In the cloud era, a legacy data protection solution is not enough to keep up with the bad actors.
Cloud comes with a whole host of new threats. Multi-tenancy means you have to ensure your instance is properly isolated from your cloud neighbors. Remote access introduces new attack surfaces and concerns about user credentials. And the shared responsibility security model introduces new confusion about who is in charge of securing different parts of your cloud instance.
It’s clear you need a resilient cloud security solution, one that provides not only backup and recovery but also employs a defense-in-depth approach to ensure backups can always serve as your last line of defense.
Rubrik offers a suite of advanced security features designed to protect, manage, and recover critical data across various cloud environments. From ensuring that backups are air-gapped, immutable, and secure to leveraging the time series history to provide key security insights, Rubrik Security Cloud can help safeguard your digital assets against the evolving security landscape. Indeed, security is woven into the very fabric of Rubrik Security Cloud.
Let’s have a look!
Secure by Design - The Foundation of Rubrik’s Platform Security
At the core of Rubrik’s innovative platform lies a steadfast commitment to security. By integrating the principles of a Zero Trust model, continuous authentication, authorization, and encryption are infused throughout the system. Rubrik's holistic approach extends beyond safeguarding against external threats; it's about creating a resilient ecosystem where data integrity and availability are paramount.
Let’s take a look at some examples of Rubrik’s platform security.
Robust Access Controls
Rubrik ensures that users logging into the platform are who they say they are, and can only perform the activities they need to to perform. Through Single Sign-On (SSO), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Rubrik authenticates authorized users for access to underlying resources. RBAC further refines user permissions based on their roles within an organization, minimizing potential internal threats.
Advanced Encryption
Rubrik ensures data is encrypted both during transmission (inflight) and while stored (at rest), protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access and breaches. Leveraging industry-standard encryption, along with customer data segmentation, Rubrik ensures data can only be read by trusted sources within your environment. Depending on deployment types, Rubrik provides customers with the option to use Rubrik generated keys, native cloud provider encryption methods, or customer managed keys, allowing organizations complete control over their data access. On top of this, tablestake processes such as key rotation, re-keying, and key revocation are in place within the Rubrik platform.
Logging, Reporting, and Auditing
Rubrik provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities, monitoring identities, data, and patterns to detect anomalous activity. This allows organizations to respond to potential threats swiftly. Through Rubrik’s support of webhooks and alerts, events within Rubrik Security Cloud can be easily sent to nearly any SIEM/SOAR solution, with pre-built integrations provided for Microsoft Sentinel, Palo Alto Networks XSOAR, and Crowdstrike Falcon LogScale.
On top of this, our API-first architecture and pre-built playbooks make it easy for security teams to integrate Rubrik processes such as Anomaly Detection, Sensitive Data Monitoring, Threat Hunting, and Threat Monitoring directly into the SOAR tool sets they use everyday.
Enhancing next-level security in Cloud Native Protection
As organizations migrate to the cloud, securing production data becomes paramount. But even with extraordinary efforts to shield critical information from cyber threats, data breaches, and accidental loss, bad actors still wreak havoc on cloud environments. And the bad guys aren’t just targeting production environments anymore—they are taking aim at backup data as well.
It is critical to recognize that backups (essentially clones of your principal data) warrant the same level of vigilant protection. After all, what benefit is a backup if it's just as vulnerable as the data it's meant to safeguard?
Rubrik’s Cloud Native Protection solution was built with this in mind, embedding backup security into the platform at every layer.
Let’s take a look at few key features:
Immutability
Rubrik stores your cloud native backups to immutable storage. That means that once data has been processed by Rubrik, it can't be modified, altered, or changed by any external entities. To provide immutability within the cloud, Rubrik leverages cloud-based feature sets such as S3 Object Lock for AWS, and Immutable Storage for Azure Blob Storage, to protect your backups as a last line of defense against cyberattack.
Air Gapped Backups
Air gapping cloud backups is essential. If a cloud account is compromised, attackers will often look to find and destroy any backups within the same account. Rubrik protects against these scenarios by allowing organizations to bunker their data to different regions—or better yet, entirely different cloud accounts. Furthermore, Rubrik Cloud Vault, a fully managed cloud storage solution, can also host cloud backups, providing organizations with storage that sits completely outside of their identity landscape.
Retention Lock and Quorum Authorization
While immutability protects against unauthorized access to the data, organizations must also worry about authorized access. For instance, what if a rogue administrator or an attacker with stolen credentials decides to simply log in and change the retention settings of a Rubrik SLA? In this scenario, backups could be marked for deletion, ensuring the success of a cyberattack.
To protect against this, Retention Lock can be configured on a Rubrik SLA—this means that any change to an SLA that would result in a shorter retention period would be essentially blocked. In order to officially make this change, Quorum Authorization requires that at least two designated users within the organization provide approval before the retention change can be made, ensuring backups are available when you need them.
True Least Privileged Access
Organizations today are relying more and more on clean rooms and minimum viable recovery environments to assist with both root cause analysis and recovery efforts. In order for these environments to function securely, strict isolation and access requirements must be adhered to. This involves ensuring that users and applications don’t need long-standing write access into these environments.
With Rubrik, organizations that use Microsoft Azure as their cloud of choice can take advantage of our Least Privilege Access features, which essentially allows Rubrik to operate without any long-standing write access into its recovery environments. When the time comes for a restoration, Rubrik can be granted temporary write access into the environment and once complete, access is then automatically removed. This not only adheres to good security practices, but decreases an organization's overall risk.
Empower security teams with Rubrik’s unique time-series data insights
Rubrik does more than provide backup and recovery for cloud data; it acts as a comprehensive time-machine for your digital assets. This cloud-centric approach not only safeguards your dynamic cloud environments but transforms your backups into a comprehensive catalog that preserves historical data snapshots and unlocks a wealth of insights from this time-series repository. This dynamic archive allows you to track and analyze how your data changes over time, detect anomalies that could indicate potential security threats or system malfunctions, and understand the nature of your data, including its sensitivity and compliance requirements.
By charting where your data resides, who accesses it, and what they do with it, Rubrik offers more than a mere recovery solution—it provides a powerful, insight-driven approach to data governance that is as proactive as it is protective.
These insights can be categorized into the following four categories:
Data Threat Analytics
Rubrik’s Data Threat Analytics provides Anomaly Detection and Threat Monitoring capabilities against protected resources within RSC. Anomaly Detection works by leveraging the rich metadata generated by Rubrik after each backup, and sending that through a two-stage machine learning process that both discovers anomalies between backups and scans for signs of encryption. In the end, customers are alerted to any modifications, additions, or deletions within their backups that are deemed suspicious, along with predictions around any ransomware strains discovered, and their subsequent ransomware notes. This allows customers to quickly determine the blast radius of an attack, and identify the exact workloads, down to the folder/file level that have been compromised by the attack.
Furthermore, Rubik's Threat Monitoring feature allows organizations to scan for indicators of compromise within their backups, either through file hashes/patterns or YARA rules. Using these scanning capabilities, organizations can quickly identify what point in time backups still contain signs of malware, allowing them to easily quarantine snapshots to ensure that they cannot be recovered, giving administrators peace of mind that they won’t simply just reinfect their environment at a later date.
Data Discovery and Classification
The next logical step in remediating a cyber attack is to gain an understanding of the types of data that have been compromised. Rubrik’s Data Discovery and Classification processes allow organizations to easily discover and classify sensitive data within their environments, be it located on-premises, in the cloud, or delivered through SaaS models. This allows organizations to easily identify risk within their environments, and analyze data proliferation over time across their different workload and environment types, ensuring that the highest level of security is applied to their workloads containing highly sensitive information.
Data Risk Management
Rubrik’s Data Risk Management builds on top of Data Classification features, allowing organizations to eliminate or archive unused or stagnant data, while ensuring that the remaining data has been protected appropriately. This can reduce cloud storage costs and lower overall data risk. Furthermore, organizations can leverage Data Risk Management features to identify overexposed data within the cloud (data that is public or internet-facing) and align data protection with published security standards and regulations.
Data Access Governance
Rubrik’s Data Access Governance provides much the same risk analysis as Data Risk Management, but focuses on users and identities within your organization. The goal is to minimize excessive and unqualified access to sensitive data. This means classifying users with access to sensitive data as high-risk identities and right-sizing their permissions to limit the attack surface should the account become compromised. In the event an attack occurs, Data Access Governance can accelerate your incident response and forensics by tracing activity that lead to the breach.
Data Detection and Response
Data Detection and Response provides organizations with the ability to detect suspicious and malicious data activity within their cloud environments. This includes continuous monitoring to help ensure that all sensitive objects are audited for malicious activity, and reducing the overall noise of alerts by prioritizing activity and monitoring notifications based on how sensitive the data or objects affected are. Finally, full integration into leading SIEM and SOAR tools allow organizations to reduce their Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) by leveraging the data context from Rubrik to automatically kick off playbooks to investigate threats further.
Security Embedded, Not Appended
In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud security, Rubrik emerges as a trailblazer—offering a comprehensive suite of security features that not only fortify your cloud data but also provide unparalleled insights into its lifecycle. By seamlessly integrating with your cloud infrastructure, Rubrik ensures that your data is protected at every stage, from backup to recovery, while also empowering you with the tools to detect anomalies, manage access control, and helps you meets compliance requirements.
With an innovative approach to data cataloging and time-series analysis, Rubrik transforms your backup data into a powerful asset, enabling you to make informed decisions about your cloud security posture. As organizations navigate the complexities of securing their cloud environments, Rubrik stands as a steadfast partner, providing the cutting-edge technology and expertise needed to safeguard your most valuable digital assets. With Rubrik, you can confidently embrace the cloud, knowing that your data is not only protected but also intelligently managed, ensuring the resilience and success of your organization in the face of ever-evolving cyber threats.
Learn more about how to get started with Rubrik cloud solutions.
Safe Harbor Statement: Any unreleased services or features referenced in this article are not currently available and may not be made generally available on time or at all, as may be determined in our sole discretion. Any such referenced services or features do not represent promises to deliver, commitments, or obligations of Rubrik, Inc. and may not be incorporated into any contract. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon services and features that are currently generally available.