Cloud recovery is becoming less about restoring files and more about rebuilding the application environment that makes those files useful. Commvault is expanding Cloud Rewind to cover more Microsoft Azure resources, adding broader configuration protection, dependency mapping and automated recovery capabilities as enterprises confront increasingly complex cloud infrastructure and longer recovery windows after cyber incidents.
A cloud application can have its data intact and still remain offline.
That is because modern enterprise applications depend on a web of cloud resources, configurations, identities, networking components and infrastructure services. Restoring a database or virtual machine does not necessarily recreate the environment required for the application to function.
Commvault is targeting that problem with an expanded version of Cloud Rewind, its cloud application recovery technology within Commvault Cloud.
The company says the latest update expands Microsoft Azure resource coverage threefold, reaching 62% of enterprise-relevant Azure resource types available in the market. The goal is to allow organizations to recover not just application data, but the cloud infrastructure and configuration surrounding it.
The distinction matters as enterprises increasingly operate distributed applications across public cloud environments.
Traditional backup systems are generally optimized around protecting data. Cloud-native recovery requires a broader view: identifying which resources an application depends on, understanding their relationships and rebuilding them in the correct configuration.
Commvault’s Cloud Rewind is designed to continuously discover cloud resources, map application dependencies and orchestrate application recovery from a single platform.
The company is also adding recovery simulations, allowing organizations to test whether applications can actually be rebuilt before a real incident occurs. Those simulations can be conducted in isolated, air-gapped environments, a capability aimed at organizations concerned about ransomware and compromised production environments.
The need for faster recovery is becoming increasingly apparent.
According to Absolute Security’s 2026 State of Enterprise Cyber Resilience report, 57% of enterprises said recovery from a cyberattack took more than 4.5 days on average.
For organizations running logistics, financial systems, manufacturing operations or customer-facing digital services, several days of downtime can translate into significant operational disruption.
Commvault’s pitch is therefore less about backup speed alone and more about application resilience.
One of the major changes is the integration of cloud configuration protection with Commvault’s existing backup and recovery capabilities. Its new Protection Groups are intended to bring application data and cloud configuration into a unified recovery workflow.
That approach addresses a common operational problem: cloud recovery can require several teams and multiple tools.
Infrastructure teams may need to rebuild cloud resources. Backup administrators handle application data. Security teams validate the recovery environment. Application owners then check whether dependencies have been restored correctly.
Each handoff creates another potential failure point.
A unified workflow does not eliminate that complexity, but it can reduce the number of systems teams need to coordinate during a recovery event.
Commvault is also introducing more automated policy controls for large cloud environments. Resources can be automatically enrolled for protection based on attributes such as tags, regions and resource types across multiple cloud environments.
That matters because manually onboarding cloud resources becomes increasingly impractical as organizations scale.
Cloud infrastructure is also highly dynamic. Resources can be created, modified or removed through automation, meaning protection policies need to follow the environment rather than depend entirely on administrators remembering to add individual resources.
The development puts Commvault into a competitive enterprise resilience market that includes traditional backup vendors as well as cloud-native data protection companies.
Microsoft itself provides native Azure backup, disaster recovery and infrastructure management capabilities. Other vendors—including Rubrik, Cohesity and Veeam—also compete around cloud data protection, cyber recovery and resilience.
The differentiation is increasingly moving toward how much of the application environment a platform can reconstruct, rather than simply how many terabytes of data it can store.
That creates a new set of buying criteria for enterprise IT teams.
Coverage matters. So does dependency awareness. Organizations also need to know whether recovery procedures work under realistic conditions, particularly when an attack may have compromised credentials, production infrastructure or backup environments.
Commvault’s use of isolated and air-gapped recovery simulations reflects that shift from backup as a passive insurance policy toward recovery as something organizations should continuously validate.
There is an important limitation to the current announcement, however.
The expanded Azure resource coverage is targeted for availability in the coming months, while Cloud Rewind itself is available today as an add-on workload within Commvault Cloud. Pricing is metered according to protected cloud resources.
For enterprises evaluating the technology, the practical question will therefore be how the promised Azure coverage maps to their own application architectures.
Coverage percentages can provide useful context, but the resources that matter most vary substantially between organizations. A company running containerized applications, managed databases and serverless services will have different recovery requirements from one operating traditional virtual machines and storage.
The broader trend is clear.
As enterprises move more critical workloads into public cloud environments, resilience increasingly means reconstructing application state plus infrastructure state.
That changes the role of backup software. The next generation of cloud resilience platforms is expected to understand applications as interconnected systems rather than collections of files and machines.
Commvault’s Azure expansion is another step in that direction.
The strategic question for enterprise IT leaders is no longer simply whether their data is backed up. It is whether they can prove that an entire cloud application—including its configurations and dependencies—can be brought back online when the underlying environment has been disrupted.
Market Landscape
Enterprise cloud resilience is converging around several capabilities:
- Cloud-native backup: Protecting workloads and data hosted on public cloud infrastructure.
- Application-aware recovery: Mapping dependencies so applications can be restored as interconnected systems.
- Configuration protection: Preserving the infrastructure settings required to recreate cloud environments.
- Cyber recovery: Providing isolated or air-gapped recovery environments following ransomware or other attacks.
- Recovery validation: Testing recovery procedures before an actual outage.
- Policy-based protection: Automatically discovering and protecting changing cloud resources.
Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud all provide native backup, disaster recovery and infrastructure capabilities. Independent platforms from Commvault, Rubrik, Cohesity and Veeam compete by attempting to provide broader multicloud protection, centralized management and cyber-resilience capabilities.
The competitive battleground is increasingly shifting toward recovery confidence: whether enterprises can demonstrate that complex applications can actually be reconstructed, rather than simply proving that backup copies exist.
Top Insights
- Commvault is expanding Cloud Rewind’s Azure coverage, targeting 62% of enterprise-relevant resource types to improve application-centric cloud recovery.
- The platform combines application data, configurations and dependencies, addressing recovery challenges that traditional file-focused backup approaches can leave unresolved.
- Recovery simulations in isolated, air-gapped environments give enterprise security and infrastructure teams a way to validate recovery readiness before attacks occur.
- Policy-based protection automatically enrolls cloud resources using tags, regions and resource types, reducing manual administration across dynamic environments.
- The update intensifies competition among Commvault, Microsoft, Rubrik, Cohesity and Veeam around cloud resilience, cyber recovery and application reconstruction.
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