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Blog • • 4 minute read

Rubrik sits up straight and acquires Laminar

Rubrik buys Laminar. Cloud native use cases folded into observability and resiliency for Rubrik Security Cloud.

This acquisition undoubtedly shows Rubrik's ability to skate to where the puck is going to be. Coming full circle, Rubrik once the "cloud data management" solution for Enterprise IT is now positioning itself as the "cloud data security" solution for the market. 

Rubrik is laser focused on driving the impact and relevancy of the traditional data protection market through the lens of the CISO and security leaders for organizations. The urgency of shifting your backup and recovery strategy with the weight of modern cyber attacks that involve ransomware, exfiltration and 0-day vulnerabilities is a reality that we see all vendors address in varying product features and services engagements. 

Cybersecurity is now a global priority, and it is not if but when you find yourself dealing with a cyber attack. During such an event, do you have the right tools to respond effectively?  

Rubrik has challenged the industry to extend the traditional enterprise data protection beyond just the normal speeds and feeds conversation. Rubrik's goal is to provide organizations with efficiency that can only come with better intelligence of what is impacted.  

How does Rubrik provide that intelligence?  
  • Sensitive data discovery – personally identifiable information.
  • Ransomware monitoring – granular anomaly detection.
  • Threat monitoring – search for indicators of compromise within backups.

These are all incredibly useful in today's enterprise environments and allow data protection teams and IT organizations to react to threats in an intelligible way and these features and capabilities are continually improving.  

Rubrik's Zero Labs is strengthening its threat hunt functionality. Additionally, the award-winning partnership with Microsoft provides a technical edge for M365 integration. Another example, powered by the igneous acquisition in 2020, NAS Cloud Direct is being brought into Rubrik Security Cloud with ransomware monitoring capabilities. We are now seeing Rubrik broaden their security cloud again, with Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) being the growth catalyst. 

With the Laminar acquisition, Rubrik is increasing their capability to provide customers clarity and insight for their cloud data assets. Laminar has integrations across AWS, GCP, Azure and Snowflake Data Cloud. Bringing Rubrik into context of enabling organizations to not only provide recovery of their cloud native workloads, but to now secure those workloads in an automated way. The goal for a DSPM solution is to automate the prevention of sensitive data exposure, eliminate unnecessary shadow copies and provide data security governance within a sprawling cloud ecosystem.   

Rubrik's go-to-market and product philosophy revolves around 3 primary tenets: 
  • Data resiliency
  • Data observability
  • Data recovery

Laminar is providing Rubrik a boost in the observability and resiliency aspects for the cloud native workloads that are growing rapidly.  Organizations that leverage SaaS platforms, or a variety of customer and provider-managed PaaS and IaaS offerings, is where Laminar has been prioritizing its capabilities. It's not uncommon for traditional enterprise data protection to treat these types of workloads and operating models as an after-thought. Think of this as the recovery tenet, where Rubrik has support for AWS, Azure and SaaS workloads. 

So, what might the future hold with this acquisition?

 

I would anticipate Laminar's tech stack to be folded into Rubrik Security Cloud tenants for customers to consume. Rubrik may embed the technology across a few functional stacks they have already established: 

  • Data Security Command Center – provides additional guidance for Rubrik Cloud Cluster configs. 
  • Sensitive Data Discovery – add Cloud Native policies into this feature set (Exfiltration Targets).
  • Reports – load pre-existing reporting features to become available from RSC (Rubrik Security Cloud). 

I wouldn't be surprised if Rubrik one day builds a separate "Security Domain" workflow utilizing the full depth of the acquisition. Providing itself firm footing for a platform that can provide risk mitigation and data backups across an organizations complete data ecosystem. This multi-faceted approach would provide an outcome that existing competitors would either need to partner or acquire in order to achieve. If they decide to go down the path of a Security Domain workflow, they could easily rationalize the Observability features as part of that workflow. This would give organizations a platform that is accelerating data security while maintaining traditional Enterprise Data Protection.  

It will be exciting to see how Rubrik and Laminar integrate for customer outcomes.