What’s wrong with traditional backup and disaster-recovery technologies? They’re often standalone products that don’t mingle with the rest of the IT environment. Integrating backup and DR with other systems can reveal their numerous hidden talents.

Backup, DR, data governance, and continuous data protection could all accomplish more if they’d work together, according to Shay Mowlem (pictured, left), senior vice president of product and strategy at Rubrik Inc. “These are areas that have generally been addressed through separate, siloed approaches. And we see a lot of synergy with backup and recovery,” he said. 

For example, new privacy laws are pressing companies to gain greater understanding of their data. They may require them to dig out personally identifiable information from their backup archives. “Generally, the backup data has been somewhat of a black box. The only way to check it is to do sort of a spot audit check. It’s labor intensive and hard,” Mowlem stated. 

Mowlem and Chris Wahl (pictured, right), chief technologist at Rubrik, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed the new release of their integrated backup and data-management platform (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Platform bonus points add up

The process of checking backup data would be much simpler if data governance and backup were integrated on one platform, Mowlem pointed out. Rubrik just announced a new release of Andes 5.1 — one platform to protect, govern and secure data on-prem, at the edge and in cloud.

“[Governance] sort of naturally fits there in some ways, because, I’m backing it up — why not process that data to discover? It sends that information and classifies it,” Mowlem said. 

Features like these that derive bonus capabilities from backup data are resonating with customers, according to Mowlem. They represent the company’s vision of next-gen backup for multicloud.

As Wahl puts it: “Let’s take all this backup data with Rubrik, let’s index it, inventory it, really start to understand what’s going on, and use that as the jet fuel that actually powers our Polaris platform and all of our data-management applications.” 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: Rubrik Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Rubrik nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE