How Rubrik is helping organizations manage identity risk

“Identity has now become so critical for an organization to survive and make sure that they can run their business sustainably” says Ananth Nag, Vice President for APAC at Rubrik.

In the Asia Pacific region, Rubrik continues to expand its capabilities with its customers. The security and AI operations vendor leads data protection and cyber resilience for organization while enabling AI acceleration. However, increasing AI deployment does come with its own challenges as well.

According to Ananth Nag, Vice President for APAC at Rubrik, conversations with organizations revealed that a majority of them are reassessing their business models and the impact of AI on their business models.

“Each organization is looking at how do they look at AI and reassess and remodel their business. That is also increasing the cyber risk for organizations which has amplified. The reality is productivity, and the business drivers with AI is so impending that they are starting to realize that cybersecurity is a critical priority that they have to address. So, we are talking to organizations across the region around how we can help while they adopt AI and simplify their models,” said Nag.

Nag explained that this includes enabling organizations to be more resilient and have confidence in their AI adoption and deployment. Businesses need to be aligned with regulator needs and be sure of the processes they have in place when it comes to handling critical data.

“These nuances are the ones that each industry in each market is re-evaluating. The ANZ region is slightly different from the way ASEAN and India are looking at it. And within ASEAN, each country is very different from each other. They have to rethink their new models and the second most critical product they're looking at is cyber risk,” he said.

Dealing with AI Agents

As businesses look to deploy more AI agents, there is also a massive increase in the number of identities that an organization has to deal with. Businesses will now have to secure both human and non-human identities, which Nag explained continues to increase and is about 80 plus non-human identities for every single human identity.

“This means that the feasibility within an organization of what AI is executing is not very clear and also means that organizations are seeing a threat with identity as the beginning. Because if you've observed the industry movement that's happening, many cybersecurity organizations are acquiring identity security vendors. And the reason for this is with increasing agentic AI adoption, identity becomes the new perimeter or the new security that they have to think about. This means that you could have human and non-human identities stolen, people can live off the land, can be persistent without seeing any cyber risk,” Nag explained.

According to Rubrik’s Zero Labs report, 84% of Singapore leaders cited identity-based attacks as the single largest threat to their organizations. 90% of organizations plan to hire professionals within the next year to strengthen their defenses against identity-driven attacks, and 94% are actively seeking to change their Identity and Access Management (IAM) providers.

The report also revealed 92% of organizations have fully or partially incorporated AI agents into their identity infrastructure, despite 44% predicting that agentic AI will drive over half of cyberattacks in the next year.

For Nag, the concern with identity risk is that in the past, cyber risk meant threats get in and disrupted businesses by taking data out and such. However, when it comes to identity risk, it can be persistent as the identities can be in the environment and continue to impact the business.

“These are the trends that we are consistently seeing across industries, because identity threats can really bring an organization to its heels,” Nag said.

Why backup matters

While the backup industry has evolved over the last few years, Nag explained that this evolution was clearly one of the reasons Rubrik was born as previous backup models were not sustainable with the current demand.

“Rubrik was born with a mission to make sure that when a cyber incident happens, we are able to help make a business sustainable, recover back, and bounce back to operation as quick as you can. And we are an innovation company. So, we are innovating as to how can we help organizations recover from hallucinations, from impacts of AI, because we think AI will not only be 10x more productive, but 100x more impactful than a natural human or a cyber disaster,” he explained.

Nag added that Rubrik continues to position itself as a data security and AI operations company that can help organizations become sustainable.

“Backup is primary. Backup is fundamental foundation for this, but overlaid with making sure cyber resilience is built, and identity resilience is built to make sure that organizations are sustainable. There have been backups for the last 20, 25, 30 years. The reality of those backup organizations, they were there at the right time for the right use cases, be it human or natural disaster but cybersecurity was 10x more impactful,” he added.

For Nag, cybersecurity is a very different use case than human and natural disaster. And that is the space he stated that Rubrik helps organization make sure they identify their first clean copy to recover as well as make sure they build a cybersecurity recovery time objective (RTO) because most organizations look at RTO from an operational perspective.

“Cybersecurity RTO is very different. Operational RTO is where you have a data center in a disaster recovery, something goes wrong with your data center, you recover it at the hour. For cybersecurity, you wouldn't know when did the malicious actor enter your environment. The malicious actor could have come into your environment days, weeks, months before. And if that malicious actor is sitting in your environment, how do you identify the first clean copy, the data that you need to recover back your operations? That's the hardest part to identify. What Rubrik helps is identify your first clean data that you can recover from, for you to be back in operations,” Nag said.

At the same time, Nag pointed out that Rubrik helps customers with identity security, which is the new perimeter. “Identity has now become so critical for an organization to survive and make sure that they can run their business sustainably. And for identities to be secure, human and non-human identities are only going to amplify by multiples of maybe hundreds in the next few years with agentic AI coming in. You can't prevent it with the cybersecurity tools that you deploy. How do you plan for recovery? And that is the thing that Rubrik helps to make sure that we help organizations recover,” he concluded.