Zero trust data security startup Rubrik Inc. is tapping the power of generative artificial intelligence to help VMware users rapidly recover from cyberattacks.

Today, the company announced its new AI-Powered Cyber Recovery tool, which leverages large language models to help teams deal with the aftermath of cyber incidents and ensure minimal data loss and downtime.

Rubrik is a well-known provider of enterprise-grade backup and recovery tools. Its product spans public clouds, private clouds and on-premises systems. It relies on petabyte-scale archival storage to achieve long-term data retention at lower costs, offering integration with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and VMware.

Its new AI-Powered Cyber Recovery tool is aimed at customers that run virtual machines to host business-critical applications. As the company explains, cyberattacks are one of the most significant threats to VMs and so there’s a need for enterprises to be able to quickly and safely recover any critical data that’s lost in such incidents.

However, the cyber recovery process is often a manual and time-consuming process, even for people who know what they’re doing. What’s more, many organizations fail to restore all of the data affected by a cyberattack: Rubrik cites its own State of Data Security report, which found that only 16% of organizations managed to recover 100% of their data after paying a ransomware demand.

Rubrik Chief product Officer Anneka Gupta said that’s something every company should be aware of, given the highly unpredictable nature of cyberattacks. “The complexity and sophistication of these threats make it challenging, if not impossible, for organizations to recover data quickly, safely and with minimal data loss,” he said.

The company reckons that generative AI can make a difference, leveraging models that know exactly what to do in the aftermath of cyberattacks to ensure the recovery proceeds without a hitch. The startup explains that the AI-Powered Cyber Recovery tool employs guided workflows and offers a comprehensive list of recommendations for security teams, helping them to perform each vital task required to ensure they can get back up and running as quickly as possible.

Specifically, the new tool helps companies to achieve three things: First, it creates a plan to help the company reach its recovery point objective with the cleanest, most recent data. It provides step-by-step guidance to recover unaffected files from the most recent snapshot, while rolling back affected files to the most recent snapshot prior to when the attack was first detected.

Second, Rubrik said its tool helps to eliminate the risk of reinfection with a safer VM recovery process. This involves identifying the vSphere templates needed to reconstruct a clean and safe VM that doesn’t introduce any undetected vulnerabilities within the operating system.

Third, Rubrik helps to minimize application downtime with AI-enabled task lists. These leverage Rubrik’s data threat analytics to provide clear recommendations about which snapshot or files to use to engineer a clean and successful recovery.

“We understand that every minute counts when faced with a cyberattack, and Rubrik AI-Powered Cyber Recovery helps organizations take advantage of every second, empowering them to get their business-critical systems and data back up and running,” Gupta added.

Today’s announcement builds on Rubrik’s recent collaboration with Microsoft Corp., which saw it integrate Rubrik Security Cloud with Microsoft Sentinel and Azure OpenAI Service to enhance the cyber recovery process with generative AI and natural language processing. Rubrik said its new AI-Powered Cyber Recovery tool will be showcased at this week’s VMware Explore 2023 event Aug. 21-24 in Las Vegas.

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