In today’s threat environment, recovery from a cyber-attack is not simply about restoring data, but ensuring that business-critical applications, identities, cloud services and dependencies can be recovered in the right order and from a trusted state. Balaji Rao, Area VP, India & SAARC, Commvault, claims in an exclusive conversation with Rajneesh De, Group Editor, APAC Media & CXO Media that Commvault’s key differentiator is its ability to help customers achieve fast, clean and complete recovery from a cyber incident. This spans from protecting critical data and services to validating recovery plans and restoring operations after an attack.
What solutions and services are currently in Commvault’s portfolio in India?
Commvault’s portfolio in India is built around a simple objective: helping organizations achieve unified resilience in an increasingly AI-driven, cloud-first world. As cyber threats, regulatory requirements, and digital complexity continue to grow, businesses are shifting their focus from protecting data alone to ensuring they can recover critical operations quickly, securely, and with confidence when disruption occurs. This is where Commvault helps.
At the core of our offering is Commvault Cloud, our platform for unified resilience at enterprise scale. It brings together data security, cyber recovery, identity resilience, and AI-powered intelligence into a single operating experience, enabling organizations to protect and recover data, applications, and identities across cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Rather than relying on multiple point solutions, customers gain a unified view of risk, protection, and recovery readiness.
Our portfolio spans cloud-native data protection, ransomware resilience, cleanroom recovery, identity recovery, cyber preparedness and recovery automation across cloud, SaaS, on-premises and hybrid environments. Capabilities such as Cloud Rewind, Cleanroom Recovery and Clumio help organizations recover faster, cleaner and with greater confidence when disruptions occur.
We are also extending resilience to the AI era through Arlie, our AI copilot, which helps customers gain deeper visibility, automate workflows and make faster recovery decisions. As organizations in India adopt AI at scale, Commvault helps ensure that the data, applications and identities powering these environments remain protected, trusted and recoverable.
Which key verticals are currently showing maximum traction for Commvault in India? Which referenceable marquee installations exist, and what are their use cases?
We are seeing strong momentum across sectors where cyber resilience, regulatory compliance and business continuity are critical. This includes financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, technology, cloud-native businesses and the public sector. As organizations accelerate cloud adoption and AI initiatives, the ability to recover quickly from cyber and operational disruptions has become a board-level priority.
What stands out is the diversity of use cases. For example, India’s leading entertainment platform, BookMyShow uses Commvault Cloud Rewind to strengthen cloud resilience and automate recovery across AWS, helping ensure business continuity during periods of peak demand.
IP Rings, a leading manufacturing company, modernized its data protection strategy to improve ransomware resilience, accelerate recovery and dramatically reduce audit preparation times.
Persistent Systems, India’s leading IT service provider, deployed Commvault as a cyber resilience platform integrated with Microsoft Azure, enabling immutable data protection, faster recovery and stronger business continuity outcomes.
Across all industries, customers are turning to Commvault not just for data protection, but to strengthen cyber resilience, simplify operations and achieve greater recovery readiness in increasingly complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
What are the dynamics of integrating Commvault’s Cyber Recovery Actions into CrowdStrike Charlotte Agentic SOAR Workflows? How does it benefit enterprises?
Commvault and CrowdStrike have a long-standing partnership focused on strengthening threat detection, security visibility and cyber resilience. This latest integration takes that relationship a step further by bringing Commvault cyber recovery actions available as native steps into CrowdStrike Charlotte’s AI-driven SOAR workflows.
Through this, organizations can now automate critical recovery actions alongside security response, such as preserving clean recovery points, restricting access to critical data, and restoring assets into a clean recovery environment. This helps bridge the gap between detecting an attack and recovering from it.
For Indian organizations navigating rapid cloud adoption, AI transformation and growing cyber risks, the benefit is faster, more coordinated incident response and investigation with less manual intervention. Ultimately, it helps security and recovery teams operate as one, reducing downtime and strengthening overall cyber resilience.
As AI evolves, how does it increase the chances of vulnerabilities for enterprises, and how are Commvault solutions geared to mitigate some of these challenges?
AI is fundamentally changing the threat model. The risk is no longer limited to attackers using AI. Autonomous agents can access data, invoke tools and act at machine speed, sometimes pursuing legitimate objectives in ways their designers never anticipated. This expands the attack surface across data, identities, applications and the broader AI supply chain.
For enterprises, prevention alone is no longer enough. They must be able to detect abnormal behavior, contain compromised workloads, limit the blast radius and recover AI services without reintroducing corrupted data or assets.
Commvault’s portfolio is built to make enterprise data and operations AI-ready and resilient. It helps organizations protect the data, applications, identities and cloud environments underpinning AI; identify threats and anomalies earlier; understand vulnerabilities and dependencies across AI workloads; and automate resilience operations. Crucially, it enables clean recovery to a known, trusted state, helping businesses validate data integrity and restore critical services with confidence after disruption.
Because traditional recovery asks, “Can we bring it back?” AI resilience asks the more important question: “Can we trust what we are bringing back?
How does Commvault leverage AI to enhance enterprises’ capability to combat cybersecurity threats while conforming with all compliances in a highly regulated environment?
As cyber threats grow in speed and sophistication, security teams need more than visibility, they need the ability to identify risks earlier, prioritize response efforts and recover with confidence. At the same time, highly regulated organizations must ensure that security improvements do not come at the expense of governance, compliance or control over sensitive data.
At Commvault, we leverage AI to help organizations strengthen cyber resilience through intelligent threat detection, anomaly identification, risk prioritization and recovery automation. AI-powered capabilities help security and IT teams cut through complexity, identify clean recovery points and accelerate decision-making during incidents, reducing the time between detection and recovery.
Equally important, AI can help organizations improve data governance and compliance. As AI adoption accelerates, enterprises need greater visibility into what data they hold, where sensitive information resides, who has access to it and how it is being used. Our portfolio helps customers classify and govern data, strengthen access controls and reduce overexposure risks, creating a stronger foundation for both security and regulatory compliance.
Ultimately, AI should not simply make operations faster. It should help organizations become more resilient. By combining AI-driven insights, automation, governance and recovery capabilities, Commvault helps organizations defend against emerging threats while maintaining the trust, control and compliance required in highly regulated environments.
What are the key pillars on which Commvault’s GTM strategy rests in India? What are some of the key initiatives under this strategy?
First, we are focused on helping organizations embrace a modern, cloud-delivered approach to resilience through Commvault Cloud. India is home to a rapidly growing ecosystem of cloud-native, SaaS-first and digital businesses that need resilience to keep pace with innovation. Our focus is on helping these organizations protect and recover their data, applications and identities through a scalable, subscription-based model, without the complexity of managing traditional infrastructure.
Second, we continue to invest in a partner-first model. Partners are critical to extending our reach and helping customers navigate cloud transformation, cyber recovery and resilience challenges. Through enablement, certifications, incentives and joint go-to-market initiatives, we are helping partners build high-value practices around cyber resilience and managed services.
Third, we are aligning closely with evolving customer priorities around cyber recovery, AI readiness, identity resilience and operational resilience. As attacks become more sophisticated and digital environments more complex, organizations are looking beyond data protection and focusing on recovery readiness, business continuity and resilience at scale.
Across all these efforts, the objective is simple: helping customers innovate faster in the cloud while ensuring they can recover quickly and confidently when disruption occurs.
What are Commvault’s unique differentiators in the extremely competitive landscape?
In today’s crowded vendor market, we believe organizations need to start by asking a different question. Instead of asking “Do I have backups?” or “Can I detect threats?”, they should be asking “Can I recover my business when it matters most?”
That is where Commvault differentiates itself. Many vendors focus on prevention, detection or backup. Our focus is on cyber resilience and recovery readiness. We help organizations prepare for the entire lifecycle of a cyber incident, from protecting critical data and services to validating recovery plans and restoring operations after an attack.
A key differentiator is our ability to help customers achieve fast, clean and complete recovery. In today’s threat environment, recovery is not simply about restoring data. It is about ensuring business-critical applications, identities, cloud services and dependencies can be recovered in the right order and from a trusted state.
We also take a broader view of resilience. As organizations embrace cloud, SaaS and AI, the attack surface extends far beyond traditional infrastructure. Our approach helps customers build resilience across data, applications, identities and cloud environments, reducing complexity and helping them maintain operational continuity in increasingly distributed environments.
Finally, we believe resilience should be treated as a continuous business capability rather than an annual recovery test or compliance exercise. This philosophy underpins our ResOps approach, which brings together security, IT and recovery teams around a shared objective: ensuring organizations can withstand disruption and recover quickly when it occurs.
Ultimately, our differentiation is simple: we help customers move from hoping they can recover to knowing they can recover. That is an increasingly important distinction in today’s business landscape.
