Rubrik signs agreement with Microsoft to focus on zero trust

Rubrik on Tuesday announced a strategic agreement with Microsoft to focus on running Rubrik’s zero trust products in a Microsoft Azure environment.

The two companies aim to help solve rising customer needs to protect against the increased wave of ransomware attacks. Together, Rubrik and Microsoft will offer Microsoft 365 and hybrid cloud data protection and integrated cloud services on Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft has been talking a lot about zero trust in recent months, and integrating and embedding zero trust into Azure makes sense as the next logical step, said Dirk Schrader, global vice president of security research at New Net Technologies, now a part of Netwrix.

“The crucial part will be managing a zero-trust ecosystem by the regular Azure customer," Schrader said. “Zero trust is sometimes described as treating every single asset like having its own perimeter, its own protection against everything else. As promising as it is, zero-trust can be cumbersome to manage efficiently for the less experienced. If so, and the zero-trust architecture is perceived as a hinderance to the business, it will be difficult to stop employees from working around it.”

Joseph Carson, chief security scientist and Advisory CISO at ThycoticCentrify, said organizations must continue to adapt and prioritize managing and securing access to business applications and data similar to BYOD devices. That means further segregation of networks for untrusted devices, but secured with strong privileged access security controls to enable productivity and access. 

“Organizations are looking to a zero-trust strategy to help reduce the risks resulting from a hybrid working environment which means to achieve a zero-trust strategy, organizations must adapt the least privilege that enables organizations to better control user and application privileges elevating only authorized users,” said Carson.