Commvault Rethinks Recovery for the AI Era – Commvault SHIFT 2026

Recovery is no longer something you do after things break. We have that old model – something goes wrong, you call the recovery team, and they put the pieces back together, they restore and clean the data, and so on. However, in the AI era this no longer works. This is not enough. Environments are denser, applications and identities are tightly linked, autonomous agents are making changes at machine speed, and the blast radius is bigger than ever.

At the SHIFT Virtual event on November 18, Commvault will be showing how recovery has to evolve. It now needs to work before, during, and after an incident. Continuous. Orchestrated. Full-stack.

Here’s what they’re announcing.

The five announcements split into two halves: Recovery Studio and AgentRecover on the recovery side, and the Zscaler, NVIDIA and Databricks partnerships on the safe AI adoption side.

Recovery Studio (early access December)

This is the big one.

Commvault’s own numbers put recovery to even a minimal level of operation at an average of 28 days with conventional approaches. Pranay Ahlawat, Chief Technology and AI Officer, calls Recovery Studio “the DevOps moment for recovery”.

Recovery Studio is the new orchestrated recovery experience. It discovers dependencies across modern applications, identities, and infrastructure, then brings everything back in the right order. Think of restoring a three-tier or complex app that has other dependencies and configs, or an AD forest.

It builds on the existing Runbook framework (your old Cleanroom and AD runbooks are not thrown away – you can bring them in and modernize them). It also includes threat scanning and validated checkpoints so you’re not restoring dirty data.

You can practice the workflows before an incident happens. Self-paced labs are already available – worth spinning up if you want to try it yourself.

AgentRecover

Autonomous agents create a new recovery problem. When an agent makes a mistake (or is compromised), restoring the agent itself is not enough. You need to understand and reverse everything it touched – permissions, identities, data, configurations.

AgentRecover maps what the agent can access and what it changed, then lets you roll those changes back. Initial support is for Microsoft Foundry (early access November) and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (early access December).

Strategic Partnerships

To deliver this new level of visibility and safe AI activation, Commvault is also strengthening key partnerships:

Zscaler – deeper runtime signals on AI and agent activity so you get better visibility, governance, and cleaner recovery. This partnership can explore use cases across AI discovery, runtime governance and agent detection and recovery.

NVIDIA – reference architecture is being built together with NVIDIA (using NVIDIA NIM microservices and NVIDIA Nemotron Retriever with Commvault Data Activate) so you can safely activate protected data (including cold/tape data) for AI use cases such as RAG and knowledge graphs, with proper authorization and traceability. The reference design is targeted for early release in December, with general availability in 2027.

Databricks – Commvault Data Activate for Databricks extends the existing protection with a governance layer (metadata, lineage, sensitivity, ownership) so data can be activated for analytics and AI safely. Complementary to what Databricks already provides. Commvault already protects Azure Databricks environments and is a certified Databricks partner. Early access is planned for December in select Azure regions.

Identity Resilience (already announced, but part of the bigger story)

AD Pre-Recover – a “pilot light” / translated replica approach so you can stand up secondary identity services quickly if Active Directory (or Entra) goes down.
Identity Attack Intelligence – now works across Active Directory, Entra ID and Okta. Understands attack paths and can roll back both the compromised identity and the downstream changes it made.

Final Thoughts

Commvault is pushing hard on the idea that recovery has to become continuous and intelligent if you want to adopt AI safely and still stay resilient at machine speed.

Most of these capabilities (except the pure partnership reference architectures) will be available in self-paced labs so you can test them yourself.

Don’t miss the free SHIFT Virtual event on November 18

It’s the global companion to the Nashville conference. It is broadcast live at 1:00pm ET (AMER), 9:00am GMT (EMEA), 2:30pm IST (India) and 12:00pm AEDT (APAC), with everything on demand from November 19. Sanjay Mirchandani’s opening keynote is followed by six tracks, including Cyber Recovery, Identity Resilience and Simplify Hybrid Complexity. Perfect if you can’t travel or want to catch the sessions and demos from home.