Commvault SHIFT Roundtable Discussion

Considering ResOps – a Tech Field Day Roundtable at Commvault SHIFT 2025

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

At the Commvault SHIFT 2025 Tech Field Day Roundtable in New York City, moderator Stephen Foskett convened a panel of industry experts to discuss the latest trends in data protection, resilience, and artificial intelligence. The panel included Jay Cuthrell, Karen Lopez, Shala Warner, and Tom Hollingsworth, as well as Michael Stempf from Commvault, each bringing perspectives from security, data management, DevOps, and cloud architecture. The discussion focused on Commvault’s strategic announcements around ResOps—an emerging discipline combining practices from DevOps, SecOps, and FinOps into a holistic approach to cyber resilience. Panelists noted the importance of cross-team collaboration, integrations with major cloud and security platforms, and the convergence of operational practices, all of which align with the increasing complexity of enterprise IT environments and the growing threat landscape fueled by AI-driven attacks.

A key topic was the shift from traditional disaster recovery (DR) and backup, which assumed non-malicious outages, towards a mindset anchored in active defense against adversarial threats like ransomware. Jay Cuthrell and Tom Hollingsworth highlighted innovations such as synthetic restore—a method to selectively recover clean data and minimize downtime after an attack—as well as the crucial role of identifying attack persistence in overlooked areas like Active Directory. The panel emphasized the necessity of incorporating AI for faster detection and remediation, but also pointed out the risk of AI-generated threats and the importance of comprehensive data inventories. Karen Lopez stressed that recovery, not just backup, should be the ultimate goal, asserting that organizations need robust strategies to know what data they have, where it lives, and how it is being protected.

The roundtable concluded that Commvault’s announced direction—moving beyond storage toward broader cyber and AI resilience—was credible and matched the realities of modern IT. Panelists praised new capabilities such as conversational interfaces and integrations with collaboration tools (e.g., Office 365, Google Workspace, and cloud-native databases), while also pointing to the need for organizations to invest in people and processes, not just technology. The panel agreed that cyber resiliency is now a “team sport,” requiring cooperation across IT, security, legal, and business units, facilitated by intelligent automation and education programs. The event served as both a showcase of Commvault’s evolution and a broader industry call to arms for holistic, AI-aware data protection.

Personnel: Jay Cuthrell, Karen Lopez, Michael Stempf, Shala Warner, Stephen Foskett, Tom Hollingsworth