Microsoft 365 has become the digital backbone of the modern enterprise, integrating core business operations such as finance, legal, sales, and HR. However, this central role also introduces a significant vulnerability: when M365 is hit by ransomware or suffers a major outage, the entire company faces operational paralysis.
At Rubrik, we recognize that the speed of recovery is no longer defined by how fast you can restore a snapshot, but by how quickly you can restore business function. Today, we are announcing Rubrik M365 Intelligent Business Recovery, the industry’s first solution to transform M365 recovery from a purely technical process into a measurable business continuity strategy. We are moving from data-centric recovery to business-centric recovery, enabling the full restoration of your Minimum Viable Business (MVB) in minutes.
The Business Recovery Gap: Why Data Restoration Fails the C-Suite
Current recovery solutions, although technically sound, have one significant flaw: they lack operational insight.
All data is equal, so no priority is given to the information that matters most to the business at the time of the crisis. So you may spend valuable resources recovering mailboxes, files, and sites based solely on time (either point-in-time or the latest snapshot) or infrastructure, rather than on the critical importance of the data for the business.
During a crisis, this creates confusion for Microsoft 365 and security administrators. They face questions such as:
Which of the thousands of mailboxes is truly mission-critical at this moment?
Where is the critical contract document located: OneDrive, a Teams channel, or an obscure SharePoint site?
Are we restoring the right assets to ensure our executives and core teams can operate effectively?
This uncertainty wastes limited API bandwidth on non-essential data, prolongs downtime, and diminishes stakeholder confidence.
For instance, a global company might successfully restore 50TB of data, but if the recovery process overlooks a crucial shared finance report on SharePoint that hasn't been recently modified, the business could be left paralyzed for hours as management struggles to get back online.
Rubrik M365 Intelligent Business Recovery directly addresses this gap in recovery solutions.
The Three Pillars of Rubrik Microsoft 365 Intelligent Business Recovery
Rubrik's Microsoft 365 Intelligent Business Recovery solution is built on three essential pillars that harness workflow intelligence to automate the most challenging aspect of recovery: prioritization.
Pillar 1: Identify and Define Your Minimum Viable Company (MVC): The MVB concept starts by defining the Minimum Viable Company (MVC): the essential users, including CXOs, department heads, and key operational personnel, who must be operational immediately based on the criticality of the incident
Within the Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC), administrators can:
Define Critical Personnel: Easily select and group core users via seamless integration with Entra ID Groups or manual selection for different scenarios.
Create MVC Profiles: Save the configuration as a persistent, auditable MVC Profile that serves as the foundation for all future recovery actions and simulations for different scenarios.
This step ensures that recovery efforts are always centered on the elements needed to maintain operational momentum.
Pillar 2: Analyze with AI-Driven Workflow Intelligence: This is where the paradigm shifts from conventional data recovery to dynamic business restoration. Instead of simply looking at file size or backup time, the AI analyzes the relationships and context of the data.
The solution conducts an automated scan and analysis of the last N days of activity across all M365 workloads—Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams—to determine the data needed to optimize productivity for MVC users. The analysis encompasses the following areas:
Exchange: Recently sent and received emails, calendar items, and contacts
OneDrive: Files that have been accessed, modified, or shared by MVC members in recent days
SharePoint: Sites and libraries that have exhibited recent user interaction
Teams: Chats and channels with notable recent activity involving MVC participants
Leveraging this telemetry, the system formulates an intelligence-based recovery plan. For instance, it does not merely restore the CEO's OneDrive; rather, it specifically retrieves the files in their OneDrive referenced in high-priority email exchanges over the past 30 days.
Pillar 3: Automated MVB Restoration with Precision and Control
The final pillar provides a structured and phased recovery process through a refine-and-modify loop, ensuring both speed and accuracy.
When administrators initiate a recovery from the saved MVC Profile, it activates a one-click, cross-workload restoration. This recovery process occurs in two phases: an Immediate MVB and a Full Recovery that takes place in the background.
Importantly, Rubrik upholds necessary human-in-the-loop control through the following steps:
Plan Validation: Administrators review the AI-generated recovery plan, including the selected users, data, and workloads, along with explanations for their inclusion based on factors such as access, activity, or dependencies.
Granular Refinement: Before executing the recovery, administrators can adjust the recovery order or manually add or remove specific users and data objects. This allows for surgical exclusions, such as omitting archived mailboxes, and prioritizing certain workloads, such as Finance over HR.
Additionally, the Smart Recommendations feature in the RSC Agent proactively identifies critical data assets that are not covered by recent MVC activity. The AI analyzes metadata (such as sensitivity labels) and historical context to suggest items, such as a SharePoint Finance Reporting Site or a Legal Archive library. These recommendations are essential for maintaining operational continuity and ensuring that no critical, dormant asset is overlooked.
The Rubrik Differentiator: Restoring Confidence
Competitors restore data. Rubrik restores business.
Rubrik provides direct operational impact by delivering the industry’s first business-aware recovery solution for M365:
For the CISO/CIO: Rubrik enables you to prove operational resilience to the Board with measurable MVB recovery times, turning recovery from a compliance burden into a competitive advantage.
For the M365 Admin: Rubrik eliminates the guesswork, automates the most stressful decisions, and minimizes human error during high-pressure incidents, reducing Recovery Time Objective (RTO) from hours or days to mere minutes.
Rubrik M365 Intelligent Business Recovery is the necessary evolution of cyber resilience for the M365 era, built on our proven foundation of data immutability and security.
Ready to see it in action? Explore the Rubrik Microsoft 365 Intelligent Business Recovery demo and learn how your organization can benefit!
Please note: Rubrik Microsoft 365 Intelligent Business Recovery is expected to be available in the coming months.
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.