Enhancing Cybersecurity through Simplification and Education

A New Era of Channel Investment

Since taking on the role of regional VP for Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), David Rajkovic has led Rubrik to triple its channel investment and add two new employees to the channel team. The vendor’s commitment to supporting its channel partners is evident in its efforts to simplify its local structure and make it clear which Rubrik representative is responsible for specific regions or vertical markets.

Adam Gabriel joins Rubrik as A/NZ channel SE leader, bringing experience from Zscaler’s sales engineer manager for A/NZ
Hayden Tseng joins as A/NZ director for global systems integrator (GSI) alliances, previously at Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The goal is to make it easier for customers and partners to engage with Rubrik and to provide a better-understood shared responsibility model for cybersecurity. Rajkovic explained that the current model has been simplified to ensure that customers and partners understand their roles and responsibilities. “There’s now a better-understood shared responsibility model,” said Rajkovic. “The service provider or vendor guarantees service availability within agreed-upon SLAs, but it’s up to the customer to protect their data assets.”

This shift in approach has been driven by the need to educate customers about the capabilities and limitations of their backup solutions. Rajkovic noted that there was once a misconception that if a customer used a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, they were fully covered by the vendor. However, this is no longer the case. Breaches and data loss have become increasingly common, and customers are now expected to take responsibility for protecting their data assets.

Examples of breaches include Zscaler’s own data breach in 2020, which compromised customer data
Customers are also responsible for recovering data in the event of a breach, which can be a time-consuming and costly process

To address this issue, vendors like Rubrik are focusing on providing education and training to customers and partners. Rajkovic emphasized the importance of having a proactive response posture, which involves quickly determining the scope of a breach, identifying what data has been affected, and recovering quickly. “Having a proactive response posture is crucial,” said Rajkovic. “It means quickly determining the scope of the breach, identifying what data has been affected, and finding the best clean copy to recover from and recovering quickly, especially for critical systems that are essential to running the business.”

Rubrik’s approach to cybersecurity is centered around providing a hardened, zero-trust platform that sits on the network. This platform is not discoverable and holds an immutable copy of an organization’s data.

Rubrik’s platform provides a range of cyber services to help build a proactive recovery posture and cyber resilience posture
The platform is designed to detect and respond to threats in real-time, and to provide a fast and secure recovery process

In addition to providing technology solutions, Rubrik is also investing in consultative services to help customers understand their risk profile and the capabilities they need to respond to cybersecurity threats. “There is a role for our channel partners to play at the front end of the conversation – not just by delivering a solution, but by helping the customer understand their risk profile, the scenarios they might face and the capabilities they need to respond to these types of incidents,” said Rajkovic. “So, there is an opportunity in the market for consultative services like this. We’re a 100 percent channel-oriented business, and we’ll continue to invest in our programs and go-to-market strategy to support the growth and profitability of our partners.”

The Importance of Vendor Responsibility

Rajkovic also emphasized the importance of vendor responsibility in ensuring that customers are well-educated and can provide the right advice. He noted that vendors have a responsibility to ensure that their service providers are well-educated and can provide the right advice to customers. “There’s also the issue of directors being held responsible for breaches, which introduces some legal complexities and grey areas,” said Rajkovic. “It’s been clarified that there’s an expectation for businesses, particularly in regulated industries, to be able to deliver these services,” he said. “In critical industries like financial services, there are regulators overseeing this.”

“I think there’s an onus on service providers and vendors, like Rubrik and all technology vendors, to ensure that their customers understand the capabilities they offer and what’s required to recover in unforeseen circumstances,” said Rajkovic. In addition to providing education and training, vendors must also ensure that their customers understand the importance of having a proactive response posture and the capabilities required to recover quickly. “Recovery time is everything,” said Rajkovic. “If recovery takes too long, it effectively makes the adversarial breach a success. The longer they can disrupt you, the more likely you are to respond to their demands for payment.”

A New Era of Awareness and Education

Rajkovic believes that vendors like Rubrik must play a dual role in helping their partners and customers. The first role is to build awareness and create demand for these services. “This means making sure that Rubrik’s brand is well known in the market and that our capabilities are understood and differentiated,” said Rajkovic. “That’s the role I play and it’s also the role of everyone in customer and partner-facing roles to advocate for our capabilities and differentiate us,” he said. The second role is to help channel partners and service providers execute and fulfill that demand when it comes. “This includes being able to architect solutions correctly, implement those solutions correctly and manage the solution for the customer, should they need to deliver effective recovery capability,” said Rajkovic. Rubrik’s commitment to education and awareness is evident in its efforts to simplify its local structure and make it clear which Rubrik representative is responsible for specific regions or vertical markets. “We’re not just talking about operational recovery capability recovery for well-defined operational scenarios like file deletions, database corruption, hardware failure or server outages,” said Rajkovic. “These were the problems customers had five, 10, or even 15 years ago when they chose their backup platform.”

Today, however, the problem has changed, explained Rajkovic. Now, the threat is an adversary behind the firewall, attacking data and the ability to recover. “Not only do they go after your data, but in most cases, they also try to compromise your ability to recover, so when you hit the recovery button, nothing happens,” said Rajkovic. “That’s their goal.”

In this new era of cybersecurity, vendors like Rubrik must play a critical role in educating customers and partners about the importance of having a proactive response posture and the capabilities required to recover quickly. “We call these’minimum viable business’ systems and businesses expect these systems to be recovered quickly with minimal downtime,” said Rajkovic. This is why vendors like Rubrik back a hardened, zero-trust platform that sits on the network, because it’s not discoverable and holds an immutable copy of an organization’s data. “It also provides a range of cyber services to help you build a proactive recovery posture a cyber resilience posture,” said Rajkovic. In conclusion, Rubrik’s commitment to education and awareness is crucial in helping channel partners execute and fulfill demand for cybersecurity solutions. By simplifying its local structure and making it clear which Rubrik representative is responsible for specific regions or vertical markets, Rubrik is making it easier for customers and partners to engage with the vendor. “We’re a 100 percent channel-oriented business, and we’ll continue to invest in our programs and go-to-market strategy to support the growth and profitability of our partners,” said Rajkovic. This approach will help vendors like Rubrik to build a stronger relationship with their customers and partners, and to provide the education and awareness that is needed to respond to the growing threat of cybersecurity breaches.