Exclusive: Inside Commvault’s Cloud Unity launch with APAC leaders

Commvault has unveiled its new Commvault Cloud Unity platform at its third annual SHIFT 2025 conference, highlighting advances in multi-cloud data protection, cyber resilience, and AI-driven recovery.

SHIFT 2025, Commvault's largest annual event, brought together customers, partners, and analysts despite disruptions to travel caused by US government shutdowns.

"We're very happy to announce that almost everyone who we expected to be there is here, and it has been a wonderful launch," said Martin Creighan, Vice President for Asia Pacific at Commvault.

During a joint interview with TechDay, Creighan described the event as "our biggest conference of the year, and it's our opportunity to really showcase the innovation, as well as the investment that Commvault continues to make out in the marketplace."

Gareth Russell, Field Chief Technology Officer, Security for APAC at Commvault, added that breakout sessions, hands-on labs, and expert briefings had amplified the conference content. "Being able to have those stories and those parts of the agenda has landed incredibly well," said Russell.

Unity platform

Central to the announcements was the launch of Commvault Cloud Unity.

Creighan explained the reasoning behind the platform: "We kept on seeing, especially in large enterprise organisations, there is these siloed approaches around breaches and around how they recover from a cyber attack. Unity is all about us coming together and bringing a platform together that gives our customer the broadest reach and range in regards to platform type, workload type, premise, location, all of these great things, but it also gives us the capability to unify their own internal teams, IT ops, sec ops, the security team, and the business."

The platform aims to simplify complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments, supporting a wide range of workloads from SaaS applications and cloud-native workloads to legacy systems and mainframes.

Creighan said, "What Commvault Cloud Unity does is it breaks down the complexity of the hybrid environment and of the multi-cloud environment by supporting the broadest range of workloads across multiple environments. We cover all of those workloads with a single platform that focuses on identity, data security and cyber recovery, collectively and in an automated fashion, with new intelligence and AI built into our platform."

Cyber resilience and automation

Commvault highlighted how Unity accelerates recovery from cyber incidents. Russell emphasised the platform's new synthetic recovery capabilities: "The ability to say from a simplification perspective, and where this innovation really shines, is how do you get through a clean recovery process and identify what that looks like with less risk and more visibility."

Synthetic recovery combines data from multiple backups to construct a verified clean copy, removing corrupted or infected files.

Russell explained, "Historically, you had to use different backups across different points in time to reconstruct something. With the Unity platform, you can take that data point and synthetically bring it back with another data point from a different backup. You can eliminate the compromise and the attack from happening at the data source, identifying all of those clean files and bringing them together automatically."

Threat scanning and anomaly detection work in tandem with synthetic recovery.

"Threat scan helps us go through the backup life cycle of a piece of data, apply it to previous backups, and make sure we can get to a clean recovery point," said Russell.

Creighan added, "We now proactively know what good looks like and what the clean data set looks like. We can search for that information and construct the portrait of clean data across multiple points in time."

Impact on enterprise recovery

The executives highlighted the scale of the challenge for enterprises. Creighan cited regional data from Commvault's reports: "The global average time to recovery for a cyber incident is 24 days, while in Australia and New Zealand it stands at 28 days - down from 45 days a year ago. That shows improvements, but these environments are complex, and there hasn't been a lot of automation traditionally built into the platforms."

The Unity platform addresses both the time and complexity issues.

"With acceleration, automation, and scale, you are able to meet the requirements of the hybrid enterprise or multi-cloud," Creighan said. Russell noted that the synthetic recovery feature is particularly valuable in Asia Pacific, where attackers can dwell in enterprise systems for over 200 days before detection. "The new Unity platform lets you accelerate the ability to get your business back online, instead of figuring out how to operate for 28 days during a cyber attack," he said.

Platform integration

Russell also emphasised the platform's capability to integrate previously siloed cyber resilience tools.

"The average enterprise has anywhere from four to six data protection and cyber resiliency tools. IT environments are very complex, and our platform simplifies that while automating recovery," he said.

Unity also supports advanced workloads, including AI data and DevOps applications, alongside traditional enterprise infrastructure. "We focus on providing broad coverage across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments, delivering identity protection, cyber recovery, and automation," said Creighan.

What are the customer outcomes?

Both executives framed the announcements in terms of real-world impact.

Russell described how Unity enables operational continuity during cyber events: "You can identify a clean recovery point and synthetically restore it from multiple backups automatically. It reduces risk, accelerates recovery, and gives enterprises more visibility and control over their data." Creighan added that automation and AI in Unity help organisations scale recovery across complex environments while ensuring security and compliance.

What's ahead?

The SHIFT 2025 announcements demonstrate Commvault's investment in cyber resilience and hybrid cloud data management.

"Commvault has accelerated both investment and innovation over the past two years," said Creighan. "SHIFT 2025 represents the most monumental shift that we are seeing in the marketplace."