Executive Summary / Key Takeaways
The Core Problem: Cyberattacks take down the users and applications a business runs on. Traditional recovery restores data object by object, so critical operations wait behind everything else.
The Solution: Powered by Rubrik Security Cloud, Autonomous Business Recovery (ABR) restores a Minimum Viable Business first: the critical users, applications, and data needed to keep operating.
Two Environments, One Principle: Microsoft 365 Autonomous Business Recovery restores critical users and their data first. Autonomous Business Recovery for Cloud Applications rebuilds entire applications in dependency order from a validated clean point.
Overview: The Need for an Innovative Recovery Tool Against Cyberattacks
According to Sophos's The State of Ransomware 2026 report, only 55% of organizations recover within a week of an attack. This gap exists because legacy data protection tools are built to copy data, not to rebuild the business.
When enterprise organizations suffer a cyberattack, they don't just lose files. They lose the ability to operate. Autonomous Business Recovery (ABR) gets the business back to a Minimum Viable Business (MVB) state first: the critical users, applications, and data it needs to keep running, without waiting on a full restore.
For Microsoft 365: ABR identifies your Minimum Viable Company (MVC), the critical users and the data they depend on, and restores them first while full recovery continues in the background.
For cloud applications: ABR discovers and tracks every component that makes up an application (compute, databases, and configurations), protects the entire stack, and orchestrates recovery of the whole application rather than individual workloads.
What Is Autonomous Business Recovery?
Autonomous Business Recovery (ABR) recovers business operations in priority order, rather than restoring data object by object, so the business runs again before full recovery finishes. It applies one principle (recover the business, not just the data) to two very different environments:
Microsoft 365 Autonomous Business Recovery: Uses AI-driven analysis of identity and activity signals to pinpoint critical users, such as the executive team or finance, and the email, files, sites, and collaboration channels they need first, so core workflows come back before the full tenant is restored.
Autonomous Business Recovery for Cloud Applications: Covers the full cloud application stack, including compute, databases, networking, identity and access, and configurations, and rebuilds it in dependency order: network first, then compute, then data.
Autonomous Recovery vs. Traditional Disaster Recovery: How to Recover Faster
Traditional recovery treats every object the same, so critical users and applications wait in line behind everything else. How that plays out depends on the environment.
How Autonomous Business Recovery Works
Both versions of ABR follow the same idea: do the planning before an incident, so recovery is fast and predictable when it counts. The steps differ because Microsoft 365 and cloud applications fail, and recover, in very different ways.
Microsoft 365
ABR uses a three-phase model to accelerate recovery for Microsoft 365 environments:
Identify: Defines critical operations. Identifies priority users (like the finance team), departments, and the data the business needs to function.
Analyze: Discovers dependencies autonomously. Maps how critical users work across email, files, sites, and channels to determine what they need first.
Orchestrate: Executes the prioritized recovery. Restores critical users and their workflows first while full recovery continues in the background.
Much of ABR's speed comes from how it's operated: an admin can simply ask, in plain language, to build a recovery plan for their Minimum Viable Company, and ABR's agentic AI maps recent activity across Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams to identify exactly what's needed, turning scoping work that used to take hours into seconds. Nothing executes until a human approves the plan.
Cloud Applications
ABR for Cloud Applications does the hard work in peacetime, so recovery becomes a matter of execution, not investigation:
Discover: Defines application boundaries and maps every component of a business-critical cloud application, including compute, databases, networking, and configurations, and keeps the map current as the application evolves.
Protect: Applies air-gapped, immutable backups to every application component through a single SLA policy, keeping them out of an attacker's reach.
Recover: Orchestrates a sequenced rebuild of the full application, in dependency order, from a validated clean point identified before recovery begins.
Much of ABR's speed comes from that preparation: applications are already discovered, backups are automated and unified, and Rubrik's Preemptive Recovery Engine identifies a clean recovery point before you need it.
Why Enterprise Leaders Use Autonomous Business Recovery to Minimize RTOs
Data protection metrics have shifted from technical checkboxes to true business continuity. Executive leadership and board members require verifiable, repeatable proof of operational recovery time.
ABR delivers three core advantages:
Replace Manual Runbooks with Automated Recovery Plans: Swaps outdated, manual recovery plans for automated workflows that teams review and approve, so recovery starts faster and runs predictably.
Minimize Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs): Restores critical applications, workflows, and users first, accelerating time-to-revenue.
Prove Recovery Readiness: Recovery testing and reporting give boards, auditors, and regulators evidence that critical operations can be restored.
To see how this works in practice, explore Rubrik's approach to protecting SaaS applications like Microsoft 365 or recovering cloud infrastructure like AWS. To understand the agentic AI behind how ABR builds a Minimum Viable Company and restores critical users and their data, explore Rubrik's AI-powered approach to cyber recovery.