What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
From Backups in the Basement to the Boardroom: The Evolution of Cyber Resilience
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
The cybersecurity landscape has fundamentally shifted from prevention to resilience. Gone are the days when organizations could reasonably expect to prevent all breaches. Now, the question isn't if you'll be breached, but when—and how quickly you can recover.
Rubrik stands at the forefront of this new reality, bringing a refreshingly practical approach to data security. Rather than promising impenetrable defenses, they've built a platform that helps organizations bounce back quickly when attacks inevitably occur. By analyzing data risks, understanding data locations, and minimizing unnecessary access points, companies can significantly reduce breach impacts and accelerate recovery times.
What makes Rubrik's approach particularly powerful is their unique combination of identity security and data classification. While many security tools focus exclusively on either identity or data, Rubrik recognizes that these elements are inseparable in modern environments. Attackers target identities as pathways to sensitive data, making it essential to understand which identities—both human and non-human—can access your most critical information. This perspective has become increasingly important as organizations navigate the complexities of machine identities, API tokens, and AI agents.
The conversation also explores Rubrik's innovations in AI security, including Project Annapurna, which enables organizations to run AI models against backed-up data with carefully controlled access. As Multi-Agent Collaboration Protocol (MCP) creates new possibilities for security automation, Rubrik helps customers balance innovation with appropriate safeguards.
Ready to transform how your organization thinks about data security and resilience? Visit the Rubrik booth at RSAC to learn more about their revolutionary approach to combining identity and data security.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, really fascinating discussion in the lead-up to RSAC with Rubrik Noam. How are you?
Speaker 2:Hey Evan, I'm good, Really, really, really nice being here today, looking forward to our discussions.
Speaker 1:I am as well. Before we dive into all things Rubrik, maybe introduce yourself your journey, which you know fascinating journey to Rubrik and how that kind of experience shaped your perspective. Philosophy about data security.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So I spent many years in the security space doing research from the intelligence and being all the way through R&D departments, and then I joined a startup called Laminar in the SVM space, where I joined day one. And you know, day one you join a startup. There isn't much to do but just write a bunch of code and start developing and building the product. One thing that I loved right off the bat was talking to customers, understanding what they need. So, being a startup, you do anything. I was the support. Every customer had my personal number at the start and pre-sale and events and anything to deal with customers.
Speaker 2:We truly built an amazing technology um as the dspm space group and really had the privilege of being acquired by rubric. Now, you know a lot of people ask well, how's, how's the journey with rubric, how's it going? And people tend to say the generic well, yeah, it's all good, it's's nice, it's exciting, some people might say. But I say I'm thrilled with what we're doing with Rubrik. It's an amazing company, brilliant people. And one thing that, coming from a startup that you're really concerned about, I was concerned about, is can we keep the pace of innovation? And truly proud and really happy to say that we are and we're moving faster than we moved, and I have the privilege of working with a team that's taking new products to market, incubating products, and working with the vast, very wide say call it crowd of the rubric market and customers.
Speaker 1:Fascinating. So many hot buttons, hot topics to talk about, so I'm wondering where to start. But one thing you talk about is not when, but not if, rather, but when a breach happens, what's your philosophy around preparing for and responding to a full attack against a really difficult timeline?
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah, I think that's a great question. So Rubrik, at its core, detects data. So Rubrik is built as a data security platform that expands from on-prem SaaS and cloud workloads. And when we say being resilient, it's when it will happen, it's when you'll be hit, when systems will be down. Can you recover, can you bounce back? But one thing that will help you speed up the recovery process and lowering the impact of the breach is if you do prepare right. For example, if you analyze your data risks, if you know what data you have, if you minimize access to data, you can enhance your preparedness. Or, essentially, what it will do is it will lower the impact of the breach and will help you to respond faster to that breach. So the rubric philosophy is we are not your go-to tool that will put and try to prevent an attack. We say to our customers really, it's about assuming that you will be attacked and you will be breached. How can you bounce back as fast as possible?
Speaker 1:Yeah, really well said. You've also talked a lot about data sprawl. It's such a hot topic as the world moves to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud private cloud environments. How do you define data sprawl? Think about moving into cloud.
Speaker 2:I think this truly accelerated what we see today as data sprawl. So COVID cloud started before COVID, but COVID definitely accelerated cloud adoption and when organizations were starting to use cloud, they were starting to see the benefits of cloud, which, was it allowed data democratization, more people could use more data, and this was even before the AI boom that we're experiencing now. So AI is in terms of thinking about data. We want to use the data even more. So it just enhances that data sprawl. So it has a lot of advantages and we see how it's really powering everything to do with AI today.
Speaker 2:But this data sprawl also puts organizations at risk, because if you don't know what data you have and you don't know where it is, then you don't know how that data is secured. So today, especially with moving into cloud and even in 365 environments, we just see the data stores like S3 or sometimes your SharePoints, just being dumping ground for data and it's really difficult to keep track of what data we have and how is that data being used? Who is accessing it right? So we see this data sprawl as a brilliant. It doesn't need to be just a negative aspect, because data sprawl means more people can use more data and can be more productive, but it definitely puts organizations at risk today.
Speaker 1:Interesting. You've also talked about identity being the new perimeter. You know, with so many kinds of identities machine identities the definition is increasing. So what does it mean in a practical, day-to-day sense for organizations trying to secure their cloud?
Speaker 2:No, 100%. So it was very exciting. So today we announced that Rubrik is really stepping in into the identity space and why is that?
Speaker 2:The way I started is saying data is at our core, but what is today's entry point into that? Data Attackers are after data obvious, but how are they getting to that data? And you look at the industry today and we're speaking to our customers. Identity today is the main path to data, and if we want to secure the data in a better manner, we want to be able to secure the identity as well, and it comes in both ways. The way I look at it is in one aspect if you want to secure the data, you want to ask well, who can access this data? How can that data be leaked?
Speaker 2:If many of the attacks are happening through the identity, then I want to understand which are the identities that can access this data. The other, on the flip side, if I want to look at all the identities in my org and I saw, evan, that you mentioned the Okta conference the other day what many of the solutions that deal solely with identity are missing is the data component. So you can see all the identities, but which ones truly can impact sensitive data? And that's something unique that Brubrick is bringing to the table now and it's really exciting. We just released an announcement. I would urge anyone of viewers to just have a look at what we're doing with combining identity and data.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting, so yeah sorry, I'll just interrupt because you know. How do you know what data is critical, where it lives and how important it is? Because there's, you know, I guess all data is not created equally Correct.
Speaker 2:Yes, Rubric has a classification engine, and that classification engine can classify unstructured, structured, semi-structured data, whether it lives on-prem cloud or SaaS. Now, when we think about identities in Avenue you mentioned it it's not just your. When we think of identities, we think about your users and groups, but what we're seeing today and again, ai is enhancing it, enhancing the problem through non-human identities right Through machines. Through it could be agents that would be using tokens to authorize, authenticate against that data. And again, that sprawl that this, now identity sprawl, will make it more difficult to prioritize which machines are actually accessing sensitive data. And then again, by combining, analyzing the identity and also classifying the data, being able to separate whether it be your PHI, pci, pii, but also what is specifically sensitive to the business, by being able to classify all this data, we combine the two in a way that has not been seen yet by the industry, that has not been seen yet by the industry Wow, very cool.
Speaker 1:So a big conversation you haven't heard years ago and it's become a board-level conversation is around resilience. You've seen so many careers, even companies, ended by breaches.
Speaker 2:How do you fit into this new discussion around cyber resilience? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think back in the day before I joined, rubrik disrupted the backup space by allowing for a safe, faster and resilient backup. But the conversations were usually being held literally down at the basement with the backup person that they cared about the backup with ransomware, when organizations tried to bounce back from a cyber attack, trying to recover the data stores recover, say, the VMs they would reinfect the malware. So you're saying, okay, systems are down, now you have your backup. Okay, we're good, organizations would reintroduce, reinfect the backups. So the opportunity came from Rubrik, customers asking Rubrik hey, can you help identify a clean copy? So the jump that Rubrik made, the leap that Rubrik made from you to quickly see that it's happening, identify the anomaly as it's happening and also being able to identify a clean copy, identify a clean state and recover to that state.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's an incredible proposition. So let's talk about AI, another hot topic at RSAC and beyond. Obviously changing the way hackers operate, giving them superpowers, but what about the defenders? What are the opportunities there for your customers and, in general, the industry?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's a fascinating topic and Rubrik's proud to really. Going back to the beginning of our discussion, Rubrik's truly innovating in all fronts. So we're combining data with security, with AI, and another release that we've made is around the Annapurna release, and what Project Annapurna for Rubrik does is very basic for our customers, Since Rubrik back up all of this customer data. One of the biggest challenges that we see with adoption of safe AI is, if you allow, say, an LLM model to run against your data, how do you limit the access that this LLM module has? How do you know what it runs against? So what we did with Rubrik is we built a layer on top of the data that's being backed up by Rubrik that you can run your models and you can limit what data they can access. Who can access this data on top of data that's already being backed up? So also the collection of data you don't need to go in and collect. Access this data on top of data that's already being backed up. So also the collection of data you don't need to go in and collect all this data. It's already available for our customers in Rubrik. Now, in terms of what I think the industry is going, it's fascinating what we're seeing with MCP. I think it's driving everyone crazy.
Speaker 2:The opportunities, um. For whoever doesn't like hasn't heard about mcp real quick. I I just view it as the move from llm's chatbot to ai agents. I'm just going to break it down. Is an lm and abot? The interface is simply a chat and the input output is me putting text and expecting the output to be textual as well. The move into agents is those LLMs can now have different connectivities to multiple the other LLMs different data stores. Mcp is a new protocol that simply standardizes all the interactions. All the APIs between it could be agent-to-agent and agent-to-data store. So this brings the potential for perhaps security practitioners to connect their LLMs into multiple data stores and to become more efficient when trying to tackle security risks. So think of, if you want to be able to scan multiple sources and to really bring it all together into one place, then you could have perhaps connect to GitHub, perhaps in Splunk, see the events and correlate. Now that has nothing to do with Rubrik, but it truly excites me on the AI space and to see where we're headed with that. So MCP again brings new opportunities, but brings a lot of risks as well. New API, a new attack surface, so truly interesting to see what's going to happen there.
Speaker 2:On top of being a backup service, being more efficient and having a lower cost, a lower TCO for our customers in cloud, we can also help our customers identify.
Speaker 2:By tying in the classification engine that we mentioned, we can also help our customers identify what data they have in cloud, so they don't try to go ahead and back up everything. Right, this context before the context we tied into identity, but if we look at cloud backup, we tie this knowledge of data. Well, perhaps you don't need to back up everything, or perhaps you can back up things in what we call different SLAs. I don't need to back everything every day. If it's not as critical, I can maybe back it up every month or every six months. If it's not critical at all, Maybe I don't need to back it up at all and I can delete the data and spare the cost altogether. So this is something that Rubrik brings to the table with much more efficient and smart cloud backup, and again, it's using all the power and innovation of Rubrik, being able to handle cloud data at scale and also being able to identify what data needs to actually be backed up.
Speaker 1:Wow, fantastic so we're heading to RSAC, any tips or tricks or plans that you want to share? You've been many times, as have I, I guess. Besides good walking shoes and lots of water, what other advice would you give attendees?
Speaker 2:So for me, honestly, I'm sometimes very intimidated by all the noise it's crazy, and then I just ask people about it, how they handle it. What I find super effective is to simply focus on three talks that I want to participate in and really want to listen, and not to be distracted scrolling through my phone through the talks, because if I sign up to 10, then I know well I have the next one. So really focus on the talks that you want to participate in and, on the floor at the expo, focus on three vendors that you are truly intrigued about. I mean, it's crazy, right? We all want to join some raffle and there are so many demos and vendors trying to pull everyone in.
Speaker 2:What I even try to do and I use this as a learning opportunity I will be at the floor working at the rubric booth, but I do try to step out out. Focus on three vendors, ones that that truly excite me, the smaller ones, but also the big ones. What are they saying? What are they seeing? So I would recommend, obviously, go ahead and and see what we have at the rubric booth. You'll love what we're doing with identity, combining it with with data. That's me being biased, but, with all fairness, truly focus on the vendors that you want to see and the ones that you don't even know about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's always fun discovering things, but it's also good to go with a plan. I created a Google Doc that has just everything I'm planning to do in one place and contact and emails, and saves you a lot of time and scrolling through emails and texts and other things. So good luck to us all and we'll see you next week. Okay.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you, thanks very much.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening everyone and watching. Take care.