The annual State CIO Top 10 priorities list issued by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers shows that while the technology initiatives remain relatively unchanged, there is a slight shuffle around priorities. Cybersecurity continues to take the number one spot and will likely be the case for years to come, given the increase in ransomware attacks across industries and organizations of all sizes.
Rubrik, the Zero Trust Data Security™ company, delivers data security and operational resilience on a single platform. It is our mission to protect data, so organizations from the public and private sectors can continue to serve their customers, citizens, and constituents.
Looking at the list of priorities, here is how Rubrik helps State, Local, and Education (SLED) organizations deliver and meet their goals.
For #1 Cybersecurity and Risk Management
Rubrik Security Cloud was engineered from a security-first perspective. The foundation of the solution is our proprietary, append-only file system that prevents the modification and deletion of data so that it is readily available for recovery. Rubrik’s breadth of data security capabilities are delivered in a single, integrated solution, and includes:
Logical air gap technology so data cannot be discovered, accessed, or modified by unauthorized users
Immutable file system: once written, the data cannot be modified, encrypted, or deleted
Advanced authentication: customizable RBAC, SAMF support, MFA, TOTP with granular role-based access control
Prevent unauthorized disclosure of data, at-rest and in-transit, using strong encryption
Ransomware detection and investigation to discover data anomalies
Incident containment to prevent malware reinfection
Orchestrated application recovery to aid teams to restore in hours, not weeks
Our latest Threat Hunting capabilities allow you to directly scan backups for indicators of compromise (IoC), including ransomware. With this added intelligence you can more accurately identify the last known clean copy of data in order to prevent reinfection during and after recovery. And on top of just knowing where the IoCs are, our customers can also scan for and discover where sensitive data resides and who has access, thus enabling a more educated response in the event of a cyber incident.
For #4 Legacy Modernization
A critical step in creating digital governments and improving experiences for citizens and employees is IT systems modernization. Legacy backup technologies are slow, brittle, and complex and were not built to support digital transformation and the rising of cloud adoption. In addition, recovery is typically time-consuming. IT practitioners cannot identify the scope of the attack or quickly locate the most recent clean data to restore quickly, so legacy backup tools are not a reliable recovery solution following a ransomware attack.
Rubrik provides a modern backup and recovery solution that simplifies data protection with a policy-based approach, ensures rapid recovery, and provides ransomware resilience. Rubrik delivers:
Single software fabric and simple install, so you can be up and running in minutes. You can reduce tool fragmentation by centralizing hybrid and multi-cloud workload protection. Our SLED customers were able to see 70-90% operational savings.
Policy-based backup and data lifecycle management (2-3 policies vs. 1000s of backup jobs) allow you to meet and exceed business SLAs and reduce administrative time by up to 85%.
Quick recovery of immutable data, so you can lower RTOs and RPOs and increase resilience from downtime, attacks and disasters.
Rubrik was also built to be API- first, so you can leverage the APIs to extend automation across your environment and effectively integrate with reporting, SIEM, and other critical IT tools.
For #6 Cloud Services
Whether you are lifting-and-shifting workloads, building new applications that leverage native cloud services, archiving to the cloud, or protecting Microsoft 365, Rubrik helps you accelerate and de-risk your cloud journey.
For cloud-native workloads, Rubrik helps you:
Automatically discover, protect, organize, and manage data and apps across multi-clouds through a single interface
Achieve near-zero RTO for critical apps across cloud workloads with flexible recovery options, including per object and per file
Consolidate your cloud and on-premises reporting for a standardized approach to digital compliance and control
Archive data to different cloud solutions and/or tiers, with smart automatic tiering of the data by timestamp, pointing it to the lowest-cost storage by data type in the cloud
In addition to cloud-native data protection, Rubrik also allows SLED institutions to:
Protect petabytes of NAS data and archive to any object storage or any cloud tier with NAS Cloud Direct
Do you have large video files from traffic cameras or volumes of IoT data from smart meters across town? Do you need to retain research records or better secure your students’ files? NAS Cloud Direct makes it simple to balance security and performance at a petabyte scale and mobilizes unstructured data from NAS systems to public or private cloud as well as to on-prem storage targets for optimal and secure storage and archival.
Keep account-isolated, off-site data copy with Rubrik Cloud Vault
Built-in conjunction with Microsoft on Azure Immutable Blob Storage, Rubrik Cloud Vault allows organizations to secure, retain and recover from ransomware with immutable, logically air-gapped copy of backup data. The account-isolated data copy assures you have clean, off-site data, readily available for recovery. This fully managed service also comes at a predictable cost that includes storage and egress charges, so organizations can accurately budget for it.
Secure your critical Microsoft 365 Data
Microsoft 365 has truly become a Tier 1 application across many organizations, including SLED. While Microsoft provides perimeter defense and compliance, its governance tools are not designed for recovery in the event of account compromise or accidental data deletion. Rubrik provides policy-based protection of Microsoft 365 and delivers security, simplicity, and performance for search and restore operations across Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams.
For #8 Data and Information Management
As mentioned at the end of item #1 Rubrik helps with Sensitive Data Discovery, so you can discover, classify, and report on what types of sensitive data reside where and who has access to it. You can easily surface the risk of what sensitive data is potentially exposed in a data exfiltration ransomware attack. Knowing what data you have helps you secure it by managing where it is stored and who can access it.
We can keep writing about Rubrik’s breadth and depth of capabilities. But instead, we invite you to check some inspiring customer stories from fellow cities, states, and educational institutions. We encourage you to get in touch with us, so we can tell you more about Rubrik Security Cloud and see a live demo.