actors and escalate their cyber defenses[3].
AI integration is transforming how organizations manage cyber risks. By partnering with a wide ecosystem of the top AI and cybersecurity firms, Commvault integrates AI to provide advanced threat detection and proactive security measures and help to address the chaos. Our Commvault Cloud platform leverages AI for real-time data insights and enhanced security, ensuring organizations can quickly respond to and mitigate potential threats.
These strategic integrations alongside our own platform allow us to leverage AI for real-time data insights and enhanced security, ensuring organizations can quickly respond to and mitigate potential threats.
In what ways does Commvault Cloud cater to customers seeking to fortify their cyber resilience and bolster their enterprise cloud strategy?
Cyber resilience can be the gateway to drive hybrid cloud adoption. But what you need is a partner with true cloud cyber resilience. One that supports cloud maturity by enabling data security and rapid cyber recovery across workloads, wherever they live on their cloud journey. According to the industry reports in 2023, 98% of global tech executives report their business has been impacted by increasing complexity of data across the cloud, and 82% of breaches these days involve data stored in the cloud – public, private, or multiple environments.[4]
Commvault Cloud is the industry’s first platform for true, cloud cyber resilience and is a trailblazer in this area, delivering the highest security, most intelligence, and fastest recovery. It differs from others by avoiding complex setups and offering a straightforward, comprehensive cloud solution that secures data across all cloud environments. Our platform ensures that your data is always protected, accessible, and recoverable, no matter where it resides
Only Commvault Cloud enables true data security and recovery in the cloud. Companies can now back up, monitor, report, manage, and recover their data, wherever it lives, from one, central cloud-based solution.
How can organizations effectively tackle and advance their digital transformation amidst mounting cyber threats and other challenges?
Digital transformation presents numerous advantages for businesses, including heightened efficiency, improved customer experience, diversified revenue streams, data-informed decision-making, and increased agility. However, it also brings its own challenges, such as resistance to change, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, financial investments, skills shortages, and technology integration complexities.
In the contemporary business arena, data assumes unparalleled value as firms pursue advancement. The necessity for digital transformation has become evident, particularly when you consider substantial shifts in both operational practices and IT frameworks, notably with the proliferation of remote work setups.
Effectively harnessing data for customer satisfaction and innovation presents hurdles when dispersed across disparate platforms such as silos, clouds, and on-premises storage, managed through diverse backup and recovery systems. A modernized data protection strategy is indispensable, one that fosters agility and adaptability across the entirety of the infrastructure, rather than in isolated segments. This demands a solution that harmonizes diverse workloads, streamlining the environment and facilitating seamless digital transformation endeavours.
One of the many ways Commvault addresses these is by integrating early warning systems and cyber deception into our data security and cyber recovery services, allowing us to detect threats faster than industry norms. Our comprehensive approach helps businesses manage data across platforms, ensuring swift recovery and continued innovation without disruption.
Over the past four years, Commvault has diligently enhanced its platform to effectively merge IT and security functions. This empowers our customers to proactively combat threats by integrating threat defense, backup, and recovery like never before. With Commvault’s comprehensive workload coverage and dependable recovery capabilities, enterprises can swiftly recover from attacks or outages, minimizing downtime and ensuring seamless business continuity.
What are the prominent industry trends anticipated to reshape the approaches organizations adopt in safeguarding their data in 2024?
According to a recent IBM report, the global average cost of a data breach in 2023 was USD 4.45 million, representing a 15% increase over the previous three years. Furthermore, 51% of organizations are planning to boost security investments in the aftermath of a breach, including incident response (IR) planning and testing, employee training, and threat detection and response tools. Organizations that heavily employ security AI and automation save an average of USD 1.76 million compared to those that do not.[5]
In 2024 so far and for the remainder of the year, we expect to see more focus on enhancing cloud security frameworks, encryption mechanisms, and identity and access management solutions to safeguard data stored in cloud environments[6].
We can expect to see a growing focus on IoT security, as organizations strive to protect their devices and data from cyberattacks. This will include developing new security standards and protocols for IoT devices, as well as raising awareness of the risks associated with them[7]. In addition to increased focus on AI and Machine Learning (ML), enhanced Focus on Mobile Security, improving the Cybersecurity skills and culture among the employees.
As well as this, we are seeing that organisations of all sizes across the region are becoming more aware of the importance of a sound cyber resilience strategy. Previously, it would be left to the IT teams to develop and integrate solutions to protect their data in order to enable efficient digital transformation. However, it has now become a C-level and board-level priority. The state of digital transformation within the Middle East is at an advanced level compared to other regions, so the need for cyber resilience is, in turn, at a far greater level. If you’re serious about your data protection and backup capabilities, then you are serious about cyber resilience.
To summarise, looking ahead for the remainder of 2024, key trends to keep an eye on include enhanced cloud security frameworks and encryption, heightened IoT security, and a focus on AI and ML for improved cybersecurity. Commvault is at the forefront, incorporating these innovations to ensure our customers can navigate the complex landscape of data protection and thrive in an increasingly digital world.
[1] https://www.commvault.com/about-us
[2] https://www.commvault.com/platform
[3] https://www.commvault.com/blogs/collaborating-with-top-security-and-ai-companies
[4] https://read.commvault.com/your-blueprint-to-cloud-adoption-ebook
[5] https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach
[6] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cybersecurity-trends-2024-navigating-evolving-digital-landscape-z2jge/
[7] https://valuementor.com/blogs/top-cybersecurity-trends-in-2024-5-key-takeaways-from-2023/#:~:text=In%202024%2C%20we%20can%20expect%20to%20see%20a%20growing%20focus,the%20risks%20associated%20with%20them.
