Data protection firm Rubrik has pushed out a Cloud Data Management software release that automates the process of application recovery from ransomware attacks, and also protects Kubernetes-orchestrated containers.
The product was rolled out at Rubrik’s Forward virtual conference this week, which features presentations from high-profile people including tennis champ Venus Williams. Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman, NetApp CEO George Kurian, and VC Vinod Khosla will also be speaking. Rubrik signed up NetApp as a reseller in April.
Khosla has been a Rubrik investor since 2016 via his Khosla Ventures operation. Slootman ran Snowflake’s impressively successful IPO, perhaps an inspiration to Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha. Williams is a former world number one tennis player in both singles and doubles and is still in the top 100 on the WTA circuit.
Rubrik president Dan Rogers said: “There has never been a greater need to protect and quickly recover from rising cyber threats like ransomware, which are devastating businesses on a daily basis. Rubrik … [allows] for quick recovery from attacks and protection of precious IP, no matter where the data is stored.”
AppFlows automated ransomware recovery
The new software release adds a Polaris AppFlows disaster recovery (DR) facility for on-premises VMware environments to a second site or VMware Cloud on AWS. Rubrik says it enables IT teams to use existing backup systems they’ve already paid for. This obviates the need to deploy and manage separate DR infrastructure. AppFlows uses application blueprints that specify app resource mapping and workload dependencies to enable failover in the event of a data centre outage.
If a ransomware attack encrypts VMware app, a Radar facility will identify impacted VM membership within blueprints. It will then present a way for entire applications or business services to recover to a point in time before the encryption event. The whole process uses an AppFlows enhanced workflow. So there is no need to triage and remediate individual VMs as it presents a global view of the customer’s data estate. The idea is that IT teams can identify affected workloads and files in a single process.
Failover and failback processes are fully automated. Rubrik will add local, in-place recovery for ransomware attacks. Of course, this is only as useful if you actually switch it on, as the University of California San Francisco discovered last year.
Other additions
The new software release also adds:
- Integration with automation frameworks, such as Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR and ServiceNow Incident Response,
- Two-factor authentication
- Data risk management with Sonar user behaviour analysis to determine who is accessing, modifying or adding files
- Data Management for Kubernetes to protect applications and stateful data through the Polaris SaaS platform
- Rubrik-hosted backup and recovery for Microsoft 365 applications, including SharePoint and Teams
- New Network Attached Storage (NAS) Cloud Direct built on Rubrik’s acquisition of Igneous IP and technology, protecting and rapidly recovering petabyte-scale NAS systems,
- Automated discovery and backup for SAP HANA on public cloud and on-premises
- Intelligent cloud archival to optimise costs of public cloud object-based storage
- Backup from NetApp SnapMirror
- Consistent point-in-time backups for Nutanix Files and Live Mount for Nutanix AHV backups
- Offload backups to Oracle Data Guard standby databases with failover/switchover awareness
- Delivery of policy-driven backups for Cassandra databases via Polaris
- Incremental backups for vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC)
Read more about AppFlows in a datasheet.
