Commvault just became the first cyber resilience vendor embedded natively in the Microsoft Azure fabric.
If that doesn’t sound like a big deal, give me two minutes — because twenty years ago, something very similar changed the entire data protection industry.
video transcript
Commvault made an announcement that I don’t think got the visibility it deserves because of what it means for our industry. Commvault has historically been on the front line of innovative partnerships with Microsoft, with their latest news being that their data protection and cyber resilience technologies will be available as a native Azure service.
To understand how cool that is, you have to roll the clock back twenty years when Windows Server first delivered Volume Shadowcopy Services. VSS was underlying plumbing within the OS that enabled data protection software (among other things) to much more effectively protect the critical workloads that were running on Windows Server. I was part of the Microsoft team that was delivering storage and backup technologies back then. In those days, most vendors were using a variety of differing methods to somehow cull the data before backing it up.
Until recently, one of the common contrasts between how well you could protect virtualized infrastructure on-premises (vSphere, Hyper-V, whatever) versus how you could protect virtualized servers running in Azure (or AWS or Google) was that there was common plumbing within the hypervisor that allows for more robust backup/recovery; something that wasn’t available in hyperscale clouds. This announcement reveals that Azure is opening up those lower-level underpinnings to allow its ecosystem of vendors, including the data protection community, to now create a more comprehensive set of protection & recovery capabilities; as well as additional value-added services. That should be as exciting to today’s data protection vendors as the advent of VSS was 20 years ago.
If the parallels continue, here are five takeaways:
- We would hope that the other hyperscale clouds will eventually release similar plumbing for data protection and cybersecurity vendors.
- VSS didn’t come out fully feature rich on day one, so expect that Azure will continue to innovate within the plumbing because it adds value to their platform, as well as capabilities that customers want from the partner ecosystems.
- Like the staggered adoption of VSS, assume that other data protection vendors will eventually embrace that same plumbing, though for some it will take longer than you’d think it should.
- It will be really interesting to see how this underlying data access then unlocks new AI-based capabilities in production and protection.
- It’s worth noting that the same way that Commvault is the 1st resilience vendor to announce this level of integration with Azure, Commvault was actually among the first to embrace VSS 20 years ago. And in the Windows Server era, that first mover advantage gave Commvault notable differentiation within the market, especially among Microsoft resellers and integrators for years after that.
So, kudos to Azure for those underlying innovations — and congrats to Commvault for embracing what will likely be a defining factor as IT buyers look to improve the resilience of their hyperscale-hosted data and infrastructure.
Leave your thoughts on the LinkedIn article.