UPDATED 09:00 EDT / JULY 25 2018

INFRA

Data protection unicorn Rubrik debuts Radar, a new service for fighting ransomware

Enterprises rely on backup software for much more than just dealing with routine issues such as accidental file deletions and server failures.

Having up-to-date copies of important data is equally important to ensuring an organization’s ability to recover from cyberattacks, which often compromise business records. Data protection startup Rubrik Inc. wants to reduce the risk of information getting lost during breaches with a new service called Radar that it launched this morning.

The startup built Radar to tackle the threat posed by ransomware, a type of malware that has become massively prevalent in recent years and specifically targets companies’ data. The typical attack sees the hacker encrypt files to make them unusable and then demand a payment to unlock them.

According to Rubrik, Radar enables administrators to restore compromised information with a few clicks. The service is designed to handle every part of the remediation process, including the task of identifying when ransomware infects a system, which is often easier said than done. Large organizations typically have records spread out across multiple environments and locations that are in many cases isolated from one another.

Radar, like other modern security tools, relies on machine learning to catch threats. The service’s algorithms analyze day-to-day data usage to understand what constitutes normal activity and harness that information to identify anomalies. The fact that the process is done automatically allows organizations to spot breaches even before users start reporting issues with accessing data, which gives the ransomware less time to spread.  

Alongside the automated anomaly detection,  Radar provides a number of diagnostics features. Rubrik said that administrators can use the service to pinpoint the specific data and applications caught up in a breach. From there, Radar makes it possible to restore the most recent backups for the affected workloads.

The service is built on Polaris, a cloud platform that Rubrik launched in April to provide enterprises with a “single system of record across all business information.” It essentially creates a catalog of the data throughout a company to make tasks such as restoring lost files easier. Rubrik enables companies to build their own custom services on the platform using a set of application programming interfaces.

Image: Rubrik

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