Today, we launched FORWARD Digital Summit, the premier Cloud Data Management conference reimagined as an interactive, fully-virtual experience. Almost 8,000 global data management professionals joined FORWARD, where they dove into our latest product innovations, gained insight into how backup data can be leveraged to manage enterprise risk, and heard from the boldest thinkers as we all tread through uncharted waters in today’s market. We were especially humbled to feature speakers from our customers, including Allstate, The Home Depot, Analog Devices, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, University of the Pacific, Canterbury Christ Church University, University of Reading, and City of Sioux Falls.

The event delivered keynotes and 29 breakout sessions from our leadership team, end users, and industry experts, which we’ll be offering on-demand. There’s a lot to navigate through, so here are the top highlights from FORWARD:

Welcome to the World of the Data-Forward Enterprise
Our CEO and co-founder Bipul Sinha introduced the foundational purpose of the Rubrik platform. As he simply put it: “Data is eating the world.” Within 10 years, 50 billion connected devices will generate over 175 zettabytes of data. This coupled with changing everyday needs (think data compliance, governance, security, mobility–all at massive scale) ushers in the need to transform into a Data-Forward Enterprise to forge competitive differentiation. Data leverage  becomes a defining separator between innovative, competitive businesses and ones stuck in the mode of tradition. 

So what is data leverage? It comes from truly understanding your data with well-managed metadata, which contains information on the apps producing the data, active users, change patterns, and more. The richer the metadata, the more exponentially your data leverage grows. As Bipul explained, metadata has been a fundamental building block of our platform. We took business problems and converted them into data operators on metadata to build cutting-edge, end-to-end solutions. This is the core of the Rubrik Polaris Data Management Platform, which empowers Data-Forward Enterprises to simplify application availability, recover quickly from ransomware, and manage sensitive data risk. 

App Awareness Fuels Blazingly Fast Recovery Anywhere
In this new world, modern enterprises are ramming into an entirely different problem space. How do you exploit the cloud in a cost-efficient manner? How do you build a framework that delivers on-demand self-service access to data and instant recovery? 

CTO and Co-founder Arvind Nithrakashyap walked through the four properties of the Rubrik Polaris Data Management Platform–app awareness, cloud-readiness, immutability, and API-first approach–and how they combat the above challenges while also activating data leverage. This ultimately starts with app awareness: leveraging the powerful combo of backup data + metadata to liberate data from infrastructure. App awareness fuels data protection needs such as instant data access, blazingly fast recovery, exploiting cloud, and API-driven automation, all of which are driven with the Rubrik platform. 

Advancing the Rubrik Polaris Data Management Platform
Let’s face it. Legacy backup and recovery solutions suck–they’re complex, slow, expensive, and offer no path to cloud. Rubrik changed the game in backup and recovery with its SLA engine that eliminates 99% of your backup jobs, instant recovery that eliminates your data commute time, a 30-50% lower TCO, and a cloud-native approach.

At FORWARD, I introduced some of our new groundbreaking advancements. We turbocharged our backup and recovery offerings with our Andes 5.2 release, delivering 5x faster recovery speeds for monster VMware VMs with multi-node data streaming (up to 3x faster than the competition). If you had allocated an hour to backup, you can shorten it to 20 minutes or less. In the past year, we introduced Instant Recovery for Oracle databases. In fact, our customer recovered a 23TB Oracle database in 30 seconds vs. the 5-6 hours it normally required. 

Today, we’re thrilled to expand on our cloud solutions with three major advancements to the Rubrik Polaris Data Management Platform. These advancements are delivered as SaaS applications (no additional infrastructure required to setup, manage, and scale), utilize our hallmark SLA engine to automate policy protection, and deliver blazingly fast recovery performance in the cloud.

  • Rubrik Polaris Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Protection: Add hundreds of GCP projects with just a few clicks and use the same SLA engine to automate policy protection across the GCP organization. Recoveries are done in minutes, even in the cloud! 
  • Rubrik Polaris Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Protection: Automate protection of Amazon RDS instances across all availability zones. Execute point-in-time recoveries with transaction logs in minutes. Our RBAC controls allow DBAs to backup and recover their RDS instances.
  • Rubrik Polaris Microsoft 365 OneDrive Protection: Securely recover files and folders in the time it takes to brew a cup of coffee while complying with enterprise data control requirements (data never leaves your accounts). 

Today, we’re also opening up Early Access to Rubrik Polaris GCP, AWS RDS, and Microsoft 365 OneDrive Protection. If you’re interested, make sure you contact your Rubrik sales representative. 

Do More with Your Backup Data
Through our unique platform approach, we’ve been able to build data operators on the metadata to provide not just recovery, but also cyber-resiliency and data governance. Kevin Mortimer, Head of Operations at the University of Reading, discussed how his team is leveraging Rubrik Polaris Radar and our platform’s native immutability to fend off increasing ransomware attacks. To support GDPR compliance, the University of Reading uses Rubrik Polaris Sonar to discover and classify sensitive data. Kevin shared: “What really attracted me to Rubrik was the ability to take that metadata, and add value back to the organization while mitigating future problems.”

Thank you to all of our customers, partners, and community members who joined us today at FORWARD Digital Summit. We look forward to continuing our journey together and untapping even more ways to unlock new value from your backup data. In the meantime, watch our keynotes and breakout sessions on-demand here and check out the 2-min recap below.

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