Research Note: Commvault Acquires Appranix

This week, Commvault Systems announced the purchase of the relatively unknown cyber-resilience company, Appranix. While the acquisition itself isn’t that news-worthy, the implications of what Appranix offers justifies some discussion.

Background

Appranix is a start-up vendor of cyber-resilience technology. The company was founded in 2016 by Govind Rangasamy, formerly a director at Actifio and a product manager at HP(E). As far as we can tell, Appranix has not received any external funding.

Commvault announced the acquisition of Appranix on 16 April 2024 but didn’t disclose any terms. The additional revenue from the company is not expected to be financially accretive.

Cyber-Resilience

In the context of Appranix, what exactly does cyber-resilience mean? A good place to start is to examine exactly what a disaster recovery plan might involve. The most obvious component is the protection and restoration of application data, but in the most extreme DR scenarios, a rebuild of the infrastructure is required. For on-premises environments this process typically requires either a fall-back data centre, an entire equipment rebuild or increasingly more common, failover into a public cloud environment.

If you’re already in the public cloud for primary applications, then there is no hardware to manage. However, cloud regions are not infallible, while cyber-attacks could focus on deleting both configured infrastructure and data. With a large public cloud estate, rebuilding the infrastructure from scratch could be a lengthy task running into weeks or months – even if the configuration is fully documented.

Data Protection for IaC

Back in November 2023, we highlighted a new capability from HYCU, Inc. that protects the infrastructure definitions used to build applications on AWS. The public cloud has pioneered the idea of infrastructure-as-code, while on-premises, tools like Terraform and Ansible perform similar tasks.

In the same way that a typical disaster recovery plan should document the physical infrastructure on-premises, including configuration details, tools, like Appranix and the backup features of HYCU, create configuration backups and crucially, enable the recovery of those configurations into the same or different cloud regions.

Acquisition

We’ve highlighted over many blog posts and articles the need for a comprehensive data protection strategy, including disaster recovery, that covers all aspects of the data centre. By acquiring Appranix, Commvault gains another tool to meet the needs of customers with a diverse technology ecosystem.

We don’t believe Appranix will continue to exist as a separate platform (except for the transition of existing customers), but instead it will be quickly assimilated into Commvault Cloud and the Metallic backend (see this post on the Commvault Cloud announcement). This is a feature enhancement move rather than one focused on customer acquisition or increasing market presence.

The Architect’s View®

Acquiring Appranix is a smart move for Commvault, and as financials weren’t disclosed, the likely cost was relatively low. Commvault gains an additional step up in public cloud disaster recovery, enhancing its cyber-resilience posture compared to the rest of the market.

It’s worth noting that most of the recent data protection vendor announcements have focused on disaster recovery, specifically the issue of ransomware and cyber-resiliency. This is why the Appranix news is so important. It highlights an area that all data protection vendors need to address – the protection and efficient rebuild of infrastructure, wherever it resides, virtual or otherwise.

The data protection game is changing, and the leaders in this market need to change with it.