Commvault, a recognized global leader in backup,
recovery, the cloud and data management across any hybrid environment,
today announced powerful innovation in the quest to improve business
outcomes with data-driven insights and actions. With
Commvault Activate and
its portfolio of applications, customers will be able to merge the
knowledge and analysis of their data with actionable use cases. With
this ability to know their data, customers will increase their potential
to "activate" their data for significant returns across areas like
improved business decision-making, lowered data storage costs,
compliance readiness, risk and other customer critical use cases. The
innovation in Commvault Activate solves one of the most vexing
challenges facing CIOs today: gaining a complete picture of their data
environments. The announcement was made at
Commvault GO 2018, the company's annual customer conference being held in Nashville, Tenn.
Commvault Activate unleashes a powerful open, dynamic index (the
Commvault 4D Index) and embraces artificial intelligence (AI) learning
methods that enrich the data context, meaning and understanding across
data sources regardless of location or data type. Enterprises can
utilize Commvault Activate to discover and gain knowledge about their
data across all environments, whether managed by third-party tools,
managed with Commvault tools, or not under management at all.
This knowledge can then be used for dashboards and automated policies
powered by content-aware actions to expand new use cases and enable
improved decision-making and valuable business insight. And, when used
with Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery,
the enterprise can now blend this data knowledge into the indexed
collection of backup and archive data instances providing a fully
virtualized data landscape perspective.
Enterprises Cannot Manage What They Don't Know They Have
The ability to leverage data assets is a foundational component of
any company's competitive strategy. GDPR and other global data privacy
compliance regulations have also increased the penalties for poorly
managing data, with enterprises facing significant financial and
reputational damage for non-compliance.
The realization of this business value is too often prevented by
insufficient knowledge of exactly what data customers have, where it
resides and who can access it. Commvault commissioned research "Measuring IT's Readiness for Digital Business,"
- a survey of 1,200 IT executives and IT personnel in six global
business markets - highlighted this very issue, indicated that more than
60 percent of IT executives and IT personnel think they have access to
less than half of their organizations' data. This data management and
access gap further complicates future success of business, with more
than 50 percent of respondents saying that "better data collection and
management" and "new tools to analyze increasingly sophisticated data"
as essential.
The volumes of data being produced by enterprises continues to
increase exponentially as are the number of locations where data is
being stored and used. To fully implement data optimization strategies
and make better data management decisions, companies must have:
-
Reliable information about the data stored across the many data silos of their organization;
-
Mechanisms for effective information governance that incorporate
both IT and business leaders into governance decision making processes;
and
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Insights derived from and about their data that can be used to
create, implement and automate consistent data policies across their
organization.
"Customers cannot manage what they don't know they have - this is a
growing and vexing challenge for all CIOs, a challenge that is holding
back business innovation, compliance and operations," said N. Robert
Hammer, Commvault's Chairman, President and CEO. "With data in the
cloud, on-premises, stored virtually, on mobile devices and everywhere
in between - and with data sitting out in business units and not under
central management - public and private organizations are missing
opportunities to add value, reduce cost, manage risk and simply run
better. Now, for the first time, we are enabling organizations to look
across their data sources, generate and centralize knowledge about their
data, and be able to drive further analysis to assess and understand
the value of the data in conjunction with the company's business
requirements. That gives customers the power to make the right decisions
and drive action to better manage, use and get value from their data -
this is truly data management done differently."
Commvault Activate Helps Customers Know Their Data
Commvault Activate expands the use of Commvault's powerful 4D Index,
which helps customers improve their knowledge of their data assets
wherever it is stored. Commvault Activate can be introduced as
standalone solution to help customers develop a comprehensive view of
their data landscape. New connections will allow data to be inventoried
and indexed from sources such as online file stores, active endpoint
devices or new O365TM SaaS cloud data stores -- data can now be evaluated
together as part of a holistic enterprise-wide view. That data can be
indexed by combining technical metadata with user or business
application context, classification/entity rules, and with rich content
analysis to produce dynamic perspective that is visualized in a
portfolio of out-of-the-box applications featuring flexible, actionable
dashboard experiences.
Commvault Activate maps and profiles data sources to enable enterprises to perform the following analysis centrally:
-
Identify redundant, obsolete and other unnecessary data they have
stored and backed up, immediately reducing their on-premises or cloud
storage costs.
-
Assess data usage to move infrequently accessed data to less
expensive storage, and frequently accessed data to high-performance
storage - reducing costs and improving data availability and application
performance.
-
Identify pockets of critical, valuable or sensitive data (such as
personal data, intellectual property and contracts), enabling them to
move this data to storage in a specific country or geographic zones, and
implement policies to better protect and secure this data, reducing
risks associated with data privacy compliance and cybersecurity.
-
Identify the duplication patterns of files to determine the right
strategies to better control this information and derive value from it.
-
Identify data ownership to improve data governance decision
making and close gaps in data ownership, reducing data stewardship
risks.
-
Assess data not yet protected by Commvault Complete Backup &
Recovery, to help develop appropriate data protection strategies for
this data.
"Being able to secure a comprehensive understanding of the data
environment is a prerequisite for enterprises seeking to reduce
complexity and optimize their data storage," said George Crump, Founder
and Lead Analyst, Storage Switzerland. "Commvault Activate is designed
to deliver enterprises this understanding, enabling them to not just
lower data management risks and costs, but also make data work for them
to improve business outcomes."
Actionable Insight Possible with Knowledge
Customers leverage the foundational product Commvault Activate to
know their data through its powerful mapping and profiling capabilities.
Building upon that, Commvault Activate includes a portfolio of
applications to empower customers to more quickly and confidently act on
their data to optimize resources and spending, accelerate data-centric
projects, address compliance, reduce risk and to also gain more insight
and value from their data. Customers are then able to take action to,
for example, retire unneeded data collections; reclaim valuable space;
"right-size" and smartly move data into many of the new compelling cloud
storage services; secure personal and private information; and be able
to comply with "right to be forgotten" requirements in GDPR and
GDPR-like compliance regulations. Additionally, customers would be able
to benefit from lower storage costs, reduced risk, and improved
knowledge on how to use and gain benefit from information.
One such application in the portfolio is focused on helping to
automate compliance processes. The Sensitive Data Governance
(SDG) application of the Commvault Activate portfolio simplifies the
best practices of assessing and addressing the risks of managing
sensitive data based on content at scale, starting with file servers and
endpoints. This application enables several critical functions
including:
-
Detection and risk scoring of personal and other sensitive data
across unstructured data holdings, that can help to drive remediation,
validation of manual processes and uncover additional data blind spots.
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Risk profiling that helps to prioritize risk mitigation plans when faced with data overload.
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Proactive cleanup of unnecessary personal data, directly from the data source and any backup copies.
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Review and approval processes to support the joint
decision-making required by IT and business units in support of
investigations and data subject rights (including access and erasure -
right to be forgotten).
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Automated remediation of actions dictated by data subject requests with full audit trails to prove compliance.
A Commitment to Making Data Work for Customers
While Commvault Activate applications can be used as standalone data
analysis solutions, the fact that these applications come fully
integrated in one of the industry's leading data management solutions
distinguishes them from siloed and one-off applications from niche or
legacy competitors. Even though some of these other standalone solutions
provide visibility to data environments, customers must then undertake
cumbersome and manual processes to connect that data insight to other
applications or tools to take action. Commvault has a better approach:
when combining Commvault Activate and Commvault Complete Backup and
Recovery, customers will have an integrated, holistic, end-to-end
approach for managing data in the digital age. Combining a
fully-integrated approach to analysis of the data environment with
actionable management capabilities -- this is data management done
differently.
Commvault Activate and the original SDG application are delivered in
an environment that offers developers an extensive collection of data
management, visualization, reporting and business workflow capabilities
to customize templates and/or to rapidly develop and publish their own
content-oriented applications for use in the Commvault Activate
portfolio. The framework is designed with an open context to make it
easy to interoperate with third-party content-analytics products or
couple into many of the rapidly evolving cognitive cloud AI services,
and/or to provide customers the ability to self-develop similar know and
active applications of their own.
"The proliferation of electronically-stored information creates
difficulties for organizations' ability to quickly find what matters, a
problem addressed by Commvault Activate," said Vincent Chang, President,
Arrosoft Solutions. "The ability to access the insights presented by
Commvault Activate and the ability to enrich those insights, presents
significant opportunities for customers and partners to drive innovation
towards unique outcomes. This is also something that we'd expect to
drive growth in Commvault's ecosystem of partners and solutions."
Commvault Activate is targeted primarily as a user-oriented portfolio
aligned with value-based licensing tied to the user roles who
increasingly "activate" and gain the benefits of using automated
processes in a well-run governance environment.
Commvault Activate and the Sensitive Data Governance application will
be generally available in December 2018. Commvault said it planned to
roll out additional applications associated with Commvault Activate in
the coming quarters, with a coming focus on data storage optimization
and eDiscovery.
Building on Commvault's Recently Announced Portfolio
Commvault's recently announced simplified product portfolio (Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScaleTM Technology, Commvault OrchestrateTM,
and Commvault Activate) brings together comprehensive backup and
recovery and data management, including storage infrastructure, service
delivery orchestration and data governance. The portfolio also features
straightforward pricing and licensing, making it easier for enterprises
to implement comprehensive data management strategies for Hybrid IT
environments. All of the products in the portfolio incorporate
innovative artificial intelligence technologies that automatically learn
and adapt to an enterprise's data management behavior, helping them
streamline IT operations while gaining more value from their data.
The new simple product portfolio upends the "status quo" of the
backup and recovery market, which in the past has required customers to
acquire many point solutions, inclusive of new emerging backup vendors.
In addition, it addresses one of the key hybrid IT challenges faced by
today's global digital enterprises - how to protect and manage data in
ways that meet the needs of the business across locations,
infrastructures, data types, and at scale. Many point products are tied
to legacy infrastructure, creating silos of data that limit enterprises'
agility, lower productivity, and increase risk.