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Rubrik Takes NAS Backup Storage Off Customers' Hands
Rubrik has expanded its cyber resilience portfolio with a hosted backup offering for enterprise network-attached storage (NAS), allowing organizations to protect on-premises unstructured data without purchasing or maintaining dedicated backup storage infrastructure.
Announced Nov. 5, Rubrik-Hosted Protection for On-Premise Unstructured Data builds on the company's NAS Cloud Direct technology, moving backup storage, capacity management and infrastructure updates into Rubrik's cloud while leaving customers in control of protection policies and recovery operations.
According to the company's announcement, the offering addresses challenges associated with protecting large volumes of unstructured enterprise data, including medical imaging, engineering designs, seismic surveys and AI datasets.
Such data can be difficult or expensive to recreate after a ransomware attack or other disruptive incident. Traditional on-premises protection also requires organizations to purchase, deploy and maintain backup storage infrastructure, potentially adding significant hardware and operational costs.
"Backups mean nothing if you can't be confident in a clean recovery, and hardware limitations shouldn't stand between an enterprise and its resilience," said Anneka Gupta, Rubrik's chief product officer. "By taking on backup storage and orchestration directly in our cloud, Rubrik reduces infrastructure friction so organizations can protect business-critical NAS systems across vendors under one unified policy."
How the Hosted Protection Works
The service uses lightweight software components, called data movers, running on customers' existing servers to connect on-premises NAS systems to Rubrik's cloud. This architecture eliminates the need to install large backup appliances or dedicated backup storage servers at customer sites.
Rubrik operates the underlying backup storage, manages capacity and handles infrastructure updates. Customers manage their protection policies, monitoring and recovery processes through Rubrik Security Cloud.
Backups are stored in Rubrik-hosted vaults isolated from production systems by a separate identity domain. Retention locks and immutable storage are designed to prevent attackers from deleting or modifying protected backups, even if production administrator credentials are compromised.
The offering supports heterogeneous storage environments, allowing organizations to protect NAS systems from multiple vendors under a unified policy. Recovery options include restoring to a different storage array, cloud storage or an isolated recovery environment for testing.
Rubrik's broader unstructured data protection portfolio includes integrations with Dell, NetApp, Pure Storage, Qumulo, Nutanix, VAST and GPFS environments. It also covers cloud file and object storage across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Ransomware Detection and Data Discovery
Beyond backup storage, the new service includes ransomware anomaly detection that runs against every backup. The system analyzes file entropy and change patterns to identify potential signs of ransomware activity without requiring a separate scan or additional detection tool.
Threat hunting across historical backups helps administrators identify recovery points that are not affected by detected threats, reducing the risk of restoring compromised data after an incident.
Rubrik also includes sensitive-data discovery and classification capabilities that examine primary file shares directly. These capabilities help organizations locate sensitive information and apply protection policies, retention locks and legal holds to critical data.
The discovery functionality is intended to support governance, auditing and regulatory compliance requirements, particularly for organizations handling sensitive information across large file storage environments.
Another capability, Copy and Migrate, enables organizations to move NAS data between storage platforms, secondary sites and cloud storage according to configured copy schedules. Protection policies can then be applied to data at its destination through Rubrik Security Cloud.
This provides a mechanism for organizations undertaking storage migrations or infrastructure changes to continue managing protection within the same platform, rather than introducing a separate data movement and backup management system.
Availability
Rubrik-Hosted Protection for On-Premise Unstructured Data became generally available Nov. 3, two days before the announcement. Sensitive-data discovery and classification for primary data remains in preview.
The release extends the company's existing NAS Cloud Direct architecture with Rubrik-managed backup infrastructure, emphasizing recovery from ransomware and other disruptions while reducing the on-premises hardware required to protect enterprise file storage.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.