VMblog:  If you were giving a VMware Explore attendee a quick overview of the company, what would you say?  How would you describe the company?

Rubrik:  Rubrik's mission is to secure the world's data. Cyber attacks are the biggest threat to enterprise data & business continuity. Rubrik helps make our customers resilient in face of cyber attacks. Cyber resilience has two parts - cyber posture - and cyber recovery. Cyber osture is about providing customers with a continuous view of risks in data, and helping in remediation. Cyber recovery ensures customers can recover their data and restore their applications in any cyber scenario. Rubrik Security Cloud is a global SaaS service that delivers cyber resilience for data living in the data center, cloud and SaaS applications.

VMblog:  As a VMware Explore 2023 sponsor, what does that sponsorship look like?  Will you have a large delegation at this year's event?  Do you have a theme for your booth?  Do you have anything interesting planned at your booth?

Rubrik:  We have two locations on the show floor this year. Our Cybersecurity Lounge located at #A511 is our networking area where we will be providing professional headshots to attendees, as well as F&B throughout the event and networking with us.

Our second location will be our booth at #207 where we will be presenting onsite demos, swag giveaways, and live screen printing t-shirts for attendees.

VMblog:  Do you have any speaking sessions during the event?  If so, can you give us the details?

Rubrik:  Yes, we have two speaking sessions during the event - one breakout session and a theater session.

1)     Protect Your VMs In The Face of Cyberattacks

93% of organizations reported malicious actors attempting to impact data backups during a cyberattack, according to a recent Rubrik Zero Labs report. In spite of this, organizations are failing to protect VMs by relying on legacy backups that are vulnerable to compromise and difficult to restore. Organizations need immutable, air-gapped backups and out-of-band threat detection for their VMs for safer, faster, and more confident recovery. Join this session to learn how Rubrik Security Cloud can help you safely backup your workloads and recover VMware environments from data loss threats.

Speakers:

1)     Alpika Singh, Technical Marketing Architect

2)     Derrin Rummelt, Senior Product Manager

Time: Wednesday, August 23⋅9:30 - 10:15am
Location: Venetian, Level 4 - Lando 4206
Level: T100 Knowledge Application
Track: Networking and Security

2) Test And Validate Your Ability To Recover VMs From a Cyberattack

With the rise in cyberattacks, organizations need to be able to recover their vSphere environments quickly, safely, and with confidence. To ensure you're well-prepared to recover quickly, you need the ability to easily test and validate cyber recovery plans. In this session, you'll learn how you can easily and frequently validate your VM recovery plans in isolated environments.

Speaker: Marc Creviere, Technical Product Manager

Time: Tuesday, August 22⋅11:15 - 11:45am
            Location: Venetian, Hall B&C - Expo Theater 2
            Level: T200 Knowledge Application
            Track: Vision and Innovation

VMblog:  Can you give us the high-level rundown of your company's technology offerings?  What kind of message will an attendee hear from you this year?

Rubrik:  Most VMware customers are using legacy backup solutions as their last-resort cybersecurity option. However, legacy backups were built to protect against natural disasters. That might have been fine a decade ago. But today, cyberattacks are the biggest threat to your VMware data.

If you're going to quickly and successfully recover from a cyberattack, you need a complete data security platform that not only provides a clean, immutable copy of your data, but also helps spot and respond to threats, address affected data more quickly, and avoid reinfection. Only Rubrik offers a complete data security solution designed to keep your VMware data safe against cyber attacks.

Rubrik is designed around three primary pillars - data resilience, data observability, and data remediation.

Data resilience: Rubrik secures data based on zero trust security principles so that data remains readily available. Customers can withstand cyberattacks, malicious insiders, and operational disruptions with air-gapped, immutable, access-controlled backups.

Data observability: Customers can continuously monitor data so organizations can work to proactively prevent attacks from happening before they cause significant damage. Proprietary data risk assessment and anomaly detection engines enable customers to continuously monitor data risks like sensitive data exposure and detect cyber threats such as ransomware.

Data remediation: Customers can orchestrate cyber recovery of their apps and data so they can quickly return to business-as-usual from a cyber attack. Recovery automation and quarantining enable customers to contain threats and rapidly recover apps, files or objects while avoiding malware reinfection.

VMblog:  Talking about your product solutions, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique?  What are your differentiators?  What sets you apart from the competition?

Rubrik:  Rubrik provides the most complete offering in the market that delivers both Cyber Posture and Cyber Recovery features required for an enterprise to be resilient to cyber attacks.

Rubrik delivers tightly integrated data security and user intelligence capabilities under a single platform. This unique approach simplifies data protection for customers, providing a seamless experience to secure their data, wherever it lives, and supports the proactive mitigation of cyber risk before they can be exploited. Some unique and differentiated features include:

Immutable File System:

• Many data security and cyber recovery vendors claim to provide an immutable file system to protect customer data. However, they often utilize legacy approaches such as storage snapshots, redirect on write, or additional offsite/offline storage repositories that leave customer data susceptible.

• Rubrik's append-only file system was purpose-built following Zero Trust principles. There are no APIs/Storage Subsystem calls internally or externally to the platform that can modify data once it has been written, making it immutable.

Anomaly and Ransomware Detection:

• Many competitors stop at anomaly detection. Unfortunately the detection of anomalous file system behavior is only one aspect of detecting cyber attacks.

• In contrast, Rubrik not only leverages file system analysis, but also provides customers with File Content Analysis, which detects encryption and reduces false positives. Furthermore, Rubrik also provides customers with the ability to identify what data was impacted, and recovers only the impacted data, reducing overall recovery times and efforts.

Sensitive Data Monitoring and Management:

• Traditional solutions utilize agents that are placed on the data source, causing performance degradation and increased administrative efforts.

• With Rubrik, data classification policies are run directly against backups, identifying data that matches the policies that are being utilized. This allows organizations to identify sensitive data that should be better secured based on where the data is located and who has access to the data. During a cyber event, customers can utilize Rubrik's integrated Anomaly Detection tools to correlate the data that was encrypted and its sensitivity level.
  

Threat Hunting:

• Given the constantly changing threat landscape, there is no easy way to automatically scan backups with traditional solutions. In addition, there is often a lack of knowledge about threats to hunt for and production systems are overloaded with monitoring overhead.

• Rubrik Threat Hunting prevents malware reinfection by analyzing the history of data for indicators of compromise to identify the initial point, scope, and time of infection.
  

Cyber Recovery:

• Traditional disaster recovery solutions were designed to protect from natural disasters and not from cyber attacks. As a result, they often lack threat detection capabilities, don't offer a simple way to frequently test and validate cyber recovery plans, and don't offer the flexibility to perform forensics in parallel.

• Rubrik Cyber Recovery improves cyber readiness and response with recovery testing and validation in an Isolated Recovery Environment (IRE). Customers can test Recovery Plans (playbooks), clone snapshots for faster cyber readiness assessments, and conduct forensic investigations in parallel to recovery.

VMblog:  What specifically does your company offer a VMware shop or a VMware implementation?  What problems do you solve for them?

Rubrik:  Rubrik offers the broadest and in-depth cyber resilience suite of products for VMWare. The problems we solve for a VMware shop are extensive:

• Fast recovery of VMWare applications from a cyber incident or in a disaster recovery situation - whether its a single VM or thousands of VMs, locally, remote or in the cloud

• Orchestrated Cyber Recovery and Disaster recovery for any VMWare environment whether its in the data center or the Cloud (Azure VMware Solution, VMware Cloud, Google Cloud VMware Engine) with sub minute RPOs and RTOs

• Continuous monitoring for anomalies whether it is encryption or malware at file level or VM level to help understand the blast radius of the attack and which backup/files to restore from

• Sensitive data discovery to identify what types of sensitive data you have and where it lives.

• Global search for malware signatures in backup for faster incident response, especially from security operation centers

• Cyber recovery testing and validation in Isolated Recovery Environments (IRE) to improve cyber readiness and response

• Automated data protection and security via air-gapped, immutable, access-controlled backups centrally managed via a SaaS-based control plane

VMblog:  How does your company work with VMware?  Where do you fit within the VMware ecosystem?

Rubrik:  Rubrik was launched in VMWorld 2015 with our first product that secured VMware data. Now, it is one of our most important workloads, protecting about 15 Exabytes of VMware data around the world. VMware admins rely on Rubrik's high performance data protection and recovery features in our Rubrik Security Cloud for Cyber Resilience. VMWare ecosystem has the greatest depth in terms of coverage from our Cyber Posture and Cyber Recovery solutions including disaster recovery.

VMblog:  VMworld has typically been a launching platform for new products.  At VMware Explore, will your company be announcing anything new?  If so, can you give us a sneak peek?  Or, have you launched anything new recently that you can spotlight for us?

Rubrik:  Yes, we will be launching a new product called AI-Powered Cyber Recovery.

Today, cyberattacks pose the most significant threat to your VMware data. Recovering from cyberattacks is a multifaceted process where organizations must navigate through various technical complexities, involving multiple steps, such as identifying the extent of the attack, determining the affected data, and ensuring complete restoration.

With traditional backup and recovery tools, recovering from cyberattacks often entails manual and time-consuming processes to retrieve clean data from before the attack occurred. This approach can lead to incomplete restorations, prolonged downtime, and significant data loss when restoring data from an early backup.

Additionally, even after recovering clean data from before the attack, there remains a risk of reinfecting malware into production systems due to undetected backdoors or vulnerabilities in the virtual machine's operating system.

Moreover, cyberattacks can still be highly unpredictable. The complexity and sophistication of these attacks make it challenging to establish standardized recovery procedures. Each attack scenario may require different recovery steps, making it difficult for organizations to develop a one-size-fits-all approach. The recovery process could vary significantly, necessitating adaptable and intelligent solutions to navigate through the unknown.

Generative AI emerges as the ideal solution for addressing these challenges, offering expressive and situationally aware guidance that simplifies the recovery process and makes it accessible to any backup admin. By leveraging Generative AI, organizations can lower the barrier to entry for recovery procedures, empowering administrators of all levels to perform recoveries with confidence, while guiding users in an intuitive manner and ensuring efficient data recovery.

Rubrik AI-Powered Cyber Recovery minimizes data loss and reduces downtime through Generative AI-powered recovery task lists and guided workflows. It hydrates VMs using the cleanest, most recent data available, enables safe VM reconstruction using customer-trusted gold master VM templates, and accelerates recovery with customized, AI-enabled guided workflows.

VMblog:  VMware gets the big stage to deliver their message during the keynote sessions.  If you were giving the keynote, what big topics would you discuss?  What big changes or trends do you see taking shape in the industry for 2023 and beyond?

Rubrik:  

Cyber Recovery:

1. The market has a huge lack of consistent protection and cyber recovery for all data, particularly in SaaS and Cloud. Data is increasingly moving to SaaS applications which are at the cusp of being disrupted by cyber events. Rubrik plans to differentiate itself by significantly expanding coverage of SaaS applications for Cyber Recovery. Logical air-gapped data protection ensures that the data is fully available for granular recovery and even for out of place restores
2. AI and Automation of Cyber Recovery: Automation of cyber recovery function is a huge opportunity for Rubrik to lower cost for customers and expand share of wallet of Cyber Recovery spend which is very labor intensive today. Our ability to partner and bring in innovation and simplicity will be our differentiator

Cyber Posture: Leveraging our copies of users and data over time, more insights can be derived that can result in earlier detection of risks and vulnerabilities. This is a huge unexplored area that is ripe for innovation. Rubrik shall invest heavily to expand our cyber posture portfolio to differentiate ourselves further from the competition.

VMblog:  Are you giving away any prizes at your booth or participating in any prize giveaways?

Rubrik:  We have two giveaways at the Data Security Lounge #A511

• Tuesday at 5:00 PM - Shibui Pure Malt 10 year Japanese Whisky

• Wednesday at 5:00 PM - Shokz OpenRun Headset

On Thursday after the show is over, we will also be giving away a $500 Visa gift card.

VMblog:  Is your company sponsoring any type of party or get together during the event?

Rubrik:  On Tuesday at 7:00 pm, we are hosting an exclusive happy hour, Toki Tuesday, at Wakuda in the Palazzo Hotel.