Rubrik has introduced two identity resilience products and acquired identity orchestration company Strata, extending its identity recovery offering into authentication continuity.
The new products are Identity Roll Forward and Identity Continuity. Identity Continuity is enabled by the Strata acquisition, though financial terms were not disclosed.
Identity Roll Forward is designed to help organisations rebuild Active Directory after a cyber incident without discarding legitimate changes made since the last clean backup. It identifies, isolates and reverses unauthorised changes while preserving valid updates such as employee onboarding and offboarding.
Identity Continuity is aimed at organisations whose primary identity provider becomes unavailable during an attack or outage. It automatically fails over authentication to a secondary identity provider, allowing users to continue accessing critical applications while recovery work continues.
The announcements reflect growing concern among security teams about attacks targeting identity systems, not just data or endpoints. Rubrik cited research from its Zero Labs unit showing that 90 per cent of IT and security leaders view identity-based threats as their top concern.
Identity focus
For companies hit by identity compromise, restoring operations can be difficult because rolling systems back to an earlier clean state may also remove legitimate changes made in the meantime. That can leave administrators facing a manual rebuild across accounts, permissions and policies.
Rubrik's new approach is intended to address that problem by separating malicious changes from valid ones. In Active Directory, the product can reconstruct the directory to a clean, current state rather than forcing organisations to choose between business disruption and residual attacker access.
Strata's technology adds another layer to that effort. The company specialises in identity orchestration, linking fragmented identity and access management systems across multi-cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments without requiring application rewrites.
That matters because many large organisations run several identity systems at once, whether through mergers, regional requirements or the use of different cloud services. In practice, this can make failover and recovery more complex during an incident.
Anneka Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Rubrik, described the challenge facing security teams when a key identity system is breached.
"When an IdP is compromised, organisations face an impossible choice: roll back to a past clean state and lose legitimate business progress or stay compromised and leave the attacker's backdoors intact," Gupta said.
"Now, Rubrik eliminates this trade-off by not only recovering identity to a clean, current state to wipe out attacker persistence, but also keeping authentication running automatically if a primary IdP goes down," she added.
Strategic gap
The Strata acquisition brings in a company with roots in identity federation and orchestration. Rubrik noted that Strata Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Eric Olden co-authored the SAML identity federation standard, widely used for authentication and authorisation across secure websites, while Chief Technology Officer Granville Schmidt has chaired a JavaScript security working group.
Rubrik framed the deal as a way to fill what it sees as a missing element in identity resilience: keeping access systems online during recovery rather than focusing only on restoration after the fact.
Mike Tornincasa, Chief Business Officer at Rubrik, set out that position in comments on the acquisition.
"Rubrik has built the most comprehensive offering for identity resilience, and Strata closes the most critical gap: Identity Continuity," Tornincasa said.
"Strata's work on agentic identity along with our new combined team and shared focus on innovation and customer impact will define how the world achieves complete Identity Resilience," he added.
Both Identity Roll Forward and Identity Continuity are in private preview. Their release suggests vendors are placing greater emphasis on identity infrastructure as a frontline issue in cyber recovery, particularly as attacks on authentication systems can lock out users, disrupt core business services and leave organisations balancing operational recovery against the risk of preserving attacker access.