The News: At AWS re:Invent 2023, Rubrik announced the expansion of its portfolio to allow customers further visibility into where sensitive Amazon S3 data lives and who has access to it while creating effective recovery plans – with general availability planned for early 2024. It also announced new data protection features for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and the availability of its NAS Cloud Direct in AWS Marketplace. Additional details are available on Rubrik’s website.
Rubrik Enhances Protection for Amazon S3 and EKS
Analyst Take: The data protection market is in flux, driven primarily by three core requirements:
- The need to keep up with the protection requirements of an ever-broadening mixture of on- and off-premises applications and infrastructure.
- The need to address the growing demand for cloud-hosted and as-a-service delivered data protection services, including backup software and the backup storage and disaster recovery infrastructure targets.
- Last—and, of course, significantly far from least—the need to prevent and ensure rapid recovery from cyberattacks.
Rubrik is responding in kind, evolving from its roots as a hyperconverged backup appliance vendor to add threat analytics, security posture readiness, and cyber recovery capabilities to its core data protection competencies with its Security Cloud architecture.
The vendor used AWS re:Invent to unveil enhanced protection capabilities for Amazon S3 data. This functionality is important because object storage has become relevant in various primary use cases across industries, serving as a scalable and efficient solution for managing vast amounts of unstructured data. In particular, cloud-native applications are being written to use object storage as the primary target, creating a different usage of object that is not as a content repository but rather for more dynamic data, changing the protection requirements. Thus, although object storage is designed for availability and redundancy, it requires protection capabilities such as encryption, immutability, and access controls.
For its part, Rubrik is going beyond adding additional protection features, drawing from its recent acquisition of data security posture management (DSPM) company Laminar to facilitate visibility into where sensitive Amazon S3 data lives, how it is secured, and who has access to it. This addition complements Rubrik’s ability to discover and classify data, monitor for potentially nefarious activity, and identify and rapidly recover from the most recent clean recovery point.
In keeping with the theme of protecting emerging workloads, alongside the enhancements for S3, Rubrik announced additional capabilities for protecting Amazon EKS container environments. It also has added its NAS data protection and archival service for availability through the AWS Marketplace – allowing software as a service (SaaS) procurement of the protection software in addition to the ability to back up NAS data to the cloud.
In conclusion, Rubrik’s focus on protecting the full range of core and emerging workloads that modern enterprises are relying on, coupled with its long-standing focus on building out capabilities complementary to its core data protection space, should not be overlooked. These markets are crowded and competitive, however, and The Futurum Group believes that Rubrik’s messaging has over-pivoted to security, which lends to market confusion. Leaning into technical differentiators—such as Laminar—can help Rubrik to clarify its position and expand its footprint especially in modern environments.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
The Need for Cyber Resilience: A Conversation with Rubrik – Futurum Tech Webcast
Rubrik’s AI-Powered Cyber Recovery Minimizes Data Loss and Downtime
Data Security’s Uncertain Future: What You Need to Know – Futurum Tech Webcast
Author Information
With a focus on data security, protection, and management, Krista has a particular focus on how these strategies play out in multi-cloud environments. She brings approximately 15 years of experience providing research and advisory services and creating thought leadership content. Her vantage point spans technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her work has appeared in major publications including eWeek, TechTarget and The Register.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, Krista led the data protection practice for Evaluator Group and the data center practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research. She also created articles, product analyses, and blogs on all things storage and data protection and management for analyst firm Storage Switzerland and led market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
