Rubrik took the wraps off Autonomous Business Recovery for Cloud Applications at its FORWARD event, tackling something most backup tools have quietly gotten wrong for years. Restoring data does not mean restoring a working application, and when an attack moves at machine speed, the gap between those two things becomes the entire problem.
A modern cloud application is not just data sitting in storage. It is code, configuration files, secrets, identity permissions, and a web of dependencies that all need to come back online together and in the right order. Traditional backup tools handle individual resources one at a time. That works fine for a single database, but the approach breaks down the moment an entire interconnected system needs to come back online.
Rubrik’s approach, built on what it calls the Preemptive Recovery Engine, does the preparation work before anything goes wrong. The system continuously maps an organization’s application stack, validates clean recovery points, and pre-builds the recovery sequence in advance. When an incident hits, teams do not scramble to assemble a recovery plan. It already sits there, ready to execute.
Anneka Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Rubrik, framed the stakes plainly. “Recovering data isn’t recovering a business,” she said. “If the application isn’t running, the restore fails.” Her point lines up with Rubrik’s own research: 88% of security leaders surveyed by Rubrik Zero Labs said they worry about meeting recovery time objectives as AI-driven threats accelerate.
The product works through three main components. A continuously updated dependency map gives teams an accurate picture of every resource in the stack, even as environments shift and new components appear. Unified backup policies cover infrastructure and data together under one set of rules, closing the gaps that tend to surface mid-incident when teams discover something nobody protected. Recovery itself runs in sequence, restoring network layers first, then compute, then data, without manual scripting.
Gartner projects that this category, which it calls CAIRS, will grow from under 5% of organizations in 2026 to 35% by 2030.
Rubrik currently offers Autonomous Business Recovery for Cloud Applications in private preview.
