Commvault has launched “Minutes to Recovery”, a scenario-driven cyber resilience simulation designed to help security and IT teams test how they would respond to AI-driven attacks and validate their recovery readiness.
The company said the simulation is built around the shrinking window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation, which it cited as narrowing to 29 minutes in 2025—65% faster than the year before. The premise is that faster attacks require organisations to move beyond recovery plans on paper and demonstrate, through testing, whether recovery processes work under pressure.
According to Commvault, the two-hour session runs participants through three roles: attacker, defender and recovery specialist. In the first phase, participants create an AI-driven attack using what the company described as common “Frontier AI” tools used by adversaries, with the aim of showing how AI-accelerated campaigns can increase phishing personalisation and quickly target backup infrastructure.
Participants then switch to defending the simulated attack, making time-critical detection decisions with incomplete information, before taking on the recovery role to restore systems and data to a “verified clean state” without reintroducing the threat.
Commvault said the exercise produces a benchmark it calls Mean Time to Clean Recovery (MTCR), intended to measure recovery readiness based on performance during the simulation rather than assumptions in planning documents. The company said the program will be delivered globally as an onsite event in six languages.
“The question organizations need to answer is no longer, ‘Do we have a recovery plan?’ Instead, they should be asking, ‘Can we prove it will work under pressure?’” said Anna Griffin, chief market officer at Commvault. “As AI compresses the time between compromise and impact, resilience becomes a measurable business capability. Minutes to Recovery helps organizations move beyond assumptions and demonstrate their ability to recover cleanly, quickly and with confidence.”
Commvault also positioned the simulation as a partner-led engagement opportunity, saying it will be available through its global partner network. Kyndryl vice president of security and resiliency Allen Downs said the exercise could be used to help customers “strengthen their readiness, validate their resilience, and improve their ability to recover from disruption.”
