Backups sound simple until the ransomware attack hits and the “clean” copy in the cloud turns out to be encrypted too. Commvault and Microsoft are trying to head off that exact scenario with a new alliance that puts Commvault’s data protection software natively onto the Azure cloud platform. Both companies plan to preview it this summer.
Under the deal, Microsoft will give IT teams a more direct path to Commvault’s cloud tools, letting organizations buy Commvault Cloud through the Microsoft Marketplace and count that spending toward their Azure Consumption Commitment. For companies already running their infrastructure on Azure, that means one less vendor relationship to manage and one less separate dashboard to check outside the cloud environment they already live in.
Vidya Shankaran, Commvault’s Field CTO, said the point is cutting out the extra infrastructure and manual integration work that usually comes with bolting backup tools onto a cloud platform from the outside. Commvault already runs on several other clouds, but Shankaran said Azure customers specifically should see faster cloud-native backup and recovery once the integration lands.
The timing tracks with where a lot of security teams’ heads are at right now. Shankaran pointed to a shift she’s seeing across the industry: cyber resilience isn’t just an IT job anymore, it needs security and cloud operations teams actually working together, not just filing tickets at each other. And yet plenty of teams still don’t test their cloud backups often enough to know for certain that ransomware hasn’t quietly corrupted or tampered with them. Some only find out during an actual crisis, right when they need that data most.
That gap matters more now that cyber insurance often hinges on proving you can actually restore data from the cloud, not just claim you have backups sitting somewhere. Regulators and auditors are getting sharper too, increasingly using AI themselves to catch gaps in how often companies back up cloud data and whether that data is genuinely recoverable.
Shankaran’s read on the broader trend: breaches aren’t really a “maybe” question anymore, just a matter of how bad the damage gets. Organizations that skip the collaboration piece between security and cloud operations tend to learn that lesson the expensive way, usually after paying a ransom because rebuilding from a cloud environment would’ve taken even longer.
Commvault and Microsoft plan to roll out the preview in the coming months, giving Azure-native organizations a more direct route to cloud resilience.
