Rubrik just announced Code Guardian, as their next step beyond backup and into their ‘Security and AI Operations’ tagline.
When my kids were learning to drive, I used to tell them the accident you avoid beats the accident you recover from. Turns out that’s just as true for unsecured code as it is for teenage drivers. New vlog on Rubrik’s AI and Identity Summit, including what was announced and why it matters.
video transcript
Rubrik held their AI and Identity Summit this week and as one might expect it came with some new product announcements.
On the identity side of the aisle:
- They announced enhancements in the recoverability of Microsoft Active Directory, Entra ID, and Okta. With identity platforms now granting access across most of your production landscape, the assurance of a clean restorable identity provider truly is table stakes.
- We also heard about Rubrik Agent Cloud doling out scoped credentials per agent, along with monitoring and rewind capabilities.
Speaking of AI:
- Rubrik’s Forward event earlier this year talked a lot about AI being the foundation within their own platform, but this week’s announcement around Rubrik MCP fulfills the rest of the story. Their AI understands the breadth of their capabilities; while your own AI understands how your business processes work and what they depend on. Now, the MCP lets them talk to each other.
But here’s the most intriguing one: Rubrik Code Guardian.
When my kids were first learning to drive, they came into conversations like “I had the right of way” to which I would respond “The accident you can avoid is far better, than the accident you can recover from or insured against.” That is as true for IT disruptions … as it is for teenage drivers … as it is for errant or unsecure code.
Code Guardian is an offering powered by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 to identify and validate exploitable attack paths in your code, since it’d be better for you to find the holes before the bad guys do. What I think makes this interesting is if you look at Rubrik’s evolution from ‘just another backup‘ product … into a ‘cyber resilience‘ solution … into an ‘AI operations‘ company (Bipul keeps moving the goal line), those evolutions were still grounded in “once you’ve got a good backup, here’s what else you can do.”
Most major data protection vendors, once they have delivered sufficient breadth of protection for their target market, start looking at where else they can unlock value beyond just the ability to restore. Code Guardian is much more of a governance story than a ‘because of your backup’ story, even though the workflow still runs against a secure, air-gapped copy.
This probably isn’t a “We’re going to sell the paper mills” pivot; more likely just the next step of Rubrik’s evolution via expansion. Either way, it is a definitive proof point in Rubrik’s vision either alongside backup or beyond backup. We’ll see … until then, leave your thoughts on the LinkedIn article.