What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is that we have a different set of workloads. Our entire M365 is backed up using Rubrik. All our servers go to Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct. A couple of Windows file sets also, volumes as well. Basically, we are backing up our entire Nutanix infrastructure.
I can give you a quick specific example of how I use Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct in my day-to-day work: every day, any new user that is added to our government tenant, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct backs it up to the cloud. Everything happening on our infrastructure is backed up to Rubrik. So everything that happens in the day, we leverage Rubrik. When an account is deleted as well, we leverage Rubrik for recovery purposes.
Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is our single point of truth when it comes to recovery and our daily appliance usage for the government. As a government entity, we need to make sure every piece of data is not lost. We use it every day.
How has it helped my organization?
Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct has positively impacted my organization. I have been using it for nine months and it has been the holy grail for our county because we basically rely on it every day for off-boarding, on-boarding, accounts being purged, and we are able to bring them back to life. We are able to attach old mailboxes to users. We are able to detach mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint, and basically everything. It has been such a winning member of the team.
When I started using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct in February when I joined the county, I have seen outcomes where our security score was around 86. We were able to push it to 91 percent right now. We are still doing better by pushing it to 96, probably by the end of the year, pushing it to 97 or 98. So there are a whole lot of metrics to speak for it. Our downtime has been really reduced. We are not afraid of accounts being deleted and wondering when we are able to bring them back. As long as it is needed, we are easily almost always able to recover because we have Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct.
What is most valuable?
The best features Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct offers include the fact that I do not have to manually manage everything. I just need to set my SLAs and have them work, set the time and then let those jobs run and then I will just come back on the following day just to confirm that nothing failed and they were all able to back up. Automation is very important to me with Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct.
The automation specifically saves me a ton of time and reduces my workload as a lot of the processes have been automated. We install all the file sets, we have our orchestrated recovery setup in place. We also have all our accounts that are moved from active to deleted automatically. Rubrik's automation takes care of it and moves it to relic and applies an SLA to it. It keeps it more like a cold storage.
I would also add that the other part is the fact that I am able to upgrade my CDM on the fly. I download the CDM version that is compatible with my current version, just click on upgrade, and I upgrade with no downtime. Anytime there is an upgrade, there is no downtime.
What needs improvement?
One way Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct can be improved is the interface is fine and everything looks good. However, I think we should be able to do more at the kernel level, I mean the CDM level, the CLI level. I am very heavy in CLI, so I would want more of the features to push into the commands as part of the CLI.
The other thing I want to add is that the documentation is kind of vague sometimes. I skim through a lot of documents, but I always end up doing things my own way. I would really want the team to improve on the documentation with a lot of screenshots and go-throughs. So far, it has been okay.
If I could change or improve one thing about Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct, the features so far are okay for now.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct for a little over seven or eight months. I took over in January.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is very, very stable. Out of 10, I give it 9.5. It is really stable. There have been only a few times where we have a bit of an issue with authentication, but even that was resolved in less than five to 10 minutes.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct's scalability is pretty easy and pretty simple. You buy a new one and you put it on, and you run a few commands, you add those nodes, and you are good to go. It is pretty simple and straightforward.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support for Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is beautiful customer support. It is really beautiful for me. I have been working with Rubrik for eight months and the customer support is amazing. It is really amazing. I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to 10 as nine.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct, we previously used VMware vCenter and switched to Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct because of the obsolete nature of VMware. It was not giving us a lot of leverage. Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct gave us all in one.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment with Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct. A lot of time is saved, fewer employees are needed, and we do not have to stay in the office all night when there is a disaster.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that I do not make a lot of those decisions, but I think setup cost is a bit on the high side. Regarding licensing, I do not have specific information, but the setup cost appears elevated.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct, we did not evaluate other options. We went straight to Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct.
What other advice do I have?
On a scale of one to 10, I rate Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct overall as eight out of 10.
I rate it an 8 out of 10 because I do not see any product that is perfect. It is the reason why every now and then updates are rolled out. When the documentation is fixed and there are a few more chances to give to admins to do things at the back end, I will give it a 10.
Regarding Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct's AI capabilities, we use the AI capabilities for our YARA rules and hash files. I am for a more stringent governance approach rather than leaving it to people to decide.
I think the accuracy and reliability of output for Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct are good as I see features on our dashboard most of the time. I think they are accurate and pretty accurate.
Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is deployed in my organization as on-premises. Ours is on-premises and under the government tenant.
The advice I would give to others looking into using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is that it is going to save a ton of money. A ton of processes will be streamlined into one. Workflows are streamlined into a very simple, easy-to-use approach with case studies or use cases.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises