Rubrik announces security upgrades aimed at alleviating the impact of ransomware attacks

Data management company Rubrik has announced a number of data security enhancements to its platform aimed at helping organizations assess the impact of ransomware attacks and automate recovery for business continuity. The goal is to help IT teams address questions about the content of their critical business data and who is accessing it, the company said.

Rubrik also unveiled its new SaaS-based AppFlows disaster recovery system. The upgrades were made in tandem with the company’s FORWARD event this week. AppFlows is designed to capture resource mapping and workload dependencies to enable reliable failover in the event of a data center disruption.

Backup software is a core technology in every IT organization, but what has changed is that protecting against ransomware attacks has become “an integral component of a company’s cyber resilience strategy,” said Greg Smith, vice president of product marketing at Rubrik, in an interview. “I need that data to be immutable and recoverable.”

SEE: Ransomware attacks are not a matter of if, but when (TechRepublic)

The new features are designed to help make it easier and more precise for IT shops to find out exactly what data and apps have been impacted, pinpoint the time of the attack and then recover the affected apps at a very high scale, Smith said.

Recognizing the silos that often exist between frontline security and operations teams after a ransomware attack, Rubrik is helping to bridge that gap, he said.

“Once those security teams realize their data has been corrupted they have to look to make sure their backups are intact, and to recover from that, they have to work with the operations team,” Smith said. “When you have security ops and IT ops teams having to work together, what helps is to have common tooling so they can see the same problems and work collaboratively.”

Rubrik has integrated the APIs in its platform with an organization’s SOAR platform so that when a ransomware attack is detected, the security ops team has the information its needs from the IT ops team to begin the recovery process, he said.

Other new features include data risk management with new Sonar user behavior analysis to determine who is accessing, modifying or adding files, and a global view of the customer’s data landscape to help IT teams quickly and accurately identify affected workloads and files.

Become comfortable with being uncomfortable

Frank Slootman, CEO of cloud data platform company Snowflake, which had the largest software IPO in history, gave the closing keynote Tuesday on the first day of Rubrik’s FORWARD event and spoke about the importance of having “a sense of mission.”

This “permeates the way we show up for work,” Slootman said. “There’s always an opportunity to work harder, better and faster,” and not leave any opportunity untapped.”

Slootman called this “the x-factor,” saying that having a mission can “open up a huge window to superlative performance.”

He added that people should raise the bar in everything they do and look for opportunities in every interaction and email. “The desire to prosecute the mission as hard and as fast as you can is something that dominates what’s between your ears. There is no magic, just relentless application of energy and focus to the mission. It’s my natural habitat.”

An early investor and adviser to Rubrik, Slootman said he likes that the company has iterated and made “really massive improvements to what backup software does.”

The business world is “a zero-sum game–either you get the deal or they do. It’s a hard fight and I felt with every company [I was with] as we were emerging, people were trying to kill us in the cradle and not grow up to be big and strong.”

In that type of environment, he said, “leadership has to be dialed into your instincts. You’re going to take business from other people and they won’t want to let you. That state of mind is very important.”

Slootman said it’s a “very healthy thing” to constantly be uncomfortable, saying “you’d be crazy to be comfortable.” It is better to be anxious and paranoid, he said.

There is no better strategy to have than the ability to execute, Slootman said. “If you can’t execute, having a strategy is worthless.”

He said he finds that people in Silicon Valley are “preoccupied with strategy and not execution. I take the other side–we’re very execution-oriented. You become better at execution as you strategize.”

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