Databases are the heart of a company's operations, housing customer information, financial records, and core application data. When a cyberattack (such as ransomware) strikes, the immediate and most pressing challenge is restoring that data correctly and quickly. Indeed, every minute of downtime can cost a business a fortune.
Traditional recovery methods, however, were built for a different era—they are simply not enough to combat modern, sophisticated threats. These reactive legacy methods create a major bottleneck during a crisis, leaving technical teams in a state of chaos and uncertainty.
The Pain Points of Traditional Database Recovery
Traditional database recovery comes with a set of pain points that can severely test even the most experienced IT teams. Organizations frequently face obstacles that delay restoration efforts, increase downtime, complicate decision-making, and introduce challenges that can turn a routine recovery task into a complex and time-consuming ordeal. These challenges include:
Finding a Clean Recovery Point: Attackers can lie dormant for weeks, making it very difficult to confidently find a malware-free backup. Manually sifting through thousands of snapshots to find a clean state is a time-intensive process which extends downtime.
The "Rehydration" Problem: Traditional solutions require you to restore a full copy of the data to a separate environment just to scan it. This time-consuming and resource-intensive process significantly delays the start of actual recovery.
Fragmented Tools and Manual Processes: The typical recovery workflow involves a disjointed set of tools for data protection, threat detection, and security orchestration. This creates a fragmented view of the environment, forcing teams to rely on manual correlation of data across disparate systems. The lack of a unified platform introduces delays and increases the risk of mistakes during a high-pressure incident.
No Context for Recovery: Traditional backup systems lack the intelligence to understand dependencies between databases and applications. This leads to a complex and disorganized recovery, as you can't simply restore an isolated piece of data.
Rubrik Preemptive Recovery: The New Standard for Database Resilience
Rubrik Preemptive Recovery Engine redefines database recovery by shifting the focus from a reactive response to proactive preparation. This architectural innovation performs the critical analysis work before an attack, so when an incident occurs you're not starting from scratch.
Rubrik's Preemptive Recovery Engine continuously analyzes backup metadata to create an intelligent historical record, eliminating the need for time-consuming data rehydration. This decoupled analysis gives your team the power to orchestrate recovery with confidence, using the engine's application-aware recovery plans to automate the entire restoration process. This turns a complex, manual checklist into a predictable, one-click operation.
Here’s how it works.
The Blueprint: A Three-Principle Plan for Victory
The Rubrik Preemptive Recovery Engine provides a clear path forward based on three key principles that empower you to stay ahead of the threats.
Principle 1 - Create an Intelligent Historical Record: Imagine having a perfect historical record of your entire database environment—a time-series view that tracks every change to your data, permissions, and configurations. Our engine continuously analyzes and indexes this data, creating a detailed historical record of your databases. This isn't just a backup; it's an intelligent record that powers instant insights.
Action Plan for DBAs:
Shift your mindset from backups to intelligence. Your backups are a rich source of security telemetry.
Automate threat discovery. The engine creates pre-computed hashes of your data to automatically identify anomalous behavior and potential encryption events across your database snapshots.
The Outcome: When an attack occurs, you're not searching for a clean copy. Our system instantly pinpoints the last known good state, dramatically cutting down your recovery timeline from weeks to minutes.
Principle 2 - Build a Data Risk Map: It’s all about context. It’s not enough to know what data you have; you need to know what data is sensitive and who can access it. But you must have an accurate map of that data that helps you understand your risk exposure before an incident.
Action Plan for DBAs:
Get a clear view of your sensitive data. The engine automatically scans your database backups to discover and classify sensitive information like PII and other critical business data.
Correlate data with identity. We unify information about your data with user and identity attributes, allowing you to see who has access to your sensitive database tables and files.
The Outcome: You'll have a clear Data Risk Map that lets you prioritize your recovery efforts. You'll know exactly which databases hold critical data and who has access to them, helping you meet compliance requirements and inform security teams without ever touching your production systems.
Principle 3 - Automate Surgical Recovery: Now it’s time to execute. Once you know where your clean data is, you need to restore it correctly and efficiently. A chaotic recovery can cause further damage. But an automated, intelligent process ensures you get back to business faster.
The Action Plan for DBAs:
Move from checklists to intelligent Recovery Plans. Stop relying on manual, error-prone checklists. Our engine allows you to create and test automated recovery plans that orchestrate the entire restoration process for your databases.
Restore with application context. Rubrik's engine understands the dependencies between your database and other applications. Your Recovery Plan can automate the boot order and configuration, ensuring that the application comes back online correctly, not just the data.
The Outcome: You can initiate a surgical recovery that restores exactly what you need in the right order. This turns a complex, multi-day operation into a predictable, one-click process that gets your business back up and running with minimal downtime.
The Business Impact: From Crisis to Confidence
Rubrik Preemptive Recovery Engine is a game-changer for database administrators, transforming a chaotic, lengthy recovery process into a prepared, data-driven, and rapid response. The solution ensures your database recovery strategy starts long before an attack, so your business is ready to bounce back when it matters most.
Download this whitepaper to learn more about the architectural Foundations for Accelerated Cyber Recovery of your critical databases.
Safe Harbour 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.