> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.cybrsecmedia.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # AI Agent Damage Takes Seconds, Recovery Takes Weeks - URL: https://www.cybrsecmedia.com/ai-agent-damage-takes-seconds-recovery-takes-weeks/ - Published: 2026-11-10T21:29:36.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-10T21:29:58.000Z - Description: AI agents can wreak havoc in seconds, but business recovery can take weeks. New Commvault tools aim to close that gap by restoring applications, identities and agentic AI workflows. - Author: George V. Hulme - Tags: AI agent recovery, Agentic AI, Disaster Recovery, PocketOS, Article An AI agent can delete a production database in seconds. That’s something startup PocketOS learned firsthand when, earlier this year, a coding agent did exactly that and took the company offline in nine seconds, the company’s founder [detailed](https://x.com/lifeofjer/status/2048103471019434248?ref=cybrsecmedia.com) on X. Getting the business back after such an incident often takes considerably longer. According to research commissioned by data-protection software provider Commvault, [State of Data Resilience research](https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/nz/news/cyber/ransom-paid-data-still-lost--and-brokers-asking-the-wrong-question-585845.aspx?ref=cybrsecmedia.com), it takes an average of 28 days just to return to a minimum level of operation. The research also found more than eight in ten business leaders expect recovery within five days. Fortunately for PocketOS it didn’t take that long, as it was able to resume most operations over the weekend. Still, a nine-second incident that causes a two-day outage is pain organizations want to avoid. Closing that gap between the potential damage agents can do sits at the center of two product announcements Commvault made today at its SHIFT 2026 conference in Nashville. Commvault’s Recovery Studio orchestrates full-stack recovery of applications, identities, configurations, infrastructure dependencies, and datasets through automated, context-aware runbooks. AgentRecover, now extending to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Microsoft Foundry, audits what AI agents have done and recovers both the agents and the resources they changed. [Subscribe to the CYBR.SEC.Media newsletter](#/portal/signup/free) The announcements are part of a broader slate of product expansion, including a Zscaler integration aimed at shadow-AI discovery and data-activation partnerships with Databricks and NVIDIA. ## **Recovery and dependencies** The conventional failure in cyber recovery is not the backup: It is the dependencies. These include infrastructure, network, and identity configurations as well as data, files, and objects. A large enterprise may need to restore hundreds of applications and thousands of identities, including configurations and underlying data, and do so in the right order, at the right time. Chris Bevil, Commvault's global cyber resilience and AI leader, has seen recovery failure unfold in real time. In 2021, before joining Commvault, Bevil led incident response for a professional-services organization hit by the Conti ransomware group. Recovery took 284 days. Six months later, Conti struck the victim organization again. One of the primary reasons it takes so long to recover, explained Bevil, is that while teams do get immediately to work attempting to restore their systems, the teams all start doing so within their own silos, such as within identity, network, applications, and infrastructure, Bevil said in an interview on the eve of the show. That makes it challenging to restore critical functions such as identity, and when that dependency can’t be reestablished, the business won’t be able to function, even if its applications and data are restored. “The business just won’t be able to run the way that they need until such capabilities are restored," Bevil explained. Recovery Studio is Commvault's answer to that challenge: unified runbooks that rebuild infrastructure, recover workloads, and orchestrate security controls such as firewall rules, network security groups, and other settings, with automated threat scanning embedded before systems return to production. "This is the DevOps moment for recovery," said Pranay Ahlawat, Commvault's chief technology and AI officer, in the announcement. "Recovery Studio replaces spreadsheets and war rooms with one orchestrated flow," he added. ## **Recovering agents and agentic workflows** AI agents complicate recovery because they require the agent, data, and associated resources to be restored in sync. Bevil shared an example: a retail agent accepts bad instructions and they corrupt product records and configuration files across multiple applications. If one just rolls back the database to a pre-incident snapshot, legitimate customer transactions that arrived afterward are disregarded. Recovery must be scoped to what the agent actually changed, which presumes an organization can audit what the agent actually did. "Business logic is moving out of applications and into agents, and agents don't behave deterministically," Ahlawat added. "Enterprises need to see and audit what agents have done, then recover both the agent and affected resources." When it comes to restoring any systems, but especially agentic systems, CISOs need more than a listing of their applications, identities, configurations, network, and data that need to be recovered. If that’s all that they have, without the ability to map the dependencies of those systems for their minimum viable business to function, they do not have a recovery plan; they have a backup inventory. The same is true for AI agents: an inventory, an audit trail, and a scoped recovery path are prerequisites to have in place before an incident if there’s going to be any chance of a swift, successful recovery. 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