Commvault SHIFT 2025: Advancing the Future of AI-Driven Cyber Recovery

At its flagship annual event, Commvault SHIFT 2025 in New York, Commvault announced a suite of AI-enabled capabilities under its Commvault Cloud Unity platform — a significant step forward in how enterprises approach data protection, cyber recovery, and operational resilience. These innovations, encompassing Threat Scan, Synthetic Recovery, and Cleanroom Recovery automation, represent a decisive move toward intelligent, verifiable, and automated recovery processes—core pillars of resilience in the AI era.

A New Paradigm for Recovery

In today’s enterprise landscape, the ability to recover from cyber incidents is no longer a back-office IT function. It is a business-critical capability that directly affects continuity, trust, and reputation.

Commvault’s latest platform release reflects a strategic recognition of this shift: recovery must now be clean, complete, and validated — not just fast.

By embedding AI across the recovery workflow, Commvault is rearchitecting how enterprises detect, isolate, and remediate data compromises. This aligns with an industry trend where resilience is moving upstream — from post-incident remediation to pre-emptive validation and automated assurance.

AI-Powered Threat Scan: Building Trust in Recovery Data

The enhanced Threat Scan capability integrates AI to inspect backup datasets with greater depth and context. By identifying anomalies, encrypted files, and evolving Indicators of Compromise (IoCs), the system proactively isolates suspicious data before it re-enters production environments.

This approach addresses a fundamental challenge in enterprise recovery: trust in backup integrity. As ransomware grows more sophisticated — often targeting backup repositories themselves — the ability to continuously validate clean data sets becomes a prerequisite for credible restoration.

Synthetic Recovery: Balancing Completeness and Safety

A common dilemma for enterprises following a cyberattack is the trade-off between recovering older, “clean” backups versus newer, potentially compromised ones. Synthetic Recovery introduces an AI-driven alternative that detects and surgically removes malicious content during restoration while preserving legitimate data.

The result is a more granular and intelligent recovery that balances operational continuity with data assurance. This marks a substantive evolution from the traditional “lift and restore” approach to a model centred on selective, data-aware recovery.

Cleanroom Automation: Operationalizing Recovery Validation

Commvault’s Cleanroom Recovery automation addresses the final mile of cyber resilience — ensuring that recovery is not only possible but repeatable and verifiable.

Through runbook automation, organisations can automatically configure isolated recovery environments, test recovery plans, and validate data before redeployment. This reduces manual intervention, accelerates recovery readiness, and enhances governance by ensuring all restored data meets internal and regulatory standards.

Toward a Unified, Intelligent Recovery Framework

The real value of Commvault’s innovation lies in integration. Threat Scan identifies compromised data, Synthetic Recovery reconstructs clean datasets, and Cleanroom Recovery validates them before production — forming a closed-loop recovery lifecycle.

This represents an important inflection point: moving from siloed recovery processes to a continuous, intelligent resilience system capable of scaling across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It also aligns closely with Commvault’s broader goal of unifying identity, data, and recovery within a single operational framework.

Market Implications and Strategic Outlook

These capabilities are currently available in early access, with broader availability expected in early 2026. From a market perspective, Commvault’s integrated approach addresses three pressing enterprise imperatives:

1. Verification — ensuring recovered data is demonstrably clean and trusted.
2. Automation — reducing the dependency on manual oversight in crisis conditions.
3. Continuity — accelerating time to recovery while maintaining data integrity.

The introduction of AI-driven recovery workflows positions Commvault as a key player in defining what “intelligent resilience” means in the enterprise context. As AI amplifies both the scale of threats and the complexity of data ecosystems, organisations will increasingly prioritise vendors capable of combining detection, recBy applying AI to the validation layer — the point where trust is earned — Commvault is setting a new benchmark for resilience in an environment where data integrity and confidence are as critical as data availability.overy, and validation within one coherent architecture.

In Closing

Commvault’s announcements at SHIFT 2025 reflect a maturing understanding of cyber resilience — not as a set of defensive measures, but as a strategic capability embedded in enterprise continuity planning. The company’s focus on clean, automated recovery distinguishes it in a market where speed has often outweighed assurance.

By Prabhu Ram, Head of the Industry Research Group at CyberMedia Research (CMR). He attended Commvault SHIFT 2025 in New York at the invitation of Commvault, with travel and accommodation provided by the company.