New Rubrik Cloud Vault Running in Azure Promises Rapid Ransomware Recovery

Data protection provider Rubrik has big plans with Microsoft for 2022 including the rollout of Rubrik Cloud Vault in Azure. Rubrik launched the Microsoft Azure-based managed ransomware recovery service during its Data Security Spotlight, a one-day virtual event held Tuesday.

Designed to run in isolated tenants, Rubrik promises this archiving service will enable ransomware attack recovery within minutes or hours. That compares with days, weeks or more to recover using only the capabilities offered by Microsoft, according to Rubrik officials.

Rubrik’s Dan Rogers

Using Microsoft’s Azure recovery tools, “it can take days just to recover 50 gigs of data,” Rubrik President Dan Rogers said during the virtual event. “With Rubrik, we have a secured air gapped solution, making sure your backups are entirely removed from the Microsoft 365 tenant and solution. We have fast recovery, much faster than preservation hold, taking that recovery time down to hours and minutes.”

Rubrik’s Anneka Gupta

Anneka Gupta, Rubrik’s new chief product officer, said the new managed service not only provides recovery from cyberattacks and other disasters, but reduces the time customers need to keep data on primary storage.

Gupta added that Rubrik Cloud Storage lets partners offer a single bill for backup software, cloud use and storage. “This is really big news for the hundreds of thousands of Microsoft customers,” she said.

IDC Research Vice President Phil Goodwin noted that Rubrik is doubling down on ransomware protection.

IDC’s Phil Goodwin

“Rubrik is really diving into the ransomware aspect of data protection,” Goodwin said. “We’ve seen that to be one of the hottest areas of the data protection market.”

Microsoft’s Rubrik Investment

Rubrik Cloud Vault is the first major deliverable culminating from a strategic agreement that the two companies announced in August. Under that agreement Microsoft made an equity investment in Rubrik to fund co-engineering and co-marketing efforts.

Microsoft’s Saurabh Sensharma

Microsoft senior program manager for Azure storage Saurabh Sensharma said the offering combines the two companies’ Zero Trust security capabilities.

“Customers are looking for a way to combat against the unprecedented increase in ransomware attacks, Sensharma said. “And the best part about Rubrik Cloud Vault is it gives them an isolated, air gapped secure environment for their backups built on top of the secure, durable and scalable Microsoft Azure Blob storage platform.”

Threat Hunting Support

Also coming early next year to Rubrik’s core data protection platform is support for threat hunting. This new capability will let organizations scan their backups for indicators of compromise, which increasingly show the presence of ransomware.

The threat hunting feature makes it easier to discover the last clean version of data, to ensure that a recovered system won’t result in reinfection. Palo Alto Networks earlier this year formed a partnership with Rubrik, enabling the threat hunting capability.

Rubrik has integrated Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR, the widely security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platform.

Rubrik’s Murthy Mathiprakasam

This is a better approach than scanning production systems, Rubrik Senior Director of Product Marketing Murthy Mathiprakasam told Channel Futures.

“Because we have an immutable file system, that means we’re taking snapshots of the environment on a time series basis,” Mathiprakasam said. “So, we can actually go back and scan the entire environment to see exactly when malware may have been introduced. And then it was planted at one point in time, but it didn’t really affect the environment in a noticeable way until later in time.” 

Expanded Support for AWS

Rubrik’s expanded support for Microsoft Azure does not signal any reduction its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). At last week’s AWS re:Invent conference, Rubrik announced support for Amazon S3 Object Lock write-once read-many (WORM) service.

Amazon’s S3 Object Lock option is intended to protect against ransomware by preventing malicious code from deleting or overwriting objects in the store during retention periods.

Rubrik said it is enabling customers to use its Zero Trust Data Security with Amazon S3 as an immutable archive. This added protection of long-term backups and archives aims to ensure rapid recovery from ransomware attacks.