As Indian enterprises brace for a more complex, cloud-first and threat-heavy future, resilience has emerged as a critical business priority. In this SME Channels exclusive, Balaji Rao of Commvault shares how unified cyber resilience, clean recovery, and a strong channel ecosystem will shape India’s data protection journey toward 2026.
In today’s constantly evolving cyber threat landscape, organizations need more than just backup—they need true resilience. Commvault is a global leader in unified resilience at enterprise scale, helping organizations protect, recover, and secure their entire business. With its cloud-native, AI-enabled platform, Commvault brings together data security, identity resilience, and cyber recovery, enabling customers to achieve the fastest and most complete recoveries while safely embracing AI and defending against AI-driven threats.
Leading Commvault’s growth across India and the SAARC region is Balaji Rao, Area Vice President. With nearly three decades of deep technology experience, Balaji is responsible for accelerating regional growth, driving sales execution excellence, and expanding Commvault’s market presence. A people-first leader, he has successfully built and scaled businesses across enterprise, government, commercial, and channel ecosystems. Prior to Commvault, Balaji held senior leadership roles at Veritas, VMware, HPE, and Mandiant, bringing a wealth of experience in leading cross-functional teams and delivering strong value to customers and partners.
This SME Channels exclusive attempts to further explore how Commvault is helping Indian enterprises move from traditional data protection to unified cyber resilience as they approach 2026. Balaji Rao shares insights on key trends shaping the market—including clean recovery, hybrid and multi-cloud complexity, regulatory compliance, and AI-driven data usage—while highlighting the critical role of Commvault’s channel ecosystem in delivering outcome-led, resilient architectures. The discussion also examines how partners are being enabled to support enterprises, mid-market, and SMBs in building trusted, compliant, and future-ready data strategies.
“Unified resilience, not fragmented tools, will define how Indian enterprises survive and grow in the next phase of digital transformation.”
– Balaji Rao, Area Vice President – India & SAARC at Commvault
Edited excerpts…
As we approach 2026, what key data protection trends do you expect to shape the Indian enterprise market, and how is Commvault’s channel primed to lead in these areas?
As we move forward in 2026, data protection in the Indian enterprise market is undergoing a fundamental shift – from an IT-centric function to a core business imperative. Rapid cloud adoption, increasing cyber incidents, evolving regulatory expectations, and highly distributed data environments are forcing organizations to rethink how they protect, recover, and govern their information. The conversation is moving from backup completion to recovery confidence, from fragmented tools to unified resilience, and from infrastructure management to business continuity at scale.
Three key trends will shape this evolution. First, clean recovery will become non-negotiable as ransomware and AI-driven threats make speed alone insufficient. Second, unified visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments will be essential to manage risk and compliance consistently. Third, data governance and sovereignty will move closer to the boardroom, driven by DPDP and sector-specific regulations.
Commvault has aligned its channel ecosystem around unified resilience capabilities delivered through Commvault Cloud Unity, which brings together data protection, recovery, governance, and identity awareness across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Our Channel partners are being guided to design architectures that embed clean recovery validation, policy-driven control, and consistent visibility, helping enterprises modernize without increasing operational risk.
With hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments becoming the norm, how is Commvault empowering its partners in India to deliver differentiated data management solutions?
Hybrid and multi-cloud environments have become the default architecture for Indian enterprises of all sizes including SMBs as they balance scale, cost, and regulatory needs. While data is no longer centralized, accountability still is, with enterprises requiring consistent protection, visibility, and recovery across environments that were never designed to work together.
Commvault is empowering its partners to differentiate by moving the conversation from tools to outcomes. Partners are enabled to deliver unified data management strategies that span cloud, SaaS, and on-prem environments through policy-driven control and consistent recovery models. This allows them to address fragmentation without increasing operational overhead, while helping customers maintain compliance and resilience across distributed systems.
As environments grow more dynamic, our focus is on helping partners become strategic long-term advisors to the customers. The key differentiation will come from how effectively partners can design, validate, and operate resilient data architectures that evolve with customer needs.
What specific enablement programs or certification paths is Commvault rolling out to prepare its India channel partners for the evolving complexities of modern data protection?
Commvault’s enablement strategy for India channel partners is built around the realities of modern data protection, where cyber resilience, cloud complexity, and regulatory compliance intersect. As customer needs evolve, partners are expected to design and deliver resilience outcomes, not just implement technology.
Commvault continues to roll out role-based enablement and certification paths focused on cloud-first resilience, cyber recovery, and governance-led architectures. These programs combine structured technical bootcamps, continuous learning, and hands-on certifications aligned to real-world customer scenarios, ensuring partners are operationally ready rather than just theoretically trained.
Beyond technical enablement, partners are equipped with use-case-driven playbooks and sales enablement frameworks that help them lead outcome-focused conversations around resilience, compliance, and business continuity. We are also preparing partners for new measures of resilience such as Mean Time to Clean Recovery, which emphasizes restoring validated, uncompromised data and systems, not just meeting traditional RTO and RPO metrics.
The outcome is a stronger, more confident India channel ecosystem—capable of scaling across complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments and proactively leading resilience conversations with customers, rather than reacting after incidents occur.
India’s regulatory and data sovereignty landscape continues to evolve. How are you guiding your channel ecosystem to navigate compliance-driven demand effectively?
With the DPDP Act and sector-specific mandates, compliance is no longer an afterthought but a driver of architecture decisions. Enterprises are looking for partners who can translate regulatory intent into practical, scalable solutions.
Commvault is guiding its channel ecosystem to lead with a governance-first design. Partners are being enabled to help customers design architectures where data locality, encryption, access controls, and recovery policies are embedded from day one, rather than added later as compliance overlays. With DPDP introducing restrictions on cross-border data movement, this approach ensures that encryption, access policies, and recovery controls travel with the data itself.
As regulatory expectations continue to evolve, the channel’s ability to interpret policy and implement resilient architectures will become a key differentiator, particularly in regulated industries such as BFSI and Public Sectors.
How do you see emerging technologies like AI/ML impacting data management priorities, and what role will Commvault partners play in delivering these capabilities to Indian customers by 2026?
AI and ML are changing data management priorities from retention to responsible data use at scale. As organizations adopt more autonomous and agent-driven AI systems, the accuracy, integrity, and recoverability of data directly influence business outcomes. In this agentic environment, trust in data becomes just as important as access to data, making resilience a foundational requirement for AI initiatives.
For many SMEs, limited IT resources amplify this challenge. Poor data quality or compromised data feeding AI models can quickly translate into flawed insights, operational disruption, or regulatory exposure. This is pushing SMEs to favor simpler architectures where protection, governance, and recovery are built in by design, rather than managed as separate layers.
Commvault, together with its partner ecosystem, is helping SMEs adopt AI responsibly by enabling governed data activation, allowing protected backup data to be used safely for analytics and AI without unnecessary data movement or complexity. Capabilities such as automated recovery validation, data rooms and conversational AI help SMEs continuously verify data integrity and understand their recovery readiness without requiring deep specialist skills.
Partners play a critical role by helping customers apply consistent governance and recovery controls to data that is increasingly being used for analytics and AI-driven workloads, without introducing unnecessary risk or complexity. Organizations hat align data resilience with AI trust are setting the benchmark for responsible AI adoption across India’s mid-market and SME landscape.
Consumption-based pricing and “as-a-service” models are gaining traction. How is Commvault aligning its partner incentives and go-to-market motions to support these models in India?
Customer buying behavior in India is shifting towards flexibility and outcomes, with a growing preference for consumption-based and as-a-service models that align cost with business value. This reflects a broader shift away from capital-heavy infrastructure towards services that scale with demand.
With the cost of cyber breaches increasingly reaching seven figures for large Indian enterprises, boards are demanding measurable outcomes and continuous assurance, accelerating the focus towards consumption-based, outcome-aligned models.
Commvault has aligned its partner ecosystem to support this by enabling recurring revenue models, cloud-delivered offerings, and services-led engagements. Partners are encouraged to build long-term relationships around ongoing resilience, governance, and recovery readiness rather than one-time deployments. This evolution allows partners to create predictable revenue streams while delivering continuous value to customers, aligning commercial success with customer outcomes.
What strategies are you implementing to deepen Commvault’s presence with mid-market and SMB customers through the channel in India and the SAARC region?
Mid-market and SMB organizations are facing same the cyber threats and compliance pressures as large enterprises, but with fewer resources to manage complexity. This creates a strong opportunity for the channel to deliver simplified, scalable resilience strategy without enterprise-level overhead.
Commvault is deepening its presence in this segment by enabling partners with cloud-first delivery models, simplified deployment, and repeatable service frameworks. This allows partners to scale efficiently while offering enterprise-grade protection and recovery capabilities to mid-market customers who previously lacked access to them.
As identity increasingly becomes the real perimeter, SMBs are recognizing the significance of recovery models that restore trusted users and systems together, and not just infrastructure. Across India, this approach is helping our partners expand their footprint while supporting digital growth in a sustainable way.
Looking ahead, how do you envision Commvault’s India channel contributing to digital transformation initiatives across key industries such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing?
As digitalization deepens across key sectors such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing, organizations are moving beyond speed and innovation to focus on operational reliability at scale. Downtime, data loss, or cyber disruption now have direct business and reputational impact, making resilience a prerequisite for transformation success.
Commvault’s India channel plays a critical role by helping organizations modernize with confidence, ensuring that data protection, cyber recovery, and governance are built into transformation journeys rather than addressed later. Partners help customers maintain control over data, access, and recovery across increasingly digital and interconnected environments.
Transformation efforts that balance innovation with availability, trust, and compliance are delivering more sustainable outcomes, with channel partners playing a central role in enabling resilient digital growth across India’s critical industries.
