Commvault has added an offering to its data protection portfolio specifically designed to backup and restore the Iceberg table structures that are at the foundation of many of the data lakes that are now being more widely deployed in enterprise IT environments.

The first iteration of this addition to the Commvault lineup is Clumio for Apache Iceberg on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with other instances being planned based on customer demand.

Vidya Shankaran, field CTO of emerging technologies at Commvault, said the goal is to enable a range of recovery options, including point-in-time, snapshot-level, cross-region, cross-account, and in-place restores, in a way that eliminates existing manual, error-prone processes.

It’s not clear how many organizations have built data lakes but they often contain petabytes of data that can be challenging to recover. Designed to safeguard backups in an isolated environment, it provides unlimited, long-term snapshot retention without impacting the performance of the live data lake, said Shankaran.

Additionally, Clumio for Apache Iceberg for AWS reduces backup windows and cuts storage costs by capturing only the changes made after the initial full backup, she added.

It’s not clear how many organizations have built a data lake to derive more value from their applications, but many of these initiatives lead to petabytes of data being centrally stored in a repository that winds up providing cybercriminals with a very tempting target. The Clumio for Apache Iceberg on Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering makes it possible to protect that data in a way that also ensures faster recovery in the event of a ransomware attack, noted Shankaran.

In general, the level of cyber resiliency any organization can achieve is directly tied to its ability to quickly recover data. The longer it takes to recover data, the more likely it is that an organization will be forced to cave into ransomware demands. The challenge is the amount of data that might need to potentially be recovered can be massive, so IT and cybersecurity teams need to be able to prioritize which essential data needs to be recovered first to ensure the business can operate. In the absence of that capability, it becomes likely that a lot of time is going to be wasted recovering data that may only be relevant to a handful of end users.

Fortunately, as of late there has been a lot more focus on cyber resiliency. The challenge now is to make sure that the disaster recovery playbooks that organizations typically rely on are constantly kept current as new platforms such as data lakes become part of the extended enterprise.

Ultimately, artificial intelligence (AI) should go a long way toward making it easier than ever to achieve that goal. In the meantime, however, it’s important to remember that the AI is only going to be as good as the playbooks that have been set up for it to follow. Of course, no matter how good the plan may be, the most important thing for IT teams is to regularly test their ability to recover the right data in enough time to achieve and maintain a much higher level of cyber resiliency.