Commvault launches AI Protect to monitor and roll back rogue AI agents across cloud environments

Commvault has a Ctrl+Z for rogue AI agents

The company's new software keeps an eye on your agents and backs up data. Keep your agents close and your agent-monitoring software closer. Commvault's new AI Protect can discover and monitor AI agents running inside AWS, Azure, and GCP environments and even roll back their actions when something goes wrong. It is part of a broader set of new products as the 30-year-old data protection company hopes to position itself at the center of AI resilience, which is a rapidly growing subset of tools. Identity access and management platform Okta last month announced the general availability of its Okta for AI Agents, which gives customers the ability to locate agents, see what they're doing, and shut them down if need be. The other two new Commvault products, Data Activate and AI Studio, focus on preparing backup data for machine learning pipelines and giving organizations tools to build and deploy their own agents. Commvault's field CTO Vidya Shankaran told The Register that the products come at a time when enterprises are racing to deploy AI agents but struggling to govern them. "A lot of organizations tend to miss the fact that you need to start protecting the vector databases, which is essentially the brains of your entire AI stack," Shankaran said. The vector database stores the embeddings that large language models rely on, she said. If it's compromised or lost, she said, "you would either have to rebuild it from scratch or retrain the model. No one has that luxury of time anymore." AI Protect is designed to track and respond to what AI agents are doing across cloud environments including AWS, Azure, and GCP. The tool discovers agents, maps their dependencies, and monitors their behavior for anomalies. Shankaran described it as a baseline deviation model: the system ingests events over time, establishes normal behavior patterns, and then flags deviations like an agent that suddenly gains access to payroll data it previously could not reach. "We will bubble up to the surface any anomalous behavior. First we notify and then, of course, provide the options to roll out the configuration files of those agents or fix the data that was already being protected," she told The Register. When something does go wrong, AI Protect can restore an agent's configuration or repair the data it corrupted by reverting to a known good state, Shankaran said. She noted that it can only monitor and revert; it cannot stop or control third-party agents directly. "We would rather stay in our own swim lane," she said, "and not really overreach and say, 'Hey, Salesforce agent, don't do that.' " Data Activate lets organizations use the backup copies Commvault already manages to train AI models, which puts less strain on live systems. Those copies can be classified to exclude personally identifiable information, then published in formats like Apache Iceberg and Parquet for use with platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks, Shankaran said. This is a way for Commvault customers to get more value from data that would otherwise sit idle. "You're already protecting that data with Commvault," she said. "You're just going to use that protected copy to feed into the AI pipeline." Of course, even as Commvault promises to help you lock down rogue agents, it's also going to add to the morass: AI Studio is a group of prebuilt agents that Commvault customers can use for common data-protection tasks, the company said. It also has tools for organizations to build their own agents. The idea is to let Commvault's agents interact with agents from other platforms - so a Salesforce agent, for example, might coordinate with a Commvault agent to ensure data is both accessible and protected, Shankaran said. The studio also supports Commvault's Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for integration with other enterprise systems. ®

Commvault Unveils Innovations to Advance Secure, Controlled Agentic Transformation in the Enterprise Commvault Unveils Innovations to Advance Secure, Controlled Agentic Transformation in the Enterprise

Next-generation AI capabilities will leverage Commvault Cloud to safely activate AI and build agentic workflows with trusted data, governance, and recovery Commvault today announced new and forthcoming AI capabilities that help organizations confidently adopt AI while maintaining control over data, agents, and recovery. These capabilities will enable enterprises to activate AI safely, discover and govern AI agents, and build and control agentic workflows, all from Commvault Cloud. As organizations deploy AI, many struggle to balance innovation with the potential exposure of sensitive data and losing control over AI agents. According to Deloitte, 60% of AI leaders cite risk and compliance concerns and legacy system integration as the top barriers to agentic AI adoption.[1] Building on AI resilience, Data Activate, AI Protect, and AI Studio will address these challenges by helping teams understand the impact of agent-driven changes and roll back when necessary. "Every enterprise era has produced a system of record - ERP for business operations, CRM for customers, and now AI for the enterprise," said Sanjay Mirchandani, President and CEO, Commvault. "If data powering AI is compromised, AI is compromised. If data can't be recovered, AI can't be trusted. Commvault Cloud is the system of record for AI resilience." Activating Data Safely for the Agentic Era Data Activate enables organizations to classify and curate data from protected backup copies and prepare approved datasets in formats like Apache Iceberg and Parquet for use with large language models and AI data platforms. The offering continuously publishes updated and vetted datasets, making it easier to keep AI pipelines in sync with trusted data. For example, teams can identify and exclude personally identifiable information before activating datasets for model development. Built on Commvault Cloud's governance and zero-trust architecture, Data Activate helps reduce the possibility of exposing sensitive data through AI while enabling safe, controlled data activation. Extending Next-Level Control to Agentic AI AI Protect will help organizations identify vulnerabilities, understand the impact of agent-driven changes, recover affected applications, and perform full-stack recovery across AI-driven environments. As the application stack evolves and more agents can enact unwanted and unbounded changes across data, systems, and configurations, organizations need a unified approach to manage both complexity and threats. AI Protect will discover and inventory agents across environments and map their activity to AI stacks. Unlocking a New Era in Agentic Automation AI Studio will enable organizations to create and utilize agents that address their specific needs, including a repository of built-in agents for common resilience use cases. Teams will be able to build custom agents that automatically and securely utilize Commvault's Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and integrate with other enterprise systems. With these innovations, teams will continue to advance an AI resiliency lifecycle that starts with safely activating data for AI purposes all the way through bringing discovery, governance, protection, and recovery to AI agents across on-prem, SaaS, and hybrid cloud environments. "As we deploy AI agents across our organization, a key concern will be maintaining visibility and control over what these agents can access and how they interact with our sensitive data," said Marius Horja, CCoE Compute Architecture and Engineering with Emerson Electric. "Having the ability to view, manage, govern, and orchestrate our agent ecosystem in real time from a single platform will give us greater confidence to scale AI innovation without sacrificing safety or resiliency." "As enterprises accelerate AI adoption, they need solutions that reduce risk while delivering real business value," said Sean Alexander, SVP Connected Ecosystem, Lumen. "Our partnership with Commvault, including our Lumen Validated Design for Cyber Resilience, brings together trusted cyber and AI resilience from Commvault with secure, scalable connectivity from Lumen -- helping customers deploy with confidence and innovate safely in the agentic era." "In agentic environments, agents mutate state across data, systems, and configurations in ways that compound fast and are hard to trace," said Pranay Ahlawat, Chief Technology and AI Officer, Commvault. "When something goes wrong, teams need to recover not just data, but the full stack -- applications, agent configurations, and dependencies -- back to a known good state. That's what AI Protect delivers."