Originally reported by devops.com. This article is an independent editorial summary based on the original reporting.
Rubrik’s Case for Unifying Data Management and DevOps
At its FORWARD Digital Summit event, Rubrik made a public case for converging data management and DevOps practices. While the company is best known as a data protection vendor, president Dan Rogers positioned Rubrik as a broader data management platform provider — one whose API-first architecture could soon make it a first-class tool for DevOps teams, not just IT operations.
New Cloud Coverage: GCP, Amazon RDS, and OneDrive
Rubrik announced several platform expansions to its Polaris Data Management Platform, delivered as a SaaS offering:
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP): Polaris can now protect workloads running on virtual machines in GCP, adding to existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
- Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS): AWS data protection support was extended to cover managed relational databases running on RDS.
- Microsoft OneDrive: Cloud file storage on OneDrive is now covered, complementing the existing Microsoft Office 365 integration.
These additions bring Rubrik closer to comprehensive multi-cloud data protection across the three dominant cloud providers and their managed services.
Polaris as an API-First Platform for DevOps
The more strategically significant announcement at the summit was Rubrik’s articulation of how Polaris fits into DevOps workflows. According to Rogers, Polaris is built from the ground up using REST APIs and rich metadata, making it programmatically accessible — a key requirement for DevOps-style automation.
Today, most Polaris users are IT operations teams accessing it through a graphical user interface (GUI). That GUI-driven approach allows the platform to serve traditional IT operations while also being accessible to DevOps teams who want to automate data access and protection through code. Rogers suggested it is only a matter of time before DevOps teams start invoking Polaris APIs directly to access the large volumes of data their applications depend on.
Data Protection as a DevOps Enabler
Rogers highlighted two specific ways data protection platforms already support application development cycles:
- Development and testing environments: Developers need rapid recovery capabilities when an application crashes mid-development. A robust backup and restore platform reduces the cost of failure during iterative development cycles.
- Cloud migration: IT teams are actively using data protection and backup tooling to migrate datasets from on-premises environments into the cloud — a use case that aligns naturally with DevOps-driven modernization initiatives.
Beyond Backup: Data Governance, Compliance, and Metadata
Rubrik’s broader platform strategy extends beyond backup and recovery into adjacent data management capabilities, including:
- Data governance and compliance tooling
- Metadata management
- SaaS delivery of traditionally on-premises data management functions
Rubrik is not alone in this space; other vendors also deliver data management capabilities as SaaS. However, Rubrik’s pitch is a phased replacement of on-premises data protection with a cloud-native alternative that gradually adds higher-order management capabilities.
COVID-19 as an Accelerant for SaaS Adoption
Rogers also addressed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on IT platform decisions. With IT operations teams working remotely for an extended — and in some cases potentially permanent — period, organizations are accelerating their shift toward cloud-delivered management platforms that can be accessed from anywhere without requiring physical presence in a data center.
This trend benefits SaaS-delivered platforms like Polaris directly. The pandemic effectively compressed a multi-year adoption timeline into months, as organizations that had deferred cloud migrations were pushed to act by the operational realities of distributed teams.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Engineers
- Rubrik’s Polaris platform now covers all three major clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) for VM workload protection.
- Amazon RDS and Microsoft OneDrive are newly supported data sources.
- The REST API-first architecture of Polaris positions it as an automation target for DevOps pipelines — though widespread DevOps adoption of data management APIs remains nascent.
- Data protection platforms increasingly serve dual roles: operational resilience for IT teams, and data access infrastructure for development and testing workflows.
- Remote work pressures are accelerating SaaS platform adoption across IT operations broadly.