Updates: Rubrik - Building a Data-Centric Cyber Resilience Moat (Pt.1)
Summary
- Rubrik has transformed traditional backup into a high-value cyber resiliency platform, capturing a fast-growing market driven by cloud adoption, ransomware, and regulatory mandates.
- Its focus on hack-driven recovery, metadata contextualization, and integrated DSPM gives it a competitive advantage over broader but less targeted platforms like Cohesity.
- Rubrik leverages strong GTM execution, customer mindshare, and unique offerings such as the $10M ransomware recovery warranty to drive rapid adoption and high switching costs.
- While its platform excels in backup-centric data protection and recovery, it is limited in real-time prevention, content-level unstructured data protection, and insider threat mitigation.
- Future growth could come from horizontal expansion across IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and potential moves into data governance, OLTP/OLAP, and big data integrations, turning its data-first approach into a broader cybersecurity franchise.
Executive Summary
Rubrik (RBRK) has emerged as a leading cybersecurity vendor in the data domain, capitalizing on the shift from traditional disaster recovery to hack-driven data resilience amid rising cyberattacks, cloud adoption, and digitization. Following its IPO, RBRK has demonstrated impressive growth reacceleration, scaling FCF margins to ~20% and reducing SBC as a percentage of revenue, while incumbents like PANW, CRWD, FTNT, and ZS struggle to penetrate this niche.
Key revisions include:
- The data backup industry’s broadening into a larger “data resilience” category that encompasses recovery, observability, and cyber protection;
- Within the competitive Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) market, Rubrik’s strong go-to-market execution and customer mindshare compensate for its relatively modest product differentiation;
- The company’s untapped GenAI potential through its Annapurna framework, a secure retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) API that enables AI systems to safely query and derive insights from protected backup data while preserving privacy and compliance.
RBRK outperforms peers like Cohesity through superior marketing, Azure partnerships, and enterprise focus, positioning it for nearly $3.5B of revenue by FY30 in the base case (valuing at $144/share at 22x EV/S NTM) or $8B in bull case (potential 5x return). Near-term risks include Q3 seasonality and market uncertainty, but long-term tailwinds in AI, unstructured data protection, and automation solidify RBRK as a high-conviction play in cybersecurity.
Following its acquisition of CYBR, PANW has effectively become the most comprehensive cybersecurity platform, now covering all major domains after years of lacking a presence in one of the largest — identity. With identity now absorbed into major platforms, data backup and recovery stands as the last major independent category yet to be integrated by leading cybersecurity vendors. RBRK has a strong opportunity to emerge as the dominant player in this remaining frontier.
Since our initial RBRK coverage, RBRK has delivered an impressive growth reacceleration which surprised the market and ourselves. What's even more impressive is RBRK's operating leverage in scaling both FCF margin to ~20% and SBC % high-20s. In this update, we share our revised thoughts on the data backup and data security market, and our expectations for RBRK.
In essence, RBRK has continued to progress very well on the data recovery and data security front. RBRK is growing to become an independent cybersecurity franchise deeply rooted in the data domain in which incumbents like PANW, CRWD, FTNT, ZS, and others are finding it challenging to penetrate.
There are three points that we want to discuss and revise in this report:.
Disaster Recovery to Hack Recovery
Previous data backup solutions such as Veritas (now part of Cohesity) and Commvault (CVLT) started with serving the disaster recovery of legacy systems such as mainframes. Veeam pioneered data backup for virtual machines in VMware environments. Though both RBRK and Cohesity began with on-prem appliances, RBRK led the shift to protecting cloud VMs and, eventually, the full cloud estate. Cohesity entered the space early in 2013 with a broader scope beyond backup. By backing up all data in a high performance data storage, Cohesity can serve as the base for more applications to be built on top. RBRK entered later in 2014 but focused on security use cases and features which transformed the industry from disaster recovery to cyber resiliency mindset.
Cohesity viewed traditional data backup as a small, slow-growth market. Instead of just storing data for emergencies, it envisioned backup systems as a goldmine of untapped value — where data could be repurposed for analytics, search, security, or file sharing, rather than sitting idle like “dead weight” on a shelf. Its strategy was to turn backup from a reactive safety net into a proactive engine for insights and business value.
RBRK took a different view. It sees data backup not just as storage, but as a critical defense against cyberattacks. While Cohesity focused on unlocking new ways to use backup data — turning it into a platform for analytics, search, and other secondary applications — Rubrik doubled down on making backup systems ultra-resilient and secure, designed to ensure mission-critical data can be rapidly recovered in the event of hacks or ransomware attacks. In other words, Cohesity aimed to make backups more useful; Rubrik aimed to make them more bulletproof & out of box for recovering the system after the breach.
