From complexity to confidence: Lumen® Validated Design for cyber resilience with Commvault

If your business were breached tonight, could you recover quickly, cleanly and with total confidence? That’s the expectation from regulators, boards and customers alike. Unfortunately, with ransomware attacks surging 126% year-over-year¹ and the average cost of a breach approaching $4.5 million,² reactive measures simply aren’t enough to protect your bottom line.

Many organizations struggle with cybersecurity in today’s complex threat landscape, but not for lack of motivation. They simply get bogged down by the sheer complexity of their environments. Fragmented tools, manual builds and brittle handoffs create unpredictable timelines and recovery, while distributed environments, AI-heavy workloads and sprawling hybrid architectures have turned recovery into a high-risk guessing game. Cold storage alone will not save you, and trying to protect everything, everywhere without guardrails is unmanageable.

The answer is a shift to validated, repeatable design with tested, proven patterns, policies and outcomes. Lumen delivers that shift with a Validated Design for Cyber Resilience, an architecture proven under real-world conditions to simplify recovery and restore confidence.

Lumen + Commvault: cyber resilience you can trust

Cyber resilience demands a partnership that pairs best-in-class connectivity with uncompromising data protection. As organizations face a rapidly evolving threat landscape—a trend explored in our comprehensive 2026 Threatscape report—the need for proven resilience architectures has become increasingly urgent. That’s why Lumen and Commvault have joined forces to develop Lumen® Validated Design for Cyber Resilience, a proven technical foundation that addresses today’s most urgent security challenges.

Here’s what sets this architecture apart:

• Lumen operates the largest ultra‑low‑loss fiber network in North America and offers deep cloud interconnectivity, providing the transport foundation for secure, high‑performance data movement. This foundation is critical for backing up and restoring large workloads at enterprise scale.
• Commvault offers decades of expertise in backup, recovery and cyber resilience, delivering the data protection foundation enterprises rely on during ransomware events. Its platform hardens and isolates critical data through immutable, air-gapped copies and automates clean-room validation and tiered recovery workflows, enabling fast and confident restoration of large workloads when every second counts.

Together, Lumen and Commvault deliver centralized policies, integrated threat signals and validated recovery orchestration that build confidence, not just speed. Proven workflows and SLA-backed performance help reduce risk and maintain continuity, while lean IT teams gain efficiency and the ability to reduce overhead.

As data volumes surge and AI initiatives scale, this foundation delivers resilience at enterprise speed: petabyte-scale recovery, storage flexibility, tamper-proof pipelines, cleanroom restoration and policy-driven connectivity that keeps egress costs in check and compliance on track.

Real-world validation: the Lumen journey

The stakes of preparedness become clear when disruptions impact mission-critical operations. That's why validation is so important. It shows whether a resilience strategy can hold up under real-world pressure.

With that goal in mind, Lumen battle-tested the first Lumen Validated Design for Cyber Resilience inside its own operations instead of just building it in theory.

Facing sprawling hybrid environments and strict compliance mandates, Lumen confronted the same complexity most enterprises struggle with: fragmented backup platforms, storage complexity, unpredictable recovery timelines and operational overhead that drained resources. The mandate was clear: consolidate legacy tools, streamline operations and deliver rapid, reliable recovery across distributed environments without compromising compliance.

This required us to rethink our strategy from the ground up. Every step, challenge and outcome is captured in our white paper, The technical case for the Lumen® Validated Design for Cyber Resilience with Commvault, covering architecture, deployment strategy and the rigorous validation process that turned complexity into a blueprint for resilience. The design also reflects how flexible recovery storage can support recovery behavior across hybrid environments. Now that blueprint is available to any organization ready to strengthen its defenses.

Inside the blueprint: how the Lumen validated design delivers real-world results

The value of the Lumen Validated Design for Cyber Resilience with Commvault lies in its real-world impact. From day one, it was built on a defense-in-depth strategy, combining Commvault’s enterprise-grade protection with the high-performance Lumen Network to enable rapid, clean recovery across edge, core and multi-cloud environments—all under centralized governance.

Key architectural elements of the validated design include:

• Network isolation: Dedicated Wavelengths and IP VPN provide secure, high-capacity, low-latency data movement for backup and recovery, keeping production and backup traffic separate.
• Air-gapped, immutable backups: Commvault Air Gap Protect creates isolated, tamper-proof vaults with independent authentication, ensuring clean recovery points.
• Scalable, multi-tiered storage: HyperScale X and Lumen® Network Storage, powered by NetApp, supports flexible storage for additional backup copies, including air-gapped configurations, while helping with rapid restore across hybrid environments.
• Unified automation: Unified policy orchestration supports consistent protection and fast recovery everywhere workloads live.

Lumen® Data Protect strengthens this blueprint with Commvault Cloud SaaS as a fully managed service for SaaS and hybrid workloads, simplifying protection, enforcing retention policies and providing immutable backups to counter ransomware.

Deployment followed a phased, infrastructure-aware rollout to minimize disruption and accelerate onboarding. Modular design, automated policy management and rigorous validation—including functional, performance, security and interoperability testing—enabled repeatable success across thousands of hosts and diverse environments.

Efficiency, cost savings and resilience delivered

Applying the validated design to our own operational environment helped Lumen achieve these tangible and repeatable outcomes:

• Operational efficiency: Achieved approximately 90% consolidation of legacy backup platforms, streamlining operations and reducing complexity.
• Financial impact: Realized $3.5 million in annual savings through reduced licensing, infrastructure and operational costs.
• Staffing efficiency: Automation and elastic scaling expanded coverage without increasing headcount.
• Downtime and recovery: Reduced recovery time objectives (RTO) and accelerated restoration across hybrid environments.
• Ransomware protection: Enhanced resilience with immutable storage, logical air-gapping and SIEM/SOAR integration for real-time alerting and forensic analysis.

Explore the white paper for detailed results, lessons learned and recommendations for achieving similar results.

Transforming resilience from blueprint to business value

In a landscape where complexity and risk are rising, the Lumen Validated Design for Cyber Resilience with Commvault stands as a proven foundation for confident recovery and operational continuity. By combining best-in-class connectivity with flexible storage options and enterprise-grade data protection, your organization can move beyond fragmented strategies and build resilience that’s ready for the demands of tomorrow.

Take the next step. Explore our validated design strategy, then connect with a Lumen expert to see how we can help your organization simplify operations, accelerate recovery and stay ahead of evolving threats.

^{¹Finch, James, The Average Cost of Ransomware Attacks in 2025,Purple Security, May 2025.
²Ponemon Institute and IBM, Cost of a Data Breach Report, 2025.}

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