Scaling Software Solutions and Protecting Your Data with Rubrik Cloud

How does Rubrik Compare to other Cloud Based Data Management Companies? Rubrik Principal Architect Bill Gurling, Sirius CTO Vik Nagjee, and Chris Knapp (System Engineer) and Brian Farmintino (System Infrastructure Manager) for New Hanover Regional Medical Center discussed the importance of cloud data management strategy and Rubrik’s cloud-based solution with host Bill Russell.   Protecting Data and Scaling with Rubrik [caption id="attachment_13765" align="alignright" width="229"] Vik Nagjee - Healthcare & Managed Services, Sirius Computer Solutions[/caption] Rubrik is a cloud data management company. According to Gurling, the philosophy is security and resilience at the point of data, which he believes brings significant value to customers.  When the company interacts with protected data sets in a cloud platform, they utilize API-driven integrations for security data protection and resiliency. Customers appreciate this because it can operate on hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Gurling explained.  Rubrik allows customers to have a multi-cloud environment, multiple data centers, and various environments and can be applied with similar data tiering data, security models, and frameworks. “We've got a control plane that actually lives in SAS, and you can link that control plane to things that SAS would naturally interact with,” Gurling explained. As explained by Russell, Rubrik is not a security, DR, or automation platform but has those elements built into it. Essentially, it is a classification data management platforming providing these additional services. "We're trying to just produce additional value drivers out of this object or this capability that our customers sort of felt like they had to have," Gurling said. Now, according to Gurling, business value can be extracted from these factors, as it can be automated for test development or rapidly orchestrate ransomware recovery.  "All of a sudden, it goes from a sunk cost to a value driver. And that's really what we're trying to do as a company, take this idea of data protection expanded across all of these boundaries and turn it into a value driver instead of a call center," he said. Unique Capabilities and Adoption Addressing ransomware, security at the point of data is a significant driver for their value, according to Gurling. Rubrik was engineered where the file system is immutably built to the lowest primitive, extending to the file system layer where APIs do not accept any override. [caption id="attachment_13764" align="alignright" width="254"] Chris Knapp - Systems Engineer, New Hanover Regional Medical Center[/caption] More than this, the software utilizes metadata to track good patterns in the data set. This allows for them to detect anomalous behavior. The end-user is alerted if an abnormal pattern is detected, provided with the blast radius (what has been affected and the last known good point of data), and given a workflow for rolling back and recovering data.  One health system that has taken advantage of Rubrik’s offerings is New Hanover Regional Medical Center, a not-for-profit community hospital located in Wilmington, North Carolina. The team supports multiple hospitals and medical practices.  According to Farmintino, when the hospital began its cloud journey, they were inexperienced. Deciding to jump into the process anyways, they soon realized the need for assistance.  "We realized that this is new to us, and we really need to partner with a vendor to help us, at least guide us through the basic foundation and the processes that just we weren't familiar with," he said.  Rubrik Origins One of the first steps was developing a Cloud First Strategy, according to Farmintino. These benefits allowed for increased ability to serve bursts in demand, [caption id="attachment_13763" align="alignright" width="257"] Bill Gurling - Principal Architect, Rubrik[/caption] as well as exceed provision capacity. An additional goal was to shift IT personnel from managing data to concentrate on higher-value tasks. They worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to Farmintino, because of a previous project using Alexa, which had been a huge success.  "That was the kickstart to reducing our data center and getting our IT staff thinking in a different way. It was the start of our journey into the public cloud," he explained.  As the hospital continued to acclimate to cloud computing, they moved environments into AWS with hope to increase their cloud footprint.  According to Farmintino, his team is becoming increasingly agile and is developing skills to help the organization become a multi-cloud environment.  A governance strategy is needed first when looking at the challenges companies have experienced with a data management strategy in a multi-cloud environment, Nagjee explained. This runs parallel with data management and data protection strategies, which focus on safely backing up and restoring data.  According to Knapp, when his te