As a global fashion and lifestyle retailer with a large store footprint and a rapidly expanding online flagship, this customer cannot afford disruption to core systems or e-commerce platforms. Any prolonged outage or failed recovery would be immediately visible to customers, because online checkouts, store systems, and digital experiences are tightly interconnected.

When I first engaged with their team, they were relying on IBM Spectrum Protect as their enterprise backup solution. Over time, as new platforms, databases, and applications were added, the environment evolved into a highly complex architecture that was:

• Difficult to operate and maintain across a heterogeneous, globally distributed environment
• Dependent on deep, product-specific expertise
• Increasingly misaligned with modern requirements for cyber resilience and rapid recovery

They also wanted backup to fit into an automation-first operating model. Limited integration with existing infrastructure as code tooling, plus a lack of centralised visibility, made it hard to onboard new workloads consistently and to prove they could recover quickly from a cyber incident.

Our goal was to simplify backup operations while raising the level of cyber resilience for business critical applications, retail systems, and online presences worldwide. After a structured evaluation and proof of concept, we chose Rubrik because it addressed several pain points at once:

• Unified, simplified management
  Rubrik provides a single, intuitive interface to manage backups across all workloads, including physical, virtual, database, and cloud. This significantly reduces operational overhead and removes the need for multiple, disconnected tools.
• Built-in security and resilience
  Rubrik’s immutable architecture, together with capabilities such as anomaly detection, threat hunting, threat monitoring, and Data Security Posture Management, creates a strong defensive layer against ransomware and insider threats.
• Automation and extensibility
  The platform’s API surface, together with Ansible, allowed us to fully automate host onboarding and SLA assignment. Backup became part of existing infrastructure as code workflows instead of a separate manual process.
• Global scalability with consistent SLAs
  Rubrik supports a multi cluster global deployment with centralized management. SLA Domains drive protection policies, so we can enforce consistent standards across a broad, distributed environment.
• Cloud integration and long term retention
  With Rubrik integrated into the customer’s cloud strategy, including Cloud Vault for long term retention, they gained an offsite, logically separated copy of data as part of standard workflows, which improves cyber resilience and simplifies archival.

What made Rubrik stand out was the combination of simplicity, security, automation, and global scale in one platform.

For teams running similarly complex, global environments, especially in retail or ecommerce, there are a few clear takeaways:

• Start with automation. Design your Rubrik rollout around APIs and tools like Ansible so onboarding and policy assignment are automatic from day one.
• Keep SLAs simple but comprehensive. A small, well thought out set of SLA Domains is easier to manage and audit than many special case policies.
• Invest time in sizing and modelling. Do the hard work upfront on capacity planning, data growth, and RPO or RTO requirements to avoid performance surprises later.
• Integrate security from the beginning. Turn on anomaly detection, threat monitoring, and posture management early so they become part of normal operations, not an afterthought.

Think of backup as a platform. When you treat Rubrik as an API driven platform that is tied into your monitoring and automation stack, it becomes a strategic enabler for resilience and compliance, not just an insurance policy.