The new release of Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management platform also adds automated Disaster Recovery orchestration and Continuous Data Protection.

A year ago Rubrik launched Polaris, which complemented their flagship data management offering with a global policy framework and workflow orchestration SaaS platform. Today, their Andes 5.1 platform release builds on Polaris with a new data governance application that addresses a broad range of data privacy regulations. Andes 5.1 also adds automated Disaster Recovery orchestration with Polaris AppFlows, as well as Continuous Data Protection with VMware Ready certification, and an enhanced [and rebranded!] version of what was their Datos IO NoSQL platform.

“Our Polaris platform provided a central control pane to establish a common global policy that governs workloads to their SLA in the most optimal manner,” said Shay Mowlem, SVP Product & Strategy at Rubrik. “This was a big first step for Rubrik. With this release, Polaris goes deeper into cloud native protection with two new applications around data governance.”

The data governance application is Polaris Sonar, which addresses both compliance regulations and the danger of breaches that impact personally identifiable information.

“Polaris takes advantage of the rich metadata that we capture, which allows us to do a lot of interesting things from a backup perspective,” Mowlem said. “It is that metadata that enables this new data classification service that discovers sensitive information that exists in the data. Historically, determining whether personally identifiable information like Social Security numbers exists in data has been a very hard problem. We generate that visibility automatically, and classify it so you can see where this sensitive data resides.”

All the major data privacy regulations are covered with prepackaged templates, including GDPR, PCI/DSS, SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, and the CCPA, which goes live next year in California.

“Data can be classified for each of these without any production disruption,” Mowlem stated. “This is something that customers are excited about. In addition, Polaris Sonar allows customers to bring their own analyzers.”

Mowlem stressed that Polaris navigates the customer through the complexities of data governance without complexity.

“The core principle of Rubrik from the very beginning was the need to simplify backup and recovery and bring them to the modern era,” he said. “Polaris amplifies this, at a global scale, raising the bar on how we apply policies globally that protect applications and services.”

Mowlem said that the growing scope of privacy laws have raised concern for this kind of protection far beyond its traditional base in regulated industries.

“My view, in talking to many organizations, is that it is now top of mind in every single vertical,” he said. “GDPR started that intensification, and we are now seeing similar laws at country level as well as state level. The issue with accessing privacy data used to be that it was so hard and painful, there was a risk and reward assessment involved. What we do here, leveraging backup to do this simply, is extremely captivating to customers.”

Polaris Solar is the headline part of the Andes 5.1 announcement, but there are several other new elements of importance, that may well merit more attention than they are likely to get. The second new application is Polaris AppFlows, which also revolves around the simplicity message, and provides natively integrated DR orchestration of failover/failback, testing, and application migration from data centers to AWS.

“Polaris AppFlows is a new solution around orchestrated DR to protect the full application stack with single button failover to AWS,” Mowlem stated. “It makes it all a streamlines process that integrates backup, replication and DR orchestration. Historically companies had to use other tools for DR, but with this tremendous synergy between DR and our backup, we can eliminate them and simplify management as well.”

There are two other significant elements in Andes 5.1. Once is providing natively integrated continuous data protection [CDP] for VMware environments as a seamless option in the SLA Domains by which customers define their data protection policies.

“We leverage a journal-based approach and are able to provide near-zero Recovery Point Objectives [RPO] in virtualized environments,”  Mowlem said. “There is such synergy with backups for this. Why would you need another stack?”

Finally, Datos IO, the NoSQL data protection platform which Rubrik acquired early last year, and continued to update under the Datos IO name with the 3.0 release, has been  rebranded as Rubrik Mosaic, and enhanced with the 3.1 release.

“We have made some great advancements on Data OS with this release,” Mowlem stated. These include the addition of protection of DataStax Search indexes, supporting backup and recovery of MongoDB 4.0 with transactions, delivering 3x performance improvements for data protection operations at scale, and integrates with DevOps tools such as Ansible and with monitoring tools such as DataDog and Splunk. In addition, Rubrik Mosaic will now be available in the Azure marketplace.

Rubrik will be demonstrating Andes 5.1 at VMworld 2019, August 25-29 in San Francisco, where they will be at Booth 1245.