If your CIO and CISO ask whether you're better protected with storage snapshots or backup systems, the honest answer might surprise them: you need both.
But until now, these two technologies have been working in isolation. As a result, the industry has been caught in a false debate for years. Storage teams champion snapshots for their speed and efficiency. Backup teams advocate for comprehensive protection and long-term retention. Meanwhile, security teams are left trying to piece together threat intelligence across fragmented systems that don't communicate and identify which data they can trust.
The uncomfortable reality? This siloed approach is exactly what cybercriminals exploit. While you're debating snapshots versus backups, attackers are compromising both. Research shows that 74% of ransomware attacks successfully breach backup systems, but here's what's worse: when disaster strikes, most IT teams have no reliable way to determine which recovery points—whether snapshots or backups—are actually safe to use.
What if the entire debate has been missing the point? What if instead of choosing between snapshots and backups, you could finally make them work together intelligently?
The False Choice That's Compromising Your Recovery
The snapshot vs. backup argument has created artificial divisions in data protection strategies:
The Storage Team's Perspective: "Snapshots give us RPOs as low as 5 minutes and near-instant recovery. Why wait hours for backup restoration when we can recover in minutes?"
The Backup Team's Perspective: "Snapshots are great until your primary storage is compromised. You need immutable, isolated copies, and comprehensive threat detection."
The Security Team's Reality: "Both are blind to threats. When ransomware hits, nobody can tell me which recovery points are clean."
This fragmentation creates critical gaps in cyber resilience. Storage snapshots provide speed but limited threat visibility. Backup systems offer security but operate independently from primary storage intelligence. The result? During a cyberattack, you're forced to choose between fast recovery from potentially infected snapshots or slow recovery from backups you hope are clean.
Consider what happens during a typical ransomware incident with traditional approaches:
- Storage teams can restore snapshots in minutes, but have no way to verify they're free from dormant malware.
- Backup teams can validate that their copies are immutable, but can't quickly correlate threats with specific primary storage snapshots.
- Security teams spend days analyzing compromised systems while business operations remain down.
- Recovery becomes a gamble: restore fast and risk reinfection, or restore slowly and hemorrhage revenue?
The Integration That Changes Everything
The new Cyber Resilience Visibility Integration between Rubrik and Pure Storage eliminates this false choice by creating the industry's first threat intelligence integration between a cyber resilience platform and an enterprise storage platform.
Here's what makes this different: when Rubrik Security Cloud detects indicators of compromise during its continuous scanning of backup data, it automatically shares that threat intelligence with Pure1 Workflow Automation. Pure's system then tags the specific FlashArray volumes and SafeMode snapshots that contain those same threats. This gives you instant visibility into which primary storage recovery points are safe.
This requires more than just connecting up an API—it’s based on intelligent threat correlation across your entire data protection stack. For the first time, your storage snapshots and backup systems share a unified understanding of which data is compromised and which data is clean.
How Integrated Threat Intelligence Actually Works
The technical implementation demonstrates why this integration delivers capabilities that neither solution could provide alone:
Proactive Threat Hunting at Scale: Rubrik Security Cloud continuously indexes and hashes all protected data. It compares these hash signatures against live threat intelligence feeds such as Mandiant's database of 1.5 million known threat hashes and more than 6,000 YARA rules. This creates a pre-computed intelligence layer that can analyze 75,000 backup snapshots in less than 60 seconds—a process that would take traditional solutions weeks or months.
Cross-Platform Threat Correlation: When Rubrik identifies indicators of compromise, entropy anomalies, or suspicious encryption patterns, it doesn't just quarantine the affected backup data. The Pure1 Workflow Automation API allows Rubrik to query Pure Storage systems to identify which FlashArray volumes and SafeMode snapshots contain the same compromised data blocks.
Automated Clean/Dirty Tagging: Pure1 automatically tags primary storage snapshots based on Rubrik's threat intelligence. Your storage administrators can see which snapshots are verified clean and which contain known threats from their familiar Pure interface. No separate security tools or complex correlation required.
Orchestrated Clean Recovery: As a result, when it comes time to recover data, you don’t have to choose between speed and security. Pure SafeMode snapshots can be restored with confidence in seconds because Rubrik threat intelligence has already verified they're clean. For more complex recovery scenarios, Rubrik immutable backups provide surgical restoration capabilities with the same threat visibility.
The Complete 3-2-1-1-0 Architecture Advantage
This integration enables the first truly intelligent implementation of the modern 3-2-1-1-0 rule—three copies of data, on two different media types, with one copy off-site, one copy offline/immutable, and zero errors, Here’s how the architecture is designed:
Primary Copy (Pure FlashArray): SafeMode takes snapshots every 5 minutes and creates immutable, indelible recovery points that can't be altered, even if administrator credentials are compromised. With sub-millisecond latency and 99.9999% availability, you get enterprise-grade performance with tamper-proof protection.
Secondary Copy (Rubrik Secure Vault): Zero-trust immutable backups use a proprietary append-only filesystem on hardened Linux with no shell access. Multi-factor authentication, retention locks, and logical air-gapping (no SMB/NFS protocols that attackers exploit) create true backup isolation.
Archive Copy (Pure FlashBlade): You get long-term, cost-effective retention with object lock immutability. Automated lifecycle management moves data from Rubrik to FlashBlade based on policy, with the ability to recover entire catalogs if needed.
Unified Threat Intelligence: This is a game-changer: now all three layers share threat visibility. A compromise detected in any layer automatically informs the security posture of all other layers.
Why Competitors Can't Replicate This Advantage
Other storage vendors might claim similar snapshot capabilities and other backup vendors might tout threat detection. But the architectural integration of the Rubrik/Pure solution creates advantages that can't be bolted together, such as:
Exclusive Pure1 Integration: Rubrik is the only cyber resilience platform with native Pure1 Workflow Automation integration. Competitors need to build custom APIs and manage complex correlation logic to match what Rubrik and Pure have engineered together.
Pre-Computed vs. Reactive Analysis: While competitors perform threat scanning during recovery (when every second counts), Rubrik's hash-based intelligence performs the heavy analysis continuously in the background. During an incident, threat correlation happens in seconds, not hours.
Native Performance Integration: Pure's all-flash architecture with 150μs-1ms latency enables terabyte-scale recovery in minutes. Competitors using traditional storage arrays force you to choose between fast recovery and secure recovery.
Shared Engineering Roadmap: This isn't a compatibility certification—it's joint product development. As new threat vectors emerge and recovery requirements evolve, both platforms evolve together rather than requiring separate vendor coordination.
The Business Impact of Eliminating Guesswork
When you can confidently answer which data is clean across your entire infrastructure, you transform your organization's cyber resilience:
- Predictable Recovery Times: Instead of hoping your recovery strategy works, you know exactly which recovery points are clean and how fast you can restore them. Pure snapshots verified by Rubrik intelligence can recover hundreds of terabytes in seconds.
- Reduced Business Risk: Eliminate the danger of recovering infected data that causes reinfection and extends downtime. Your cyber insurance requirements for immutable, air-gapped backups with threat detection are satisfied across the entire stack.
- Operational Confidence: Your storage team, backup team, and security team finally work from the same threat intelligence. No more conflicting recommendations or finger-pointing during crisis recovery.
- Compliance Simplification: Auditors can see unified data protection policies with comprehensive threat monitoring across primary, secondary, and archive copies. Regulatory requirements become documentation, not interpretation.
Beyond Integration: A New Category of Cyber Resilience
What Rubrik and Pure Storage have created isn't just better integration—it's a new category of intelligent cyber resilience that assumes breach and optimizes for clean, fast recovery.
Traditional approaches force trade-offs: fast or secure, simple or comprehensive, storage or backup. The Rubrik and Pure Storage cyber resilience stack eliminates these compromises by making speed and security complementary rather than competitive.
Your snapshots get the threat intelligence they've always lacked. Your backups get the performance context they've always needed. Your security team gets the unified visibility they've always wanted. Most importantly, your business gets a predictable recovery that maintains operations and customer trust.
Your Next Step: From Fragmented to Unified Cyber Resilience
The question isn't whether you need snapshots or backups—you need both, and you need them working together intelligently. The organizations that recover fastest from cyberattacks won't be those with the most security tools, but those with the most integrated threat intelligence.
As one CISO from a Fortune 500 manufacturing company recently told us after implementing the integration: "For the first time, my storage team and security team are looking at the same data. We went from guessing which recovery points were safe to knowing with certainty. That confidence is worth everything when you're facing a board of directors asking how fast we can get back online."
The Rubrik and Pure Storage Cyber Resilience Visibility Integration will be generally available in the second half of 2025. Don't wait until your next cyberattack to discover that your snapshots and backups have been working in isolation.
SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT: Any unreleased services or features referenced in this document 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.