Rubrik CEO: Why Frontier AI Is A ‘Reckoning For The Cybersecurity Industry’

‘In the age of AI, you will have continuous attacks, and you need continuous recovery and patching. All the old paradigms will change,’ Rubrik co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha tells CRN.

Sinha On The Record

While it’s been evident for years that prevention and detection alone are not enough for effective cybersecurity, the arrival of ultra-powerful frontier AI models is making this plainer than ever, according to Rubrik co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha.

In an interview with CRN Tuesday, Sinha said it’s clear that with frontier AI models such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos—which are capable of chaining vulnerabilities and enabling attacks at unprecedented speed—the cybersecurity industry has now reached a critical turning point.

Amid the simultaneous rise of AI-powered attacks and widespread deployment of potentially risky AI agents, customers are being forced like never before to rethink their cybersecurity approaches, Sinha said. Ultimately, cyber defense will increasingly shift away from a focus on stopping every breach, in favor of ensuring that organizations can recover and patch quickly enough to keep operating, he said. What this adds up to is nothing short of a massive “reckoning for the cybersecurity industry,” Sinha said.

“In the age of AI, you will have continuous attacks, and you need continuous recovery and patching,” he told CRN. “All the old paradigms will change.”

During the interview, Sinha also discussed Rubrik’s recent series of AI-focused announcements—including the vendor’s initiative to transform the Rubrik platform itself into an AI agent—as well as advancements on identity security including through the company’s acquisition of Strata.io earlier this month.

What follows is more of CRN’s interview with Sinha.

What have been the biggest themes for Rubrik through the first half of the year?

At the highest level—particularly around Mythos and frontier AI—what is clear now is that cybersecurity, as we have built and conceived it in the last 20-30 years, is dead. Cyber was built for human attackers. And people working in the companies and running business processes were human beings. Now, you have AI agents attacking us, and folks are deploying AI agents to do work within the enterprise on their own. So the scenario on both sides is machine speed. But the cybersecurity tooling was not built for machine speed. It was built to prevent and detect attacks. But you can’t prevent [anything] anymore, because the time between intrusion and breach is zero—because of the chaining of vulnerability and all the rest. So the cyber strategy has really moved from prevention and detection to resilience, which is fast patching and fast recovery. That is the new cybersecurity.

That’s why at [our] Forward [conference], our biggest announcement was that we have converted the Rubrik platform itself, the product itself, into an agent. The reason is, if you say, “I’m going to fight AI with AI,” and you bring your 20-year-old software to deal with it, you can’t [do it]. Because software is run by humans. You can’t have [humans] do the work to counter an AI attack. So you have to truly deliver an AI agent to be the defender.

[Now that] Rubrik itself is an AI agent, the agent does the work, listens to all the changes, figures out if there is an attack. If it figures out there is an attack, then it figures out how it will recover—and only brings the human in the loop to make a judgment call, a decision. And once you [make the decision], it automatically completes the task.

How is that differentiated from how others are approaching this issue?

Look at everybody in the cybersecurity industry. Who has created a single, super-agent for the product that orchestrates everything? Nobody has done it. They all talk about “fighting AI with AI,” because it takes an architectural change and a single platform. You can’t do it if you have many products and different fragmentation.

Since Rubrik has a single platform, single policy engine, single control plane, we converted the Rubrik platform itself into an agent. So this is completely differentiated and a first in the industry. A lot of people say, “I can give you a copilot that will give you help”—but that’s not the platform as an agent.

What would be one example of how that changes how security is done and how people work with Rubrik as a product?

I’ll give you a simple example. You run your business in the cloud, [for instance] AWS, and you have a whole bunch of resources that you consume as part of it—RDS, EC2, a bunch of other databases, load balancing, and all of that makes your whole application. But the traditional backup and recovery industry only backs up the components. It doesn’t understand the concept of the full application, because CMDB in the cloud is missing.

Since Rubrik itself is a platform, Rubrik as an agent will go in and discover the full applications, including all the components of the applications and all the dependencies, automatically create a CMDB for you, and then it watches the whole application for any ransomware attack. Should there be a ransomware attack, it detects it, actually figures out what is the cleanest state of data, and then asks the question from the human being, saying, “I have detected a problem here, and this is the solution. I’m going to go restart the whole application in a different data center or different region within AWS. Do you agree?” You say yes, it automatically completely restarts the whole application, including all the components, without any human work in a different location. Zero human involvement.

Could you say a bit about your other recent major announcements?

The second thing that we announced was the Rubrik Agent Cloud, which actually protects Claude Code. Folks are now deploying coding agents or Copilot agents, and they are worried about these agents hallucinating or getting compromised. How do you ensure there is runtime security and agent rewind for these customer agents? We created Rubrik Agent Cloud to support Claude Code and [Microsoft] Copilot as runtime security plus recovery.

And the third big piece of Rubrik’s AI story was Annapurna. If you think about an enterprise, 80 percent, 90 percent of the data in the enterprise is non-textual, unstructured data. Think about videos, photos. All of this data is very expensive to do AI on, because the volume of data is so big, you have to load the whole data to figure out what to do AI on.

So Rubrik has a special secret sauce that classifies the data and only presents the metadata to, say, Databricks Unity Catalog, where customers can decide what data they want to do AI on. Then, whatever they want to do AI on, Rubrik loads that data into Databricks in a tabular format so that customers can immediately do AI. In some ways, Rubrik presents itself as a data infrastructure for unstructured AI.

What are the biggest opportunities right now for your channel partners?

As you know, Rubrik is a 100-percent channel company, and all our business goes through channel. The opportunity for our partners is tremendous.

No. 1, with Mythos and with frontier AI, every customer is worried about how they’re going to operate their business, because they can’t prevent and detect any attacks. So for our partners to go have this conversation about cyber resilience transformation with their customers is a tremendous opportunity, from doing assessment of cyber resiliency transformation to doing the cyber resilience and transformation projects, also delivering cyber resiliency as a service. So they are not just selling the product, but also operationalizing the technology. That creates a tremendous opportunity for them to be at a higher-margin business for the most important problem that customers are facing today, and having a conversation that is strategic to the customers. It is not, “I’m replacing one cyber tool for the next,” and customers have 80 cyber tools. Rubrik cyber resiliency is the difference between whether the customer will be in business or not in this Mythos and frontier AI era. The No. 2 opportunity is, [for] every customer of our channel partners that is buying Claude Code, they can immediately sell Rubrik Agent Cloud for Claude Code. Basically, give them a resiliency agent that watches the coding agent. And every customer is not getting the right ROI from Claude Code because they are not giving Claude Code the right access. Without the right access, Claude Code is read-only, and it is not giving you the full ROI. To have the confidence that Claude Code can do everything that it is supposed to do, but have real-time guardrails and security, is what Rubrik is delivering. So it’s a huge opportunity for our channel partners. Same thing for Copilot. As customers are deploying Copilot, creating real-time security for Copilot, plus rewind for Copilot, is a huge opportunity. And finally, at the end of the day, every customer has this issue around identity, and you wrote about identity. It’s the fastest-growing business for us in the four, five quarters. We did $50 million-plus ARR. It is still the No. 1 challenge for our customers because identity is the perimeter, and the identity system is first to compromise. The biggest challenge there is persistence. You can’t just roll back your system, because then you have ex-employees coming in. So you have to roll back your identity system and roll forward good identity changes so that you have a clean removal of persistence. There’s a huge opportunity for our partners, both in terms of consulting with our customers to understand the status today, delivering and implementing such services, and in many cases delivering this as a service for ongoing operations.

Speaking of identity, you acquired Strata—what is the biggest thing to know there?

Strata was an identity orchestration platform and is doing identity failover. So you can fail over from Okta to [Microsoft] Entra ID, for example. As you know, identity systems have become ground zero for cyberattacks. While we are delivering recovery of identity systems, there is still a challenge of, while you are doing the recovery, it could take a few hours for you to do recovery, and you still want your identity systems to be up and running. So the failover of identity is also a critical part of the resilience of the identity platform. That’s what we saw with Strata—very strong team, very strong technology, great number of customers.

That was our initial entry point, but Strata sits at a very strategic place because it gives you [connection] to all the identity systems, and it has a very important role to play in the world of agentic identity.

Overall what do you think was the story of the first half of the year, and what are you expecting for the second half?

I would say the story of the first half was a reckoning for the cybersecurity industry. If you think about it, customers have bought 80, 200 tools to prevent and detect attacks. Suddenly, with Mythos, with their vulnerability chaining and reasoning, you can’t prevent anything. So customers are back to square one.

The story of the second half is every customer is going to ask, “What am I getting out of cybersecurity tooling and products? And how can I deliver quick recovery plus patching?” Because these are the only two things.

In the world of new cybersecurity, in the age of AI, you will have continuous attacks, and you need continuous recovery and patching. All the old paradigms will change. And it’s a reckoning.

So you are expecting that there’s going to be a lot more need for resilience, as more vulnerabilities are exploited because of these frontier AI models and other models being used?

100 percent—nobody can stop breaches or attacks. That’s the whole idea. There were a lot of niche products everybody was buying because of the fear of what could happen if I have this small gap that I’m not filling, that is gone. You will see more consolidation, more tools rationalization on the prevention and detection side. And you’ll see acceleration on the resilience and recovery side, and [on] patching.

Mythos obviously did not come out of nowhere, but it certainly caught a lot of people off guard. Is there anything that you found surprising as far as how things have developed here?

You and I have had many conversations where I said that prevention and detection is not enough, and resilience is the real answer for cyber. Mythos only accelerated that phenomenon. Any big development doesn’t create anything new. It accelerates existing phenomena. That’s what has happened. It actually has proven that prevention and detection is completely not sufficient.

To be able to recover at AI speed—because attacks are happening at AI speed—you need to have preemptive work. You need to work in the peacetime to be able to deliver at AI speed in the wartime. Call it luck, call it right time, right place, call it whatever—two years ago, we actually launched something called preemptive recovery engine for exactly this purpose. Obviously, we didn’t know Mythos or what would happen with Mythos, but we had this inkling that this thing is only going to accelerate, because we are in this new world. This is why I’m saying there is a reckoning for this industry.

You had an MSP-related announcement a few months back—how has that initiative been going? What is your strategy with MSP?

As you know, many of our customers want to consume things as a service, as opposed to buying products, because they want ease of consumption and operations. If you look at the traditional MSP business, it was traditional backup and recovery for human error or natural disaster. But in the world today, the biggest disaster is the cyber disaster. And the biggest challenge is frontier model-led attacks. So what we are seeing is a renewed interest in delivering cyber resilience as a service.

That’s why we are actually working with our partners around the world to create higher-margin, higher-profit business, by delivering cyber resilience as a service. [We’re doing this] with preemptive recovery technology, which is all AI-driven, and guaranteed recoverability for our customers at machine speed. That is the opportunity in front of all our MSP partners around the world. We are educating them that we have a business model for them, we have a profitability model for them. It is based on making sure that they consume and align the business with the investment. So it’s truly a model to create a great business.

What are other aspects that we haven’t talked about here, or are there other initiatives you’re working on?

For our channel partners, Rubrik is a massive value proposition because Rubrik is a true platform company. You can land customers just on the on-premises data center cyber resilience, or cloud cyber resilience, or SaaS cyber resilience, such as Microsoft 365, or identity cyber resilience, or AI cyber resilience—all of it in a single platform. What that allows our channel partners to do is to stack services. Once you deploy the platform, you can stack the services by flipping on switches. There is no extra software deployment, and it seamlessly expands.

That creates a unique business model for our partners because they don’t have to deploy products and learn different things. [You] just deploy the platform once and scale it. Also, you can land customers in any which way. You don’t have to land with core and then add modules. That delivers a critical, profitable model for our partners.

We are telling our channel partners that in this world, there is no infrastructure without security. The infrastructure and security are coming together. And the most important risk in the minds of CIOs, CISOs and the board and CEO, is cyber. So how do you deliver secure infrastructure? Rubrik has this unique proposition of bringing data, identity and AI in a single platform. That is where partners can have tremendous opportunity.

We just did nine quarters as a public company, and our top-line revenue grew 39 percent year over year at $1.5 billion ARR [annual recurring revenue] scale. So we are in a unique position to have a fast-growing company with a broad set of products. There is tremendous opportunity for our partners to come on this platform and build with us.

In the end, I will say that Rubrik is the defining security company for the AI era, because cyber resilience is going to be the most important thing in this frontier AI and Mythos era.