The lines between cybersecurity and responsible data management are becoming blurry. By its very nature, enabling the backup of your data assets is a proactive security-focused function that protects your data from cyberattacks.
Rubrik sits at the intersection of data modernization and cybersecurity with its zero-trust data security platform that provides data resilience, observability, and remediation. While airtight security is a core goal, Rubrik’s forensic focus on data also makes the company a facilitator for data-driven innovation.
Rubrik is on the Acceleration Economy Top 10 Shortlist of Data Modernization Enablers.
Who They Are
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Rubrik was founded in 2014 to be a leader in zero-trust data security. The company has raised $554.3 million in venture capital funding over 10 rounds.
Since 2014, Rubrik has experienced rapid growth and now services upwards of 4,500 customers and has over 2,500 employees across 16 global offices.
Bipul Sinha is Rubrik’s Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO. As well as being a successful entrepreneur, Bipul is an experienced venture capitalist and remains a Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. His academic training centers on electrical engineering, and before Rubrik, Bipul held engineering positions at Oracle, American Megatrends, and IBM.
Fellow Co-Founder Arvind Nithrakashyap is Rubrik’s CTO. Nithrakashyap’s specialism is in developing storage, databases, and distributed systems. His professional career began at Oracle, co-founding the Exadata storage platform.
Rubrik’s Chief Product Officer is Anneka Gupta. Before joining Rubrik, Gupta was President and Head of Product and Platforms at LiveRamp. We spoke with Gupta during our research for this profile.
Which companies are the most important vendors in data? Check out the Acceleration Economy Data Modernization Top 10 Shortlist.
“If you talked to the two founders that are still with us here today, they would tell you that they came in as outsiders in this industry,” said Anneka. “They came in as outsiders in backup and recovery. They came in as outsiders in data security, and they recognized the challenge that legacy backup providers hadn’t innovated in 20-plus years.
“Data was moving, not just from being in the data center, but sitting in the cloud, and was becoming increasingly numerous and fragmented. They looked at existing solutions and said, “Hey, look!” The way that people have thought about backup is from a storage perspective as opposed to a software perspective. And in doing so, they haven’t really thought about what it means to secure this data.”
What They Do
“Rubrik is a unique cyber and operational recovery platform with zero-trust architecture and built-in threat intelligence and event response,” Gupta told Acceleration Economy. “What does that mean in practice? Well, if you take a step back and look at the challenges that customers face today, data is becoming the lifeblood of organizations.
“If you look at the threat landscape today, companies have made major investments in trying to keep attackers out of their systems. But the reality is that attackers are still getting through to the data.”
Rubrik’s approach focuses on building cyber resilience that addresses infrastructure and data security. Rubrik’s flagship platform for managing these persistent customer pain points is Rubrik Security Cloud.
Rubrik Security Cloud is a complete data security platform that provides data resilience, observability, and remediation, regardless of whether data sits in the enterprise, on-premise, cloud, or SaaS apps. The platform supports the full-data protection lifecycle from backups, to monitoring, to recovery.
Data Resilience
The platform is zero-trust by design, meaning data is easily accessible yet secured by various security protocols, encryption techniques, built-in immutability, and an air gap that isolates backups so attackers can’t retrieve them via an external network. Backup processes can be automated through policies, streamlining an often complex undertaking, and the platform enables a unified approach across on-premise, cloud, and SaaS data sources.
Data Observability
Rubrik enables continuous monitoring of the most pressing data risks, ransomware, and sensitive data exposure while providing facilities to identify and manage data access to reduce exposure. The platform’s User Access Analysis feature enables users to actively assess data exposure risks, while threat monitoring features allow users to find threat indicators in backups automatically.
Sensitive Data Monitoring & Management allows users to identify sensitive data with automated policies for rapid discovery and violation alerts that help organizations operate within regulatory frameworks. The Rubrik Data Security Command Center gives operators a clear view of data risk scores with visualizations and a recommendation function to help companies secure data in line with best practices.
Data Remediation
Rubrik Security Cloud facilitates rapid remediation in the event of a breach. The technology quarantines infected data in the event of a malware attack, ensuring the threat is contained. Mass recovery is fast and efficient, leading to minimal downtime, using machine learning (ML) tools to identify the last clean snapshot. And testing tools help to ensure your recovery workflows are reliable and achievable.
Customers Rubrik Has Dazzled
One of Rubrik’s early adopters is Goya Foods. We spoke to Suvajit Basu, CIO and Head Of Technology at Goya Foods, about Rubrik’s impact on the company. (See video discussion with Suvajit Basu.)
“We were one of the early adopters of Rubrik,” Basu told us. “We had a cyberattack and wanted to ensure we had great disaster recovery technology to mitigate that.”
“The challenges were, how do we give this airgap-type capability that the bad actors can’t get into, even in our backups? The second thing was what we were backing up, was that being continually monitored with anti-malware checks, etc. And, how easily, and how fast, is recovery going to happen in case of a disaster.”
Basu went on to explain the key differentiators with the Rubrik solution. “The number one thing is the technical airgap solution, they fix it with their file system, a write-once file system.”
“Number two, their product has inherent anti-malware capabilities. And number three is that we can restore a VM within Rubrik and utilize that, it’s almost instantaneous.”
“We also looked at cloud backup solution, the problem is when you’re restoring 100TB over an internet link, no matter how fast that link is, it’s not going to be as fast as having the backup right next to your machine. It has the fastest recovery time and we have tested it.”
Moving forward, Rubrik will continue expanding its footprint in the cloud and what it can do for its customers. “That means protecting more workloads in the cloud across infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and software-as-a-service. And we have a really exciting roadmap of new SaaS apps that we’re developing,” said Gupta.
Rubrik is also looking at the Shift Left approach to data security and will introduce a user intelligence feature later this year. “Part of shifting left is understanding: how do users interact with data? What do they have access to do? Have you over-provision sensitive data to particular users, and the answer to that is universally, yes,” said Gupta.
“People have way more access to data than they ever actually use. So if you can monitor that and reduce that, that’d be great. And then, on top of that, thinking about how you can find anomalous user behavior.”
Why Rubrik is a Top 10 Data Modernization Enabler
While Rubrik holds a unique operating position, straddling data management and security, the company is ultimately a data modernization enabler. Why? Because it enables users to protect and utilize its data with a commitment to airtight backups and rapid remediation. Here’s why the company is on our Top 10 Shortlist of Data Modernization enablers, as selected by our practitioner analysts.
- The company’s approach to backup security provides an unprecedented level of protection. We were particularly impressed by its use of logical airgap technology.
- Visualization tools and risk scores give companies a clear view of threat intelligence, while consistent monitoring and alerts ensure everything is noticed.
- Remediation in Rubrik is multi-faceted. It’s fast, testable, and prevents malware reinfection.
- Customer references including Goya Foods validate the company’s positioning and technology in addressing real-world business requirements.
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