Data security and AI operations company Rubrik Inc. has announced the next phase of its Rubrik Annapurna product at the Rubrik FORWARD conference, establishing an AI-ready data layer for unstructured data within its enterprise data intelligence platform.

Unstructured data constitutes approximately ninety percent of modern enterprise data. A lack of visibility into these file assets has left critical business data trapped in silos, inaccessible to data science and AI applications. The traditional approach involves costly extract, transform, and load processes to copy data into data lakes, forcing companies to pay for the entire data environment while utilizing less than ten percent of it.

Anneka Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Rubrik, stated, "For years, the model for making unstructured data usable for AI meant moving, transforming, and storing data a second time, paying for the entire data estate while only using a fraction. Annapurna fundamentally changes this model. It activates data where it lives, delivers only what the data intelligence platform actually needs, and aligns infrastructure costs with consumption."

Annapurna operates on the Rubrik Security Cloud unified management platform, automatically discovering, scanning, and indexing billions of files across NAS, S3, and object storage. The system publishes a queryable catalog of file metadata directly to the data lakehouse, enabling enterprises to extract only the precise subset of data needed for model training, fine-tuning, and inference, with pipeline costs scaling elastically based on actual consumption.

Core capabilities of Annapurna include: automated data discovery across storage systems, native data lakehouse integration, an on-demand-driven pipeline economic model, continuous governance protecting source system access controls, and an immutable chain of custody function based on a zero-trust infrastructure.

Corey West, Chief Technology Officer at Piper Sandler, commented, "Annapurna provides an automated way to map, govern, and index data assets for our AI initiatives, reducing friction across functional configurations and data sovereignty requirements without an additional ETL stack."

Rubrik Annapurna is currently available to qualified enterprise partners. The company stated that native data lakehouse connector support will be introduced in a future release. The product can be deployed alongside existing storage and data lakehouse environments without requiring new infrastructure or agents.