Multicloud data control company Rubrik this week announced expanded public cloud coverage to more workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The announcement was part of its first ever Forward Digital Summit. 

“Data is eating the world. Data is how businesses are thinking about how to create advantage in the market. People are predicting within 10 years we will have 50 billion devices generating 175 zettabytes of data,” said Rubrik CEO and co-founder Bipul Sinha as he kicked off the day of virtual meetings and demos during the keynote address.

People are leaning on internet services now more than ever before, resulting in a dramatic spike of internet usage as organizations continue to deal with an increase in new, inexperienced users and workloads. This influx combined with enterprise data compliance, governance, security, and mobility demands has created a modern IT migraine. To soothe that headache, Sinha said “data leverage becomes a defining separator between innovative, competitive businesses and ones stuck in the mode of tradition.” 

According to Sinha, data leverage fundamentally comes from understanding the data through well-managed metadata, which is where information on the applications producing the data, active users, and change patterns is held. Sinha specifically cited metadata as a fundamental building block to the company's platform.

“We first wanted to create a comprehensive metadata platform that understood application, location, behavior, and how to interact with other systems. We built this platform so that multiple operators can be billed on the metadata,” he explained. 

Rubrik built what they call a “data-forward” approach into its Polaris Data Management Platform, which enables enterprises to simplify application availability with automated backup and recovery; eliminate data loss and downtime from ransomware attacks with Polaris Radar for anomaly detection; and monitor risk protection through its Polaris Sonar data discovery and classification engine. 

“Legacy backup and recovery solutions suck – they’re complex, slow, expensive, and offer no path to cloud,” said Rubrik President Dan Rogers during the keynote address.

In that light, Rubrik introduced enterprise-grade data protection of Google Compute Virtual Machines (VMs) as-a-service, as it does for AWS and Azure. Policies can be set to backup and recover Google VMs for hundreds of GCP projects and regions. 

Rubrik also extended its AWS backup capabilities to now include Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) to monitor all instance types and transaction logs across availability zones through a two-click setup. According to the vendor, point-in-time recoveries can now be done in minutes.

And finally, Rubrik expanded its existing support for Microsoft 365 to protect both file-level and folder-level recoveries on OneDrive through Polaris. “By using Polaris Microsoft 365, customers can comply with enterprise data control requirements as their data remains within their accounts,” the vendor said in a statement.

It’s been a busy few weeks for the data management company as rival Commvault last month signed, sealed, and delivered paperwork to a Delaware District Court claiming Rubrik and Cohesity infringed on seven of Commvault’s patents relating to cloud, data deduplication, snapshots, search, security, and virtualization.

According to Commvault, Cohesity and Rubrik short circuited the “research-and-development process, minimized the investment necessary to have competitive products, and forced Commvault to compete against its own inventions.”

The lawsuit specifically cites infringement on technologies including a “metabase to identify data objects” to then identify what objects are in data storage, to methods for management of virtualization data, and data deduplication management across multiple cloud storage sites. It's asking the court to put an end to the alleged intellectual property infringement and to award monetary damages.