Episode 1

Who Needs Modern Resilience?

A thought-provoking conversation that dives deep into the critical aspects of continuous business with industry expert Roland Cloutier, former CISO and renowned cybersecurity leader, and Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO of Commvault. 


Who Needs Modern Resilience?

with Ronald Cloutier 

Sanjay Mirchandani: Welcome! Thank you for joining us. I’m here today with Roland Cloutier. Roland has an amazing background. Roland and I were colleagues. I was the CIO, he was the CISO. We’ve been through many things together.

Roland Cloutier: Sanjay, thanks for giving me the opportunity to get back into, I mean, to have this conversation.  

Sanjay: When you think of resilience, what does that mean to you? 

Roland: When I talk about resilience, I’m talking about the ability for the entire business value chain to be successful, right?

From the time we imaginate things, to we develop it, to we manufacture it, to we market it, to we sell it, to we support it with the customers, to the time that we monetize it and start the whole life cycle over. Those are all independent parts of a very large value chain. And in order for our organizations to work effectively and meet their goals, they all have to work. So, resiliency to me is a resiliency in the people, the resiliency in the business operations, in the technology infrastructure. It’s all of it. It’s not one piece or a part of technology. It’s the continuation of our organizations.

Sanjay: The cloud has made us continuous. You have a point of view, you’ve always had a point of view even when we worked together and the world wasn’t so continuous, about keeping business running right, things like that, business operations business continuity. How has that evolved? 

Roland: Let me phrase it like this, business operations protection is this combination of critical operations programs based on defense and resilience, but it’s very aligned to continuous business operations.  So, you know, my focus has always been the defense of the business is to ensure success in the market or an agency’s ability to operate to affect the mission. So, I think the combination of those worlds really combine well when we’re talking about how do I ensure the resiliency of the capability to deliver what we’ve committed to market and that’s what I’ve always based my programs on and whether it’s the cyber defensive operations or financial crimes defense or any of the programs we’re trying to achieve is to ensure that we’ve done the right things by the customer by the consumer and by the shareholders.  

Sanjay: We live in a world where resilience is becoming paramount for the existence of businesses. I’m sure there’s gonna be a lot of CEOs, CISOs, CIOs who watch our segment. Is there any final words, two or three things you wanna leave them with? 

Roland: You know, if I were to give anybody advice, I think it would be these three things. First is understand your digital ecosystem. It changes probably daily or weekly or monthly, but that’s OK. You know, have the team keep on top of it. But if you don’t understand what your value chain looks like and how it goes in and out of your environment on a consistent basis, you can’t catch up.  Second. Ensure that you think of security, risk and privacy and resilience as a component of quality. Right? Don’t leave it to the teams to say that’s your job, that’s your responsibility, that’s something, that’s all of our responsibilities as business leaders. And ensure your people see it that way.  And, last but not least, remember, I won’t use the military term, but, the six P’s of proper preparation. And I won’t go into the rest of it, but make it muscle memory. Train, practice, and from the board down to individual contributors, everyone should be aware of their accountability and responsibility when bad things happen and you’ll come through on the other side a heck of a lot better.  

Sanjay: Awesome, that’s great advice. Roland, thank you again on behalf of everybody here at Commvault and our customers for sharing your insights with us. Come back soon.   

Roland: Sanjay, just invite me and I’ll be back.