Rubrik’s regional VP A/NZ David Rajkovic works to provide more local support for partners

Rubrik is on a mission to help channel partners execute and fulfill demand by supporting them in architecting, implementing and managing its solutions, said the vendor’s regional vice president for Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), David Rajkovic.

In an interview with ARN, Rajkovic noted that since taking on the role of regional VP for A/NZ nine months ago, the cyber security vendor has tripled its channel resourcing by adding two new employees to the channel team.

Adam Gabriel joins Rubrik as A/NZ channel SE leader, who was previously Zscaler’s sales engineer manager for A/NZ, while former Amazon Web Services (AWS) regional alliance leader Asia Pacific and Japan Hayden Tseng joins as A/NZ director for global systems integrator (GSI) alliances.

According to Rajkovic, the drive to better support channel partners led to simplifying the vendor’s local structure, making it clear which Rubrik representative was responsible for specific regions or vertical markets, helping both partners and customers engage more easily.

“[There’s] positive experiences with the company and the perception of Rubrik in the market on brand and capability,” he said. “But then there were some things that we needed to work on, particularly how we presented ourselves to the market.”

“The way we were organised internally, things like our coverage model [and] the amount of resources that we had in different parts of the market [needed] simplifying to make it easier for our customers and particularly our partners to engage [with]”.

The two hires will fill a gap for Rubrik, explained Rajkovic, because previously one person was responsible for covering all of the relationships with its channel and system integrator partners.

“We’ve made those investments and [they] are now starting to bear fruit in terms of us being better able to support our partners, driving demand for them and with them and also supporting them in their capabilities to service their customers with our solutions,” he said.

Increased threats

Rajkovic highlighted the importance of the support comes as cyber threats to businesses are very real, given recent high-profile cases where companies and government agencies were impacted by cyber attacks.

“We’re at a pivotal moment where the threat to businesses from disruption of their digital assets is very real and becoming more widely recognised,” he said. “Businesses have been brought to their knees by cyber attacks [and] as a result, having the ability to prevent these attacks and, perhaps more importantly, to respond effectively when they happen, is becoming a top priority in the marketplace.”

This is a growing focus at senior levels within businesses and it’s being driven by discussions at the board and executive levels, explained Rajkovic.

“Governments are also placing more emphasis on it,” he said. “Companies are now asking what the response plan [when] faced [with] such an incident.”

The demand for cyber security solutions is being driven by a real, ongoing problem of bad actors trying to disrupt businesses, governments and agencies that rely on digital systems to serve customers and constituents.

“This reliance on digital infrastructure is not going away and neither is the threat,” Rajkovic said. “In fact, a business model has emerged around exploiting this disruption, with the goal of maximising chaos to generate revenue, often through ransomware payments.”

“This problem isn’t going anywhere.”

This comes at a time when there’s a shift in how IT is managed. In the past, he noted businesses handled their own on-premises IT. Now, vendors and service providers offer IT as a service and while the provider is responsible for ensuring the service is up and running, customers also have a responsibility to protect their data.

“There’s now a better-understood shared responsibility model,” said Rajkovic. “The service provider or vendor guarantees service availability within agreed-upon SLAs [service level agreements SLAs], but it’s up to the customer to protect their data assets.

“This understanding is becoming more widespread.”

He strongly believed that vendors and service providers are doing a better job of educating customers, as there was once a misconception that if they used a software-as-a-service (SaaS) service, they were fully covered by the vendor.

However, there have been several instances where SaaS platforms were breached and customer data was compromised, noted Rajkovic.

“There are also examples of customers’ cloud environments being breached or even unintentionally deleted and in those cases, the responsibility for restoring the data falls on the customer,” he said. “This is driving more awareness and a better understanding of the need to invest in capabilities to respond to these situations not just [to] prevent breaches but also [to] respond quickly when they happen.

“Having a proactive response posture is crucial,” he said. “It means quickly determining the scope of the breach, identifying what data has been affected, finding the best clean copy to recover from and recovering quickly, especially for critical systems that are essential to running the business.

“We call these ‘minimum viable business’ systems and businesses expect these systems to be recovered quickly with minimal downtime.”

Vendor responsibility

Rajkovic also acknowledged that vendors have a responsibility to ensure 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.”

“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.

“There’s also an expectation for businesses to be able to recover quickly—and ”quickly’ is the key term here.”

However, according to Rajkovic, if recovery takes to long this effectively makes the adversarial breach a success.

“That’s what these bad actors are trying to achieve … an extended recovery time,” he said. “The longer they can disrupt you, the more likely you are to respond to their demands for payment.

“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.”

Rajkovic sees a vendor like Rubrik having dual roles in helping its partners, with one being to help 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,” he said. “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.

“This is especially important because it’s a crowded market and there’s a lot of ‘me too’ messaging out there, where any backup vendor claims they can support you in a cyber recovery scenario, which we don’t believe is true.”

The other 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. “That’s what we’re building out in the marketplace.”

He noted that people wondered why if every business has a backup, so many were still disrupted for long periods of time.

“This leads to the realisation that what people actually have is operational recovery capability recovery for well-defined operational scenarios like file deletions, database corruption, hardware failure or server outages,” he said. “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,” he said. “That’s their goal.”

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 organisation’s data.

“It also provides a range of cyber services to help you build a proactive recovery posture a cyber resilience posture,” he said.

Consultive opportunities

While Rubrik is in a “period of quiet” and couldn’t talk about future plans, Rajkovic said there’s a “continued refinement” of its programs and go to market.

“We’re a 100 per cent channel-oriented business,” he said. “All of our business goes through our channel partners. We’ll continue to invest because that’s our path to success and growth.

“We’ll ensure that any programs we have in place support the growth and profitability of our partners, because that’s ultimately what makes them successful.”

Rajokovic noted that as a technology partner Rubrik’s role is to provide a technology solution, however, it was also having conversations with customers to help them understand their risk.

“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,” he said. “Then, the technology solution can be delivered.”

“So, there is an opportunity in the market for consultative services like this.”