I longingly remember being a Systems Administrator configuring all my infrastructure through a variety of consoles. Those days are far behind me now since I spend much of my time helping customers navigate the new cloud world where infrastructure is managed through automation. It can be difficult to orchestrate pieces of the infrastructure into your server provisioning lifecycle but some vendors are embracing the new provisioning methods. Rubrik is one infrastructure company that has built a platform to thrive in this new automated world.

The way companies get off the ground has often fascinated me. Companies start with an idea, but building a company requires really hard work to turn that idea into a product that is consumable by a customer. That hard work costs money. Where does it come from? This post will use a recent startup, “Rubrik,” to walk through how the process works.

Rubrik calls themselves the “Cloud Data Management Company”. This provoked Eric Shanks to ask the question, “What are the characteristics of a cloud product?” This is a very difficult question to answer and leaves too much room for ambiguity. This lack of formal definition creates the opportunity for almost any product vendor to call their product “Cloud Ready.” In this article, Eric sets out some definitions to see if Rubrik truly is a cloud solution.

Rubrik’s that new backup solution that makes traditional backups a snap – pun intended. I’m a former Systems Administrator and there was absolutely nothing I hated more than managing backup jobs and reviewing why the backups failed all the time. I viewed backups as that thing I had to do each day as fast as possible, so I could get to the interesting parts of being a Systems Administrator like fielding support calls and patching servers. Hey, I was young and it was a phase I was going through, back off.