Business Continuity Management / Disaster Recovery , Cloud Data Security & Resilience , Governance & Risk Management
Commvault Buys Appranix to Make Ransomware Recovery Quicker
Commvault's First Deal Since 2022 Will Get Clients Running Faster After CyberattackCommvault purchased a cyber resilience vendor led by a longtime Hewlett-Packard manager to help enterprises get up and running faster after an outage or cyberattack.
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The New Jersey-based data protection vendor said its acquisition of Boston-based Appranix will allow it to reduce the time needed to rebuild following a ransomware attack from days or weeks to just hours or minutes. Appranix automates the networking, DNS configuration, application load balancing and security group access dependencies needed to rebuild critical cloud applications, related data and cloud infrastructure.
“We are taking resilience to the next level by marrying Commvault's extensive risk, readiness, and recovery capabilities with Appranix's next-generation cloud-native rebuild capabilities,” Commvault President and CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said in a statement.
Appranix's technology will be fully integrated into Commvault's portfolio by this summer, according to the companies. Until then, Commvault said, customers can tap into Appranix for their cloud application discovery and rebuild requirements through the Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure marketplaces.
Terms of the acquisition, which was announced Tuesday, weren't disclosed. Appranix was founded in December 2016 by Govind Rangasamy, who spent five years managing HP's enterprise storage resource management products before leading product management at Eucalyptus and Actifio. Appranix hasn't raised any outside funding and employs 71 people, up 20% from 60 workers a year ago, LinkedIn found.
"We share a common vision to go beyond traditional backups and disaster recovery," Rangasamy said in a statement. "Our combined technologies will offer comprehensive, unmatched resilience capabilities for businesses globally."
What Sets Appranix Apart From the Pack
Commvault on its own helps customers reduce downtime following a ransomware attack from an industry-average 24 days by recovering data rapidly through automation and cleanroom offerings. But fast data recovery is only part of the equation, according to Commvault.
Appranix facilitates robust recovery from outages by assembling thousands of data points from cloud resources and dependencies, according to the company. It connects cloud accounts for continuous automated discovery and cloud resource mapping, and it can automatically discover hundreds of multi-cloud accounts with no agents and nothing to install, the company said.
The company continuously backs up cloud configurations and dependencies in an immutable vault away from the production cloud to withstand even the worst outages and attacks, according to Appranix. The company can back up distributed application data spread across multiple services and replicate it to another region, account or tenant, Appranix said.
Appranix automatically runs test recoveries and sends reports based on policies for compliance without depending on runbooks, complex scripts or risky manual assembly of stacks and services. The company can turn the clock back on cloud infrastructure, applications and data to a precise moment before an outage or attack occurred. Appranix's customers include IBM, SHI, HCL, LiveNation and Boston Scientific.
How Commvault Stacks Up to Competitors
Commvault in December 2022 was Forrester's top-ranked vendor for data resilience due to investments in areas such as automation, backup support and early warning cyber-deception defense. Forrester said Commvault offers subpar coverage around mainframe applications and data, and customers chided the management differences between the appliance version of the software and workloads in Metallic.io (see: Commvault, Rubrik, Cohesity Lead Data Resilience: Forrester).
In August 2023, Gartner named Commvault a leader in enterprise backup and recovery alongside Rubrik, Cohesity, Veritas, Veeam and Dell. The analyst firm praised Commvault for its scope of coverage and software-based interoperability and for bringing enterprise features to competitive prices, but it criticized Commvault for inconsistent management, customer experience and on-premises innovations lagging cloud updates.
Appranix is Commvault's first acquisition since January 2022, when the company purchased Israeli cyber deception vendor TrapX Security for $18.7 million. Commvault's competitors have been far more active in recent years. Cohesity agreed to purchase Veritas' data protection business in a deal that valued the joint company at $7 billion and since March has added heavyweights IBM and Nvidia as key investors.
Rubrik earlier this month became the first cybersecurity company to pursue an initial public offering since 2021, revealing increased sales, mounting losses and a reliance on three channel partners. The company in August bought data security posture management startup Laminar for $104.9 million to unify cyber posture and recovery and provide visibility into where a firm's data lives and who has access to it (see: Rubrik IPO Filing Reveals Sales Acceleration, Growing Losses).