The cloud is no longer just a scalable repository for storing data; it has become the engine room of the modern enterprise, hosting the mission-critical applications upon which your business depends. But accelerated adoption has painted a massive target on these environments. Recent industry data shows that 94% of cloud tenants are targeted by cyberattacks, with 62% successfully compromised.

Now, the threat landscape is rapidly worsening with the rise of autonomous AI models. The recent release of Anthropic’s Mythos Preview demonstrated this potential by autonomously discovering thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities and building working exploits without human guidance. As these capabilities—which once required elite nation-state resources—become available at commodity scale, they threaten to permanently shift the balance of power in favor of cyber attackers, drastically reducing the time between vulnerability discovery and widespread exploitation.

While these mission-critical applications are built on foundational cloud services like virtual machines and databases, they extend far beyond simple data storage. They are intricate webs of networking, configurations, and identity access rules. Legacy backup strategies that only protect isolated pieces of data fail to capture this architectural complexity, leaving your entire business service fundamentally at risk when a cyber attack strikes.

These cloud applications are the lifeblood of the business and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) expectations have shifted accordingly. Extended downtime is simply unacceptable. Organizations currently face an average of 21 days of downtime following a successful breach, with outage costs potentially soaring to $300,000 per hour. Beyond immediate revenue loss, this disruption triggers severe regulatory fines and causes irreparable damage to customer trust.

In an effort to help organizations survive this escalating threat landscape and maintain continuous business operations, we are excited to announce Rubrik Autonomous Business Recovery for Cloud Applications.

The Cloud Application Recovery Gap: Why Data Backup is Not Application Recovery

Achieving true cyber resilience for cloud applications cannot be accomplished by relying on native snapshot tools, manual scripting, or legacy backup strategies. When a cloud application goes down, restoring the data alone doesn’t bring the application back. The VPC, the networking, the IAM configuration, the security groups all need to come back, in sequence, before your application can function.

Relying on traditional methods creates a dangerous "Recovery Gap" characterized by three core challenges:

• Fragmented Dependency Maps: Modern cloud applications are complicated webs of compute, data, and networking. These environments are highly dynamic: infrastructure drift is constant, and manual runbooks quickly become obsolete. When an attack hits, IT teams are left blindly piecing together complex dependencies during critical downtime, guessing what actually makes up the application.

• Silent Protection Gaps: Siloed, manual processes leave critical components completely unprotected. As applications evolve and developers spin up new resources, traditional backup tools often miss them. During an incident, teams suddenly discover they lack backups for vital components, forcing them to manually rebuild systems from scratch.

• Compromised Backups and The Need for Clean Data: Attackers are moving faster than ever and median dwell times mean recent backups are likely infected. Restoring blindly from these snapshots risks instantly re-compromising the environment. While some legacy solutions attempt to address this by forcing teams to mount snapshots to temporary infrastructure to scan for threats, this process is notoriously slow, stalls recovery, and drives up cloud costs.

These three gaps fundamentally change the nature of recovery. Instead of executing a predictable process, IT and security teams are forced into a chaotic, forensic investigation when every second counts. Hours are lost mapping dependencies, followed by the agonizing search for valid, clean backups. For everything that wasn't protected, teams must manually reconstruct infrastructure under extreme pressure, inevitably introducing misconfigurations that leave the "recovered" application highly exposed to secondary attacks.

This manual, piecemeal approach is precisely why the industry average for downtime remains stuck at 21 days.

Introducing Autonomous Business Recovery for Cloud Applications

Rubrik Autonomous Business Recovery (ABR) for Cloud Applications shifts the paradigm from simply backing up isolated pieces of data to protecting and recovering your entire business service. Recovering isolated data isn't recovering a business. True resilience requires orchestrating the clean recovery of your entire application stack.

Rather than leaving your IT and security teams to manually stitch together infrastructure during a crisis, Rubrik does the heavy lifting in advance—acting as your autonomous Decision Engine, shifting the burden of complex forensics and orchestration from human responders to software. We close the visibility, protection, and recovery gaps during peacetime, so when an incident strikes, you aren't left hunting for clean data or guessing how to rebuild.

We turn unpredictable chaos into a fast, provable recovery that satisfies stringent board-level compliance mandates. Key capabilities include:

• Autonomous Application Discovery: We solve dependency guesswork permanently by delivering a complete, graphical dependency map showing every component of your application. You simply tag a single anchor resource (like an EC2 instance), and Rubrik uses recursive discovery to map the entire environment. This map updates continuously, giving you an accurate, up-to-date picture of your application as it evolves so you do not have to rely on stale architecture diagrams during a crisis.

• Synchronized Immutable Protection: Rubrik provides a unified place to apply continuous, gap-less protection across your entire application stack—not just your data, but your compute configurations and network layers. As new resources are discovered, they are automatically pulled into SLA-driven, air-gapped, and immutable protection policies, eliminating silent protection gaps.

• Orchestrated 'Clean' Recovery: During an incident, Rubrik orchestrates the recovery of your entire application. Leveraging the Preemptive Recovery Engine™, we autonomously pinpoint the last known clean point in seconds—without spinning up temporary infrastructure. From there, we execute pre-validated plans built directly from your application dependency map, ensuring your network, compute, and data layers are restored in the exact right sequence. Finally, you can proactively test these plans non-disruptively to guarantee success and easily generate the reports required to prove compliance
  
   

Ready to Recover Your Entire Application Stack?

Recovering data isn't recovering a business. If the application isn't running, the restore fails. With Autonomous Business Recovery for Cloud Applications, now in private preview, you can finally escape the restore-and-repeat cycle. By preparing during peacetime, you can automatically discover dependencies, apply continuous protection, and autonomously orchestrate a clean rebuild of your business-critical applications at machine speed.

Don't let cloud complexity paralyze your recovery. To learn exactly how Rubrik is closing the recovery gap, read the Solution Brief. Autonomous Business Recovery for Cloud Applications is currently in Private Preview, and we are actively looking for design partners. If you are running mission-critical workloads in the cloud and want early access to shape the future of application recovery, we want to hear from you. Sign up to become a Design Partner today.

Attending Rubrik Forward? Join our upcoming virtual session: "Safeguarding the Minimum Viable Business: Autonomous Cloud Recovery at Scale," where we'll dive deep into the recovery gap and explore how to orchestrate complete application recovery.

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.