Data security and AI operations company Rubrik Inc. recently announced at its Rubrik FORWARD conference the expansion of its identity resilience portfolio through the acquisition of identity orchestration firm Strata.io and the launch of its self-developed "Identity Roll Forward" technology. This move aims to help enterprises combat the increasingly severe threat of identity-based attacks.

Identity has become a primary target for cyberattacks. The latest research from Rubrik Zero Labs indicates that 90% of IT and security leaders rank identity-based attacks as their top concern. However, when an identity provider is compromised, companies often face a dilemma: either roll back to a previous clean state but lose legitimate business progress, or remain in a compromised state, allowing the attacker's backdoor to persist.

Rubrik Inc. Chief Product Officer Anneka Gupta stated, "Rubrik eliminates this dilemma—we can not only restore the identity system to a clean, latest state to remove the attacker's persistence but also automatically keep authentication services running if the primary identity provider goes down."

Of the two core capabilities announced, the Identity Continuity feature stems from Rubrik Inc.'s acquisition of Strata.io. Strata specializes in identity orchestration, enabling unified management of identity and access management infrastructure across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments without requiring enterprises to rewrite application code. Strata co-founder and CEO Eric Olden participated in co-authoring the SAML identity federation standard, which is widely adopted by many identity providers. Through this feature, if a primary identity provider fails or is compromised, Rubrik Inc. can automatically fail over to a backup provider, ensuring critical applications remain online during a security incident.

The Identity Roll Forward feature is entirely developed in-house by the Rubrik Inc. team and is an industry first. This capability allows enterprises to restore their identity system to its latest state. Using Rubrik's intelligent technology and third-party signals, it can identify, isolate, and revoke unauthorized changes while fully preserving legitimate change records, such as employee onboarding and offboarding information. This significantly simplifies what was previously a weeks-long manual process of rebuilding identity systems.

Rubrik Inc. Chief Business Officer Mike Tornincasa said, "Strata's work in identity orchestration, combined with our newly integrated team and shared focus on innovation and customer impact, will define how the world achieves complete identity resilience." The specific terms of the Strata acquisition have not been disclosed. Both Rubrik Identity Roll Forward and Identity Continuity are currently in private preview.