Rubrik President Dan Rogers argues organizations need to do more than invest in infrastructure security as cyberattacks are increasingly targeting sensitive enterprise data.

“We believe the next frontier of cybersecurity is data security,” Rogers told SDxCentral, defining data security as the combination of data resilience, data observability, and data recovery.

That’s why the vendor integrated those three data services earlier this year into one umbrella product – Security Cloud – to secure data across enterprise, cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS). 

Rogers noted that as data breaches surge and ransomware becomes one of the biggest threats to our economy, Rubrik’s strategy is to focus on data.

“When you start to talk about the data, you have the chance of making your business more unstoppable, and you have the chance of recovering your data because the data is always available,” the executive said.

Rubrik Rides Data Security Waves

Rubrik recently surpassed $400 million in software subscription annual recurring revenue (ARR) to date, more than doubling year over year, and it serves more than 4,500 customers globally including Citigroup, Estee Lauder, and The Home Depot.

“We believe that makes us one of the fastest companies to get to those milestones,” Rogers touted. “Many of the Fortune 500 [companies], large banks, insurance companies, many of the cybersoftware companies, cyberinfrastructure software companies themselves, use us for data security at this point.”

He noted that the rapidly increased digitization and data bolster the boom. “Rubrik is indexed on the growth of the world's data,” he said. “Data is the fuel for the new economy, so the biggest trend we see is this continued explosion of data, and we have this continued explosion of data security, [which] is prime, is paramount.”

Pairing Data Security With Zero Trust

Another driver behind Rubrik’s growth is the architecture — pairing data security with zero trust, Rogers claims.

“We designed our own proprietary file system, we ensured that our systems truly were immutable, and every service interaction level, every API, we adhere to zero-trust principles,” he said.

As data gravity moves to the cloud, Rubrik extends the same zero-trust architecture and principle from on-premises to the cloud environment. Most recently, the vendor expanded it to SaaS apps like Microsoft 365 building on its partnership with Microsoft. 

“Our concept of zero trust is really deep. It's how we test ourselves. And it's looking at all of the interaction points for all of our services, starting with the idea that trust needs to be earned as opposed to granted freely,” Rogers said. “So that's really a principle. I think it's going to remain with us for every single service.”

New Threat Research Unit

The company also launched the Rubrik Zero Labs cybersecurity research unit to analyze the global threat landscape and report on emerging data security issues. Former Mandiant VP Steven Stone is leading the threat research team.

“We can uniquely provide these insights around data,” Rogers said. “We're able to monitor data over time, and as a result we're able to see a lot of patterns and we have now built up a wealth of experience in ransomware recovery through our ransomware threat teams, so we wanted to share some of those experiences with the world.”

The launch follows a string of recent leadership appointments, including former CIA CISO Michael Mestrovich being named Rubrik's CISO and former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director Chris Krebs tapped to be chair of its new CISO Advisory Board.