Rubrik

Overview

Rubrik offers a data security platform focused on ransomware recovery and data resilience across hybrid cloud environments. The company, founded in 2014, provides solutions that aim to secure data from cyberattacks, operational failures, and compliance risks through features like immutable backups and data threat analytics.

The core of Rubrik's offering is the Rubrik Security Cloud, which integrates various services including data protection, ransomware recovery, and sensitive data discovery. This platform is designed to provide visibility into data security posture and automate recovery processes. Rubrik's approach emphasizes data immutability, which means backups cannot be altered or deleted by ransomware, providing a clean state for recovery operations.

Rubrik targets enterprise organizations that require robust data protection strategies for complex IT infrastructures, including on-premises data centers, private clouds, and public cloud services like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Its platform is suitable for industries with stringent compliance requirements, such as healthcare (HIPAA), finance, and government, due to its support for standards like SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001.

Beyond traditional backup and recovery, Rubrik provides tools for automated sensitive data discovery and classification. This capability helps organizations identify where sensitive information resides and assess its exposure risk, contributing to compliance efforts like GDPR. The platform also includes data threat analytics, which monitors data for anomalies that could indicate an ongoing attack, enabling earlier detection and response.

From a developer's perspective, Rubrik provides a comprehensive API to enable programmatic interaction with its platform. This allows for the automation of data protection and recovery tasks, integration with existing IT workflows, and custom policy enforcement. SDKs are available to simplify development, offering tools for managing snapshots, configuring policies, and orchestrating recovery operations programmatically.

Key features

• Immutable Backups: Creates unchangeable copies of data that cannot be modified or deleted by external threats, ensuring a clean recovery point during ransomware attacks.
• Ransomware Recovery: Provides tools for rapid recovery of business-critical data and applications following a ransomware incident, minimizing downtime.
• Sensitive Data Discovery: Automatically identifies and classifies sensitive data across various environments, helping organizations comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
• Data Threat Analytics: Leverages machine learning to detect anomalous activity and potential threats to data, providing alerts and insights into attack patterns.
• Hybrid Cloud Data Protection: Unified data protection and management across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud infrastructures (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud).
• Policy-Based Automation: Automates data protection policies, including backup schedules, retention periods, and replication, based on predefined rules.
• API and SDKs: Offers a comprehensive API for integrating Rubrik into existing IT operations and workflows, with SDKs available for developers to build custom solutions.
• Compliance Reporting: Generates reports to demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements such as SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA.

Pricing

Rubrik's pricing model is based on custom enterprise agreements. Specific costs are determined by factors such as the volume of data protected, the number of protected workloads, chosen features, and deployment model (on-premises appliance, software-defined, or cloud-native).

For detailed pricing information, organizations are advised to contact Rubrik directly for a personalized quote based on their specific infrastructure and requirements. More information is available on the Rubrik pricing page.

Common integrations

Rubrik integrates with various enterprise technologies to extend its data protection and security capabilities:

• Virtualization Platforms: VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV (via Rubrik documentation for VMware vCenter integration).
• Cloud Platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform for cloud-native data protection and archival.
• Databases: Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, SAP HANA, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL for application-consistent backups.
• Enterprise Applications: Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory.
• Storage Systems: NAS devices (SMB/NFS), SAN storage.
• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Systems: Integration with SIEM platforms for alerting and centralized security monitoring.
• Orchestration and Automation Tools: ServiceNow, Ansible, and custom scripts via Rubrik's API (Rubrik API Overview).

Alternatives

• Cohesity: Offers a hyperconverged secondary storage platform focused on data management, backup, and recovery across hybrid cloud environments. Cohesity's approach also emphasizes ransomware resilience and data consolidation (Cohesity ransomware recovery solutions).
• Veeam: Provides backup, recovery, and data management solutions for virtual, physical, and cloud-based workloads, known for its extensive support for VMware and Hyper-V environments.
• Commvault: Offers a broad suite of data management software, including backup and recovery, data archiving, disaster recovery, and data security solutions for enterprise customers.

Getting started

Developers can begin interacting with the Rubrik platform using its RESTful API. The API allows for the automation of various tasks, such as managing snapshots, configuring data protection policies, and orchestrating recovery operations. The following Python example demonstrates how to authenticate with the Rubrik API and list protected virtual machines (VMs). This example assumes you have an API client (e.g., requests) and appropriate credentials.

import requests
import json

# Replace with your Rubrik cluster IP or FQDN and API token
RUBRIK_HOST = "your_rubrik_cluster_address"
API_TOKEN = "your_rubrik_api_token"

HEADERS = {
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    "Accept": "application/json",
    "Authorization": f"Bearer {API_TOKEN}"
}

def get_protected_vms():
    url = f"https://{RUBRIK_HOST}/api/v1/vmware/vm"
    try:
        response = requests.get(url, headers=HEADERS, verify=False) # verify=False for self-signed certs in lab env
        response.raise_for_status() # Raise an HTTPError for bad responses (4xx or 5xx)
        vms_data = response.json()
        print("Successfully retrieved protected VMs:")
        for vm in vms_data.get("data", []):
            print(f"  Name: {vm['name']}, ID: {vm['id']}")
    except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as http_err:
        print(f"HTTP error occurred: {http_err} - {response.text}")
    except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError as conn_err:
        print(f"Connection error occurred: {conn_err}")
    except Exception as err:
        print(f"An unexpected error occurred: {err}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    get_protected_vms()

Before running this code, ensure you have the requests library installed (pip install requests). You will need to replace your_rubrik_cluster_address with the actual IP address or fully qualified domain name of your Rubrik cluster and your_rubrik_api_token with an API token generated from your Rubrik security settings. The verify=False parameter in the requests.get call is used to bypass SSL certificate verification, which might be necessary in lab environments with self-signed certificates; for production environments, proper certificate validation is recommended. For more details on API usage and authentication, refer to the official Rubrik API documentation.