Organizations are increasingly turning to Google Cloud to modernize their operations. But this journey is rarely straightforward. The dispersed nature of cloud environments creates significant complexity, as managing data across various platforms and locations demands new skills and tools. 

Simultaneously, cloud environments have become prime targets for cybersecurity threats, including data breaches, malware, and ransomware attacks. 

Adding to these challenges is the shared responsibility model in cloud computing, where providers secure the infrastructure while organizations remain responsible for protecting their own data and applications. 

All these considerations must be balanced against the backdrop of rising cloud costs, as companies strive to prevent modernization efforts from leading to uncontrolled spending. Finding the right balance between managing complexity, ensuring security, and controlling costs represents the central challenge of today's cloud adoption journey.

Rubrik understands the importance of helping our customers using Google Cloud balance complexity, security, and cost efficiency. Recognized as the 2025 Google Cloud Partner of the Year: Infrastructure Modernization – Backup and Disaster Recovery, we continue to make investments in Google Cloud and are excited to announce extended data protection capabilities designed to strengthen your Google Cloud data estate, delivering tangible value through improved recovery, robust security, and cost optimization. These include:

  • Extended Google Cloud Engine (GCE) capabilities: Granular recovery, backup immutability, and backup storage efficiency. 

  • Enhanced security features: Anomaly Detection, Threat Monitoring, Threat Hunting, and Data Discovery & Classification.

  • Expanded workload support: Google Cloud SQL and Google Workspace. 

  • Cybersecurity for AI: A secure pathway to drive data-driven AI application development through integration with Google Agentspace.

Google Cloud Engine: Seamless Data Protection, Robust Security, and Optimized Costs

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is a critical component for many organizations' cloud infrastructure. Since 2020, Rubrik has been safeguarding GCE workloads, providing customers with easy centralized management, policy-driven automation, and turbocharged recovery. We are excited to announce an expansion of our GCE protection capabilities, providing customers with an even more comprehensive suite of features designed for seamless data protection, robust security, and optimized costs.

Rubrik's upcoming granular file-level recovery for GCE VMs and persistent disks changes the game. Now, you can restore specific files or folders with pinpoint accuracy and automation for faster recovery times and reduced disruption to your business-critical applications—without any error-prone custom scripts or cumbersome command lines. 

Security still remains a top priority. Rubrik's backup immutability and retention lock features provide an impenetrable defense against ransomware and accidental data deletion. Immutability ensures that backups cannot be altered or deleted, while retention lock enforces compliance with regulatory requirements by preventing premature deletion of data. Combined, these features offer unparalleled data protection and peace of mind.

By intelligently tiering backup data based on access frequency, you can take advantage of the lower storage costs associated with Google Cloud Storage (GCS) Nearline and Coldline classes. This optimized storage strategy enables you to lower your overall cloud storage expenses, freeing up budget for other strategic initiatives.

For enhanced data durability and data availability capabilities, Rubrik now supports multiple archive locations. This flexibility allows you to replicate your backups across different GCS regions or buckets, ensuring business continuity even in the face of regional outages or disasters.

Enhanced Security Features

Rubrik's commitment to security extends beyond just backup and recovery. Later this year, joint Google Cloud customers will benefit from advanced tools that deliver deeper insights into sensitive data locations, improved threat detection capabilities, faster recovery options following security incidents, and the ability to quickly find and restore from clean recovery points. These enhancements will enable organizations to recover their data with greater speed and confidence after security incidents. These specific features will include:  

Anomaly Detection

Rubrik Anomaly Detection accelerates your response and recovery from a ransomware attack in real time. Rubrik proactively identifies and analyzes suspicious data activity by employing machine learning and establishing baseline behaviors to detect deviations indicative of cyber attacks, such as unusual encryption, deletions, or modifications, immediately reducing the impact of a ransomware attack. 

Threat Monitoring

Rubrik Threat Monitoring provides real-time visibility into potential security threats targeting your Google Cloud data. By combining intelligence from our unique partnership with Mandiant to bolster cyber resiliency across the whole intrusion lifecycle and proprietary intelligence from Rubrik Zero Labs (Rubrik’s data threat intelligence unit) and Rubrik’s InfoSec team, Rubrik automatically identifies indicators of compromise (IOCs) within backup snapshots, providing unique visibility into your organization’s data landscape and enabling proactive detection of potential threats.

Threat Hunting

Rubrik Threat Hunting offers essential data insights into a malware attack, assisting you in preventing malware reinfection during data recovery. With the latest release, Threat Hunting uses pre-computed hashes stored within metadata, helping you accelerate recovery by identifying the entry point of a malware threat and precisely determining when it occurred in a matter of seconds. With no impact on your production environment or no complex learning curve, you can process multiple rules across multiple points in time immediately.

Data Discovery & Classification

Rubrik Data Discovery & Classification helps you identify and protect sensitive data stored in your Google Cloud environment. By automatically scanning backups for sensitive information, such as personal identifiable information (PII) and financial data, Rubrik can alert you to potential compliance violations and data breaches. Remediation tools enable you to redact or mask sensitive data, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations.

Future Enhancements for a Comprehensive Data Protection Strategy

Rubrik's commitment to protecting your Google Cloud data estate will not stop with GCE. Coming later this year, Rubrik plans to extend our data protection capabilities to other critical Google Cloud services, including Google Cloud SQL and Google Workspace.

Google Cloud SQL Protection

For businesses relying on Google Cloud SQL for their relational database needs, robust backup and recovery are essential. Rubrik's upcoming support for Cloud SQL will provide seamless protection for these critical databases, enabling rapid recovery and ensuring data integrity. This enhancement will streamline database management and reduce the risk of data loss, empowering your business to focus on innovation.

Google Workspace Protection

In today's collaborative work environment, Google Workspace has become indispensable. Rubrik's planned integration with Google Workspace will offer comprehensive protection for Gmail, Drive, and other Workspace applications. This will safeguard your business-critical data and ensure business continuity in the event of accidental deletion, ransomware attacks, or other data loss scenarios.

Cybersecurity for AI: Protecting Your Innovation Pipeline

Rubrik is also thinking about how organizations are swiftly adopting Google Cloud to develop AI-powered applications but are facing challenges in advancing beyond the testing stage due to security, compliance, and scalability issues, particularly as evolving cyber threats jeopardize critical AI data. 

To solve these challenges, Rubrik has developed Rubrik Annapurna, a secure pathway for organizations to drive data-driven AI application development through integration with Google Agentspace. By being a trusted data source for Google Agentspace, Rubrik Annapurna will better enable AI models to access, govern, and protect sensitive data on Google Cloud using Zero Trust security principles. 

Rubrik accelerates GenAI initiatives by offering a secure data lake with sensitive data filtering and leveraging existing security policies for governed access. This streamlined approach will significantly reduce the time required to deploy Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based GenAI projects, allowing organizations to confidently transition from pilot phases to full-scale production while helping lower costs and avoid toil.

Building a Resilient and Secure Google Cloud Data Estate

Rubrik's extended Google Cloud protection, coupled with future data protection and security enhancements, provides a comprehensive solution for fortifying your Google Cloud data estate, empowering you to:

  • Reduce Costs: Optimize storage costs with GCS Nearline and Coldline tiering.

  • Improve Recovery Times: Leverage granular file-level recovery for GCE VMs and persistent disks.

  • Enhance Security: Implement Anomaly Detection, Threat Monitoring, Threat Hunting, backup immutability, and retention lock.

  • Proactively Secure Sensitive Data: Utilize Data Discovery & Classification.

  • Ensure Business Continuity: Use multiple archive locations.

  • Simplify Data Management: Extend protection to Google Cloud SQL and Google Workspace.

  • Secure AI Data: Govern, classify, and mobilize AI enterprise data built on Google Cloud.

In an era of increasing cyber threats and data complexity, Rubrik's commitment to innovation and customer-centricity makes it an invaluable partner for businesses seeking to build a resilient and secure Google Cloud data estate. By embracing these enhancements, you can unlock the full potential of your Google Cloud investment and ensure the long-term success of your organization.

The Future of Cyber Resilience in Google Cloud is today! Learn more about how Rubrik can help protect your valuable Google Cloud data

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.