Today, I’m excited to announce KV’s investment in Rubrik, a company that will transform how enterprises recover, manage, and secure all their data across private and public clouds. Rubrik is a company with an immense market that hasn’t seen innovation in decades and a great management team with a clear vision. That makes a killer combination.

Revolutionizing an Archaic Market

Backup and recovery is an extremely archaic market. In the past, it has served as an insurance payment rather than a business asset. From a CIO’s perspective, any money spent on backup and recovery was in hopes that they will never use it. In the best case, it was a complete waste. Think about it — enterprises are spending money that they hope will never be useful, and is of value only in the case of a disaster.

Rubrik has redefined the backup and recovery market from an insurance payment to a functional data management platform. You need to manage your data every day, every year, every decade. Rubrik helps you do that very differently and the disaster scenario is only one of many data management functions. This gives CIOs greater flexibility to manage their data based on user needs and move it between on-premises and cloud.

That is what is so unique about Rubrik. It’s revolutionizing the backup and recovery market with cloud data management. It is replacing the function of backup/recovery with a broader strategy! Everyone will need to respond to this new category to stay relevant in this digital world and the cost-effectiveness and “capability tiering” opportunities offered by the cloud.

Unlocking New Use Cases with a Cloud-Native Platform

What do I mean by data management?

Before Rubrik, not only were backup solutions insurance payments, but they were a black hole for data. With Rubrik, the IT department provides live online access to historical data. Line of business can, for example, start the database as of last week as well as today and figure out what has been updated in their data without any help from third-party tools. With Rubrik, we can go all the way to the cloud and stand up that database as of last week in a public cloud to work with our data. In a single platform, Rubrik’s customers get a time machine for their data, a disaster recovery platform, a geographic load balancing platform, and more. Data can now be actively managed at a fine-grained level without lots of toolchains, pipelines, cost, and time.

With this active data management capability, Rubrik extends the concept of data management to encompass new use cases, such as accelerating DevOps automation. That’s absolutely key. If every dollar spent can serve multiple functions — disaster recovery, backup, DevOps, cloud — it’s an immensely valuable investment for CIOs. With cloud data management, Rubrik is not only managing the data of today, next week, and throughout its lifecycle over time, but also using the same data for analytics, and other functions beyond production. Instead of this insurance hole called backup and recovery, Rubrik allows enterprises to move data to the lowest cost location be it on-premises or in an esoteric cloud tier, for as many functions as needed to drive business agility, cost-effectiveness, and performance.

Rubrik’s other major innovation is that it built these data management functions in a cloud-native platform. The world is going to cloud, and failure to adopt the cloud will result in a significantly higher cost structure and less flexible infrastructure. The only question that remains is how fast can businesses move to the cloud. At this point, there are too many obstacles preventing enterprises from adopting the cloud. By running in any combination of on-premises and in the cloud, Rubrik removes a key barrier.

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One of the Fastest Growing Enterprise Companies

What’s been so impressive about Rubrik is how fast it’s growing. It tells me they have hit the nail on the head of a major need in the marketplace. Or maybe it is because Rubrik has assembled one of the best technical teams I have seen in an enterprise in a while. Its time-to-market, expansion, and customer excitement is faster than most enterprise companies. What is even more exciting is the breadth and depth of customer adoption across industries and sizes, including multiple Fortune 50 and 500 companies.

When you look at enterprise startups, there are very few that establish a category. The last time a seismic change like this happened was when VMware introduced server virtualization. In networking, we saw a shift with Juniper Networks. Before that, Sun Microsystems changed the paradigm of computing from the data center to distributed. That kind of shift happens when you create a new category, a new need. Rubrik is creating that shift around data by replacing backup and recovery with cloud data management.

Data is becoming one of the largest and fastest-growing categories but today, it is not actively managed. The days of manually moving data around and trying to manage it worked when it was small data in a handful of nodes and locations, all at a small cost but that is no longer true. Rubrik brings new value to your data with two major innovations — data management to drive cost-effectiveness combined with cloud-native support that makes business more agile. With this vision, Rubrik has an immense opportunity to become a company without limits.

Reposted from Khosla Ventures blog