In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the question isn’t if a cyber attack will happen, but when. With 90% of global IT and security executives reporting cyber attacks within the last year, organizations face a grim reality: traditional backup solutions simply aren’t cutting it anymore. Enter the strategic partnership between cloud giants Rubrik and Rackspace Technology, who’ve joined forces to address this critical vulnerability with their new Rackspace Cyber Recovery Cloud powered by Rubrik.
This collaboration tackles one of the most pressing challenges in modern enterprise: how to recover swiftly and completely when sophisticated ransomware or other cyber threats compromise your data. The stakes couldn’t be higher, especially for organizations with mission-critical workloads in public cloud environments where downtime translates directly to lost revenue and damaged reputation.
The Current State of Cyber Recovery: why Traditional Methods Are Failing
Traditional backup and recovery systems were designed for a different era—one where accidental deletions and hardware failures represented the primary threats to data integrity. Today’s landscape looks dramatically different, with attacks specifically targeting backup systems and data repositories with increasing sophistication.
The consequences are severe. Organizations hit by ransomware often face weeks or even months of recovery time, during which operations may be severely hampered or completely halted. Meanwhile, regulatory requirements around data protection continue to tighten, adding compliance pressure to the technical challenges.
Many enterprises struggle with:
- Backup repositories that are vulnerable to the same attacks affecting primary systems
- Complex recovery processes requiring specialized expertise
- Inability to quickly validate data integrity post-attack
- Inadequate testing of recovery procedures before they’re needed
The Rubrik-Rackspace Solution: Engineered for Resilience
The new Rackspace Cyber Recovery Service represents a fundamental rethinking of how organizations approach cyber resilience. By combining Rubrik’s industry-leading data protection technology with Rackspace’s extensive public cloud expertise, the partnership delivers a fully managed service specifically engineered to address modern recovery challenges.
Key elements of this solution include:
Immutable Backups and Zero-Trust Architecture
At the core of the offering is Rubrik’s immutable backup technology, which creates copies of data that cannot be modified, encrypted, or deleted—even by administrators. This approach ensures that backup data remains pristine and recoverable regardless of what happens to production environments.
The zero-trust security model further enhances protection by requiring verification for every access attempt, effectively isolating recovery environments from potential threats.
Automated Recovery Workflows
Perhaps the most transformative aspect of the partnership is the focus on automation. The service employs Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to create repeatable, programmable recovery procedures that dramatically reduce both recovery time objectives (RTOs) and the potential for human error during crisis situations.
This DevOps-centric approach means recovery isn’t just faster—it’s more reliable and consistent across complex cloud infrastructures.
Isolated Recovery Environment
When cyberattacks compromise production environments, attempting recovery within the same infrastructure can be risky. The Rubrik-Rackspace solution provides a secure, isolated environment specifically designed for recovery operations, ensuring that reinfection doesn’t occur during the restoration process.
Benefits Beyond Basic Recovery
While rapid recovery from attacks is the primary selling point, the partnership delivers additional benefits that strengthen overall security posture and operational efficiency:
Continuous Threat Detection
The solution incorporates AI-driven anomaly detection to identify potential ransomware activity before it causes widespread damage. By analyzing patterns and behaviors across backed-up data, the system can alert teams to suspicious activity that might indicate an attack in progress.
Compliance Support
For industries with stringent regulatory requirements around data protection—banking, healthcare, and other highly regulated sectors—the solution provides built-in controls and reporting capabilities to demonstrate compliance with various frameworks.
Expert Management
Perhaps most valuable in a world of talent shortages, the managed service approach means organizations can tap into Rackspace’s cloud expertise and Rubrik’s data protection knowledge without maintaining these specialized skills in-house.
Redefining Recovery Time Expectations
Traditional recovery approaches often measure restoration timelines in days or weeks. The Rubrik-Rackspace collaboration aims to fundamentally change this expectation, enabling organizations to restore critical operations within hours.
This dramatic reduction in downtime directly translates to business value:
- Minimized revenue loss during outages
- Protection of brand reputation
- Reduced operational disruption
- Lower overall cost of cyber incidents
The ability to recover quickly represents not just a technical capability but a genuine competitive advantage in markets where continuous service availability is expected by customers and partners alike.
Why Public Cloud Demands Specialized Recovery Strategies
While the partnership addresses cyber recovery broadly, it places special emphasis on public cloud environments—and with good reason. Cloud infrastructures present unique challenges for data protection and recovery:
Architectural Complexity
Modern cloud deployments often span multiple services, regions, and account boundaries. This distributed nature makes comprehensive protection and coordinated recovery particularly challenging without specialized tools and expertise.
Shared Responsibility Confusion
Many organizations operate under misconceptions about what cloud providers protect versus what customers must protect themselves. The Rubrik-Rackspace solution helps clarify these boundaries while ensuring nothing falls through the gaps.
Scale and Automation Requirements
The very advantages that make cloud computing attractive—elasticity and scale—can make traditional backup approaches impractical. Recovery solutions must be equally scalable and programmable to be effective in cloud contexts.
Real-world Impact: From Theory to Practice
The value proposition of the Rubrik-Rackspace partnership becomes clearest when considering practical applications across industries:
Healthcare Organizations
For healthcare providers, system downtime isn’t just an inconvenience—it can directly impact patient care and safety. The ability to rapidly restore clinical systems after an attack could literally be a matter of life and death. The solution’s compliance capabilities also address the stringent requirements of HIPAA and other healthcare data regulations.
Financial Services
Banks and other financial institutions face both sophisticated attacks and strict regulatory requirements around data protection and business continuity. The Rackspace Cyber Recovery Cloud meets these dual challenges with its combination of robust security controls and rapid recovery capabilities.
E-commerce and Digital Services
For online businesses, every minute of downtime translates directly to lost revenue. The solution’s focus on minimizing recovery time objectives provides these organizations with the resilience needed to maintain customer trust and business continuity even in the face of ransomware or other cyber incidents.
The Future of Cyber Resilience
The Rubrik-Rackspace partnership represents more than just a point solution for today’s threats—it signals a shift in how organizations think about cyber resilience as a comprehensive strategy rather than just a backup tactic.
Looking ahead, several trends are likely to shape the evolution of cyber recovery:
Integration with Broader Security Operations
Recovery capabilities will increasingly integrate with security operations centers and incident response workflows, creating more seamless handling of the full attack lifecycle.
Predictive Recovery
Advanced analytics and machine learning will enable systems to anticipate recovery needs and prepare resources in advance—further reducing downtime when incidents occur.
Automated Testing and Validation
Regular, automated testing of recovery procedures will become standard practice, ensuring that theoretical recovery capabilities actually work when needed.
The Rubrik-Rackspace collaboration positions organizations to benefit from these advancements while solving today’s pressing recovery challenges.
Conclusion: A New Standard for Cyber Resilience
In a world where cyber attacks have become virtually inevitable, the ability to recover quickly and completely represents a crucial capability for modern enterprises. The strategic partnership between Rubrik and Rackspace Technology addresses this need with a purpose-built solution that combines best-in-class data protection technology with deep public cloud expertise.
By enabling organizations to restore critical operations within hours rather than days or weeks, the Rackspace Cyber Recovery Cloud powered by Rubrik doesn’t just offer incremental improvements to existing backup approaches—it fundamentally transforms expectations around recovery speed and reliability. For businesses operating in increasingly complex cloud environments, this collaboration provides both technical capabilities and peace of mind in an uncertain threat landscape.
As cyber threats continue to evolve in sophistication, partnerships that combine specialized expertise like this one will likely become increasingly important components of comprehensive security and business continuity strategies.