Every company has become a technology company, and their most important assets are increasingly the data they use to make everyday decisions, understand their customers and create best-of-breed products. In turn, data loss has never been a more significant business issue.

The volume of enterprise data is exploding across different file formats

But the challenge of backing up, recovering and archiving data is complex, especially in a world where the volume of data and workloads created by enterprises is exploding.

Cisco estimates that storage is growing at 31 percent CAGR from 2016 to 2021. And heterogeneous data — documents, videos, SaaS apps, IoT device data, workload backups, etc. — is proliferating, catalyzing the adoption of new solutions where these volumes of data can live: public cloud, SaaS apps and on-premise data centers.

In my role running Symantec our team built the largest enterprise data protection business in the world, serving over 20,000 customers. During that time I had the opportunity to work closely with customers across the globe on their data protection, privacy and security needs. Since then, the issue of protecting and managing data has grown more complex as we’ve moved to the cloud and data volumes have continued to quickly grow.

As this landscape rapidly evolves we believe that cloud data management will be one of the most important components of a CIO’s IT stack.

The market opportunity for solving cloud data management is massive

This reality is reflected by the fact that Gartner estimates the data backup and recovery market will be $12 billion by 2021. And as data volumes proliferate, this opportunity will continue to grow across sub-markets (data replication, archiving and backup and recovery), which we believe represent the emerging category of cloud data management.

Rubrik is the category winner in cloud data management

With this, we are excited to announce our participation in Rubrik’s $261 million Series E financing. Rubrik is a single software platform to manage physical, virtual and cloud data. With Rubrik, IT organizations can simplify backup and recovery, accelerate cloud adoption and enable automation at scale.

Rubrik takes advantage of the fact that previous approaches to data management need to be rethought. Whereas legacy approaches traditionally focus on leveraging software to handle data backup and recovery, and then leave the file system layer to secondary storage providers, Rubrik offers a unified, next-gen solution that doesn’t ignore, or discriminate, data context (e.g., the types of data being backed up, how to handle different data types and the policies that need to be applied).

Understanding this context — and having a simple, reliable solution to manage varied IT stacks — positions Rubrik far ahead of legacy players, especially as enterprises seek to simplify their datacenters.

After countless meetings with customers it became very clear that Rubrik had the best solution and architecture on the market. In just four years, Rubrik has built a dominant position in the cloud data management space and from our vantage point is the category winner. We have been impressed by the company’s incredible traction, large and loyal customer base, and global capabilities to deliver best-in-class service.

Rubrik is a company that stands on its own in terms of both the caliber of its team and clarity of vision. We look forward to partnering with Bipul Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Rubrik, and his incredibly talented and passionate team to build the data protection solution that all enterprises need.

1. Cisco Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2016–2021 White Paper Nov-19–18, Forecast Analysis: Integrated Systems, Worldwide, 1Q18 Update
2. Gartner Infrastructure Forecast Q3 2018

Rubrik Founding Team — (from left to right) Arvind Nithrakashyap, Co-founder and CTO; Soham Mazumdar, Co-founder and Architect; Arvind Jain, Co-founder and VP of Engineering; and Bipul Sinha, Co-founder and CEO