The Complexities Of Reinventing The Mainframe “Easy Life”
Just got back from a Commvault event in London (where I saw more people in 10 seconds than I do in a month in Devon!) which also gave me the opp to catch-up with old PR mate Ben Ralph.
In between talking fast (affordable) cars, guitars, food and wine, we did actually get to spend some quality time (as they say) with the Commvault hierarchy, primarily to cover off recent acquisitions Clumio and Appranix, and other key product updates. First, a big up for CEO Sanjay Mirchandani, very straight talking (BS free) and a bit of a rock star on stage (takes one to know one 😊) – defo a bit of Barack Obama about him…
Without giving too much away (spoiler alert) wrt a soon to be published Broadband-Testing report on the tech of a new client of mine, Vawlt (no relation), the similarities between what Commvault’s acquisitions have given them and what Vawlt is offering are remarkably, er, similar. Not that these similarities are – for either vendor – the be all and end all of each platform offering; anything but. However, it is a very strong indicator of the direction storage companies are heading, in terms of multi-cloud (private/public)/hybrid deployment management and optimisation. And the deep levels of security behind it. As for those vendors out there who will now be playing catch-up – good luck chaps; many hundreds of person-years dev time awaits…
A key element here resulting from the Appranix acquisition is what Commvault is calling “Cloud Rewind” – the ability to restore an organisation’s entire cloud application and data environment – including all the necessary cloud infrastructure configurations – rapidly and in an automated (if required) fashion. The idea is to make the cloud deployment effectively ransomware immune. Even in a non-cyberattack scenario, it takes what is currently weeks of work down to a few button clicks. And it’s guaranteed to be 100% clean and intact. Remember all those years of being forced into a major data restore and crossing your fingers for 24 hours while it rebuilt itself…
Another acquisition-based addition in the making, this times from the Clumio side, is Amazon S3 specific; bringing those same “time machine” capabilities to Amazon S3 customers. So, in the event of an attack, it will allow S3 customers to revert rapidly back to a clean copy of data – including AI and ML datasets – that has not been infiltrated with malware. Other AWS-specific (for now) additions include:
Air Gap Protect: providing AWS customers with immutable, isolated copies of data in a Commvault tenant, as a service, extending the vendors’ current capabilities for backup and protection in customer-owned tenants.
Cleanroom Recovery: Another Commvault Amazon-specific extension is in the form of providing its Cleanroom Recovery capabilities to AWS. When attacked, the tech allows companies to automatically provision a recovery infrastructure, allowing recovery to an isolated location in AWS and restore production workloads. Once in the Cleanroom, customers can also conduct forensics in a clean and safe location.
We discussed these announcements in the form of a roundtable session, where I made the point to Sanjay and the team that – given we are living largely n a 24×7 IT world, the pre-testing and forensics capabilities being provided here – where a company can fully test its cyber recovery plans – can no longer simply be a “once a year” process, but has to be effectively continuous, given the second-by-second changes in the IT landscape. You might be mistaken for thinking that companies know a) their security risk, b) the potential impact/cost of a breach and c) how to recover successfully from it. But many – most? – of them simply do not. It’s impossible to over-emphasise how fundamental these three requirements are in terms of potentially saving a business from being on its knees – or tis back with its legs up in the air… The tools are available, so get on with it.
I further made the point that, ultimately, what every IT team wants is the simplicity of securing and managing a mainframe system from circa 40+ years ago. Of course, that “mainframe” now consists of literally millions of distributed software and hardware, real and virtual, components, but Commvault should be applauded in its aims in this direction.
Meantime, I look forward to seeing how quickly Commvault can roll out its plans to create that “just as easy as securing and managing a 40-year-old mainframe” data and apps platform for any multi-cloud/hybrid environment. Now that would be a real “time machine” moment. So long as it’s without the users displaying their password details on a Post-it sticker attached to their screen…