Commvault launches AI attack simulation with recovery readiness metric

Customer workshop gives partners a practical way to demonstrate resilience gaps and recommend improvements.

Commvault has introduced ‘Minutes to Recovery’, a hands-on, live simulation where participants test their readiness for frontier AI threats under real-world conditions.

In the three-part simulation, attendees act as a hacker and run their own attacks using frontier AI tools. Then they act as defender against the AI-driven attack by making real-time detection decisions and finally they act as the recovery expert to restore systems and data.

It's designed for the Commvault partner ecosystem because every partner is helping customers navigate a more complex cyber landscape.

Jo Dean, Commvault’s APAC VP for channels and alliances, said partners remain at the centre of the customer engagement, using insights from the simulation to guide conversations around recovery readiness and the next steps customers can take to strengthen their resilience.

“Minutes to Recovery gives partners an engaging way to bring recovery readiness to life, helping customers experience the challenges of responding to and recovering from a cyber incident in a safe environment,” she said.

“That creates more meaningful conversations and provides a strong foundation for ongoing resilience engagements,” she added.

Partner opportunities flow from simulation exercise

Minutes to Recovery is designed to start conversations that continue beyond the workshop.

As participants move through the attacker, defender and recovery roles, it’s expected that they will uncover technical and operational weaknesses in recovery plans, highlight the importance of cross-functional coordination and learn more about how to respond effectively.

“That creates opportunities for partners to help customers improve recovery readiness through resilience assessments, recovery validation, cleanroom recovery, managed services and broader cyber resilience engagements,” Dean said.

At a time when organisations are increasingly looking to partners for guidance beyond single solutions, Dean believes this kind of guided, experiential workshop aids those conversations.

“It helps partners have more strategic conversations focused on business outcomes rather than products, strengthening their role as trusted advisors,” she said.

How Mean Time to Clean Recovery metric helps partners

Available globally as an onsite event and delivered in six languages, Minutes to Recovery is completed in a single two-hour session. At the conclusion, it provides a mean time to clean recovery (MTCR) benchmark, a measure of recovery readiness based on performance under pressure rather than assumptions in a planning document.

“MTCR shifts the conversation from how quickly you can restore systems to how quickly you can recover your business to a verified clean state with confidence. That's an important distinction,” Dean told CRN Australia.

Commvault’s own 2026 State of Data Resilience ANZ research found that organisations across ANZ expect to recover from a cyber incident in five days, whereas in practice, the average recovery takes 28 days.

“That disconnect highlights why organisations need to move beyond assumptions and validate recovery under real world conditions,” she said.

“Traditional recovery metrics measure speed. MTCR measures recovery readiness by helping organisations understand how they perform under realistic attack conditions, not just in a recovery plan,” she added.

For partners, it offers a powerful engagement model. “They can establish a baseline, work with customers to address the gaps identified through Minutes to Recovery and revisit the simulation over time to measure progress,” Dean said.

“Rather than being a one-off workshop, it becomes a repeatable way to demonstrate continuous improvements in cyber resilience and recovery readiness,” she added.