Key Highlights:
- Rubrik announced a “strategic deal” with Microsoft, which includes a financial commitment and new partnerships to allow zero-trust data protection.
- Microsoft is likely seeing an opportunity to both obtain a financial return on its investment and accelerate migration to its cloud platforms.
- More than one-third of all organizations globally have experienced a ransomware incident over the past 12 months.
Microsoft teams up with Rubrik
Microsoft is buying a stake in Rubrik, a data management and backup company, and the two firms are proposing co-engineering projects for Azure-based solutions targeted at improving data security in the face of increasing ransomware assaults.
Rubrik announced a “strategic deal” with Microsoft, which includes a financial commitment and new partnerships to allow “zero trust data protection.” The size of the investment has not been revealed.
The deal comes as Microsoft focuses on providing a zero-trust security architecture to clients and as ransomware assaults continue to spread, including high-profile breaches like the one that attacked Accenture, a major Microsoft partner, last week.
The deal will see Rubrik and Microsoft working together to deliver “tightly integrated data protection while accelerating and simplifying our customer’s journey to the cloud,” said Rubrik co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha in a news release.
Rubrik aligned to the Microsoft strategy
The integration of Rubrik’s “Zero Trust Data Management solutions” with Azure and Microsoft 365 “will make it easier for clients to progress their Zero Trust journey and enhance their digital resilience,” according to Nick Parker, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for global partner solutions.
Microsoft and Rubrik, located in Palo Alto, Calif., have a “longstanding” collaboration, with more than 2,000 common clients, according to a press release from Rubrik.
Microsoft is likely seeing an opportunity to both obtain a financial return on its investment and accelerate migration to its cloud platforms, according to Ric Opal, principal, and national go-to-market and strategic alliances leader at BDO Digital, a Microsoft Gold partner.
Rubrik makes sense as a vendor for Microsoft to focus on in this way since Rubrik is clearly “aligned to the Microsoft strategy,” Opal said. The deal shows that the basis for expanded collaboration with Microsoft is an alignment “to zero trusts and the other related security, compliance, identity, and management strategies that Microsoft is bringing to customers,” he said.
Zero Trust data protection solutions
Rubrik’s Rubrik Forward conference in May included a variety of technologies targeted at helping organizations defend themselves from ransomware and recover from successful ransomware attacks. At the time, Microsoft also announced new bespoke data protection designs, the capacity to cover billions of files, and new Microsoft 365-focused SaaS data protection capabilities.
Rubrik claimed in a press statement that the strategic collaboration with Microsoft will “drive go-to-market efforts and co-engineering initiatives to offer integrated Zero Trust data protection solutions built on Microsoft Azure.”
More than one-third of all organizations globally have experienced a ransomware incident over the past 12 months, according to research firm IDC, which disclosed the findings from a new survey on ransomware attacks last week.
Also Read: Army Research Team to Use its own Vehicle Program
