At Commvault SHIFT, “ResOps” and AI resilience were framed as the next operating model for enterprises facing AI-driven threats and cloud sprawl, raising the bar for what “clean” recovery should...

While for everyone else “ResOps” may be short for research operations, but for Commvault it means resiliency operations.

At Commvault SHIFT, “ResOps” and AI resilience were framed as the next operating model for enterprises facing AI-driven threats and cloud sprawl, raising the bar for what “clean” recovery should...

RSAC 2026 is in the books, and Commvault once again reinforces its vision of cyber resilience by announcing features and integrations focused on Resilience Operations (ResOps). In fact, organizatio…

Organizations have spent years and billions of dollars hardening their defenses against cyberattacks, but prevention alone no longer settles the question that matters most to a board. Accenture’s State of Cybersecurity Resilience 2025 report stated that organizations had faced an average of 1,876 cyberattacks in a single quarter, a 75% increase over the prior year. What’s more, 63% of the surveyed executives cited a rapidly evolving threat landscape as their biggest challenge. In such a dangerous environment, organizations must assume that eventually an attack will succeed, so IT has to be able to prove that it can recover cleanly once an attacker gets in. Attackers already understand this shift. Mandiant, a Google subsidiary, reported in its M-Trends 2026 Report that “adversaries are systematically targeting infrastructure such as backups, identity services, and virtualization layers to deny recovery, putting immense pressure on organizations to pay ransom demands or risk losing the ability to recover.” Backup systems have become a primary target. Demonstrating recoverability has been difficult for IT, because backup, recovery, cybersecurity, and disaster recovery all evolved as separate disciplines, with each solving its own piece of the problem essentially independently. That fragmentation leaves organizations unable to answer basic questions about their own ability to bounce back. A new discipline, resilience operations (ResOps) has emerged to close the gap between performing backups and proving that an organization can actually use them to recover. ResOps functions as an operating discipline that focuses business, security, and infrastructure teams on recovering critical functions quickly while avoiding reinfection. This discipline also provides the teams with a common framework so they can pivot away from assumptions and anecdotes to instead quantify resilience in a repeatable, sustainable way. Spot-testing of discrete systems is not enough. Organizations need to perform regular tests of the entire system if it is to pivot away from assumptions and anecdotes to quantify resilience in a repeatable, sustainable way. Additionally, to measure the effectiveness of recovery, the industry needs an updated resilience metric, mean time to clean recovery (MTCR). Metrics such as recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) still matter, but neither confirms that restored data is free of compromise. MTCR closes that gap, by measuring how long it takes to validate that a recovered system is both online and clean, giving CIOs, CISOs, and boards a single evidence-based answer during an attack. Building that kind of resilience starts with architecture. Depending on a single vendor or platform across multiple heterogeneous environments introduces a single point of failure. Diversity is a strength, especially when it comes to the identity infrastructure. Recovery systems that share the same identity layer with production will fail if the identity systems are compromised, so more and more organizations now stand up an independent identity infrastructure solely for recovery. Immutable air-gapped storage rounds out the picture, but it remains rare among organizations, even for their most critical workloads. Finally, during recovery execution, backups should be paired with clean room validation of workloads before anything returns to production. “For years the industry measured resilience by how fast we could restore data,” says Bill O’Connell, chief security officer at Commvault. “Now the measure that matters is whether we can prove, with evidence, that what we restored is actually clean.” Vendors such as Commvault are building the infrastructure to support this shift, giving organizations the tools for testing recovery as a complete system rather than a collection of individual failure scenarios and to walk into the boardroom with proof instead of assumptions. But whatever the underlying backup-and-recovery infrastructure in this increasingly dangerous threat environment, organizations need to make attaining clean recovery their goal. **Build real resilience** Learn how organizations are proving recoverability and achieving clean recovery when it matters most.

While for everyone else “ResOps” may be short for research operations, but for Commvault it means resiliency operations.

Sanjay Mirchandani takes the stage at #CommvaultShift, and dives right into the #AI opportunity and threats. Lots of talk here about "non-human identities and agents" that are increasingly part of our IT solutions and business world. They need to be authenticated, authorized, and managed like people, but they're more ephemeral. Two years ago at SHIFT, Commvault re-focused on resiliency in the face of cyber attacks. Now they're adding AI resilience to their portfolio, unifying on security, identity, and recovery. Commvault is proposing #ResOps (resilience operations) as a new discipline for businesses to proactively manage enterprise data: Discover and protect access, detect access and data anomalies, recover clean data, and restore to production. I had the opportunity to discuss this with Tim Zonca yesterday, and recorded an episode of the Strive podcast with Darren Thomson on the topic. Watch for that soon! The next announcement is Commvault Cloud Unity, the next release of their unified enterprise resilience solution. This combines their Cloud and Metallic AI control plane to protect data from the data center to the cloud to the edge. They also integrated Satori, which intercepts, inspects, and enforces AI threats in real time. Another key innovation is so-called synthetic recovery, which detects malware and encrypted data and rebuilds an up to date restore rather than restoring older data from before the incident. "Commvault uses AI everywhere" including in the UI. Is it so easy a CEO can use it? We're about to find out live on stage! Commvault now has an MCP server allowing authorized users to talk to the system. They're also able to integrate with CrowdStrike, ServiceNow, Slack, AWS, and other services.

RSAC 2026 is in the books, and Commvault once again reinforces its vision of cyber resilience by announcing features and integrations around the concept of Resilience Operations (ResOps). In fact, organizations should not treat security, data protection, and recovery as isolated domains. Instead, they should be integrated into a single operational model that helps companies identify, respond to, and prevent cyber incidents and, when necessary, recover from them.

Modern data protection is undergoing a fundamental transformation. At Commvault SHIFT 2025, the company shares the clear message that backup alone is no longer sufficient: organizations must adopt recovery-first, cyber-validated architectures capable of restoring clean, trusted data at speed. Among the innovations presented at the event, Synthetic Recovery stands out as one of the most strategic, enabling rapid, storage-side reconstruction of recovery-ready datasets.

**The world has changed — artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping business faster than most can adapt** The rise of large language models and agentic AI has created unprecedented scale, speed, and complexity. Enterprises are moving from static infrastructures to hyperplexed, distributed, and autonomous systems. Organizations are pouring more than $400 billion into AI infrastructure, a wave expected to generate more than $2 trillion in new value. But without resilience at the core, that value remains at risk. As innovation accelerates, new risks emerge just as quickly. Security is lagging behind transformation. Data is exploding, with nearly 40% year-over-year growth across hybrid and multicloud environments. Regulations are tightening, and ransomware and AI-powered attacks are multiplying. The result: Resilience now defines competitive advantage. **Resilience drives velocity** Resilience isn’t just recovery. It’s also the foundation of sustained innovation. Traditional recovery models were built for yesterday’s outages, not today’s AI-driven disruptions, which unfold in milliseconds. In this world, recovery is table stakes. True resilience means that every system runs on clean, verifiable data, and it restores trust when it’s tested. The most resilient organizations are also the fastest movers. They adopt emerging technologies with confidence, recover with speed and integrity, and innovate at scale. Resilience has evolved from a safety net to the engine of enterprise speed and scalability. **Introducing resops, the model for next-generation resilience** Resops, short for _resilience operations_ , is an operating model that unifies data protection, cyber recovery, and governance into a single intelligent system. It creates an ongoing loop that monitors, validates, and protects data across hybrid and multicloud environments, enabling organizations to detect risks early and recover with confidence. By integrating resilience into every layer of operations, resops transforms it from an isolated function into a proactive discipline — one that keeps businesses secure, compliant, and ready to adapt in the AI era. To learn more about ResOps, read “ResOps: The future of resilient business in the era of AI.” * * *