Commvault Activate and its portfolio of applications to define innovation

Commvault has 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: gaining a complete picture of their data environments. The announcement has been made at Commvault GO 2018, the company’s annual customer conference being held in Nashville, Tennessee.

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.

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 – has highlighted this very issue, indicates that more than 60 per cent 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 per cent 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 continue 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

· Insights derived from and about their data that can be used to create, implement and automate consistent data policies across their organization.

N. Robert Hammer, Commvault’s Chairman, President & CEO, says, “Customers cannot manage what they don’t know they have – this is a growing and vexing challenge for all CIO’s, a challenge that is holding back business innovation, compliance and operations. 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.”

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 O365 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 which is visualized in a portfolio of out-of-the-box applications featuring flexible, actionable dashboard experiences.