Rubrik extends data protection to Apache Iceberg tables on AWS

Rubrik has announced Rubrik Apache Iceberg Protection, a backup and recovery capability for Apache Iceberg tables on Amazon Web Services. The company argues that native tooling leaves a gap because Iceberg snapshots are metadata pointers rather than copies, so a table that is deleted, encrypted by ransomware or overwritten by a misfiring AI agent takes its snapshot history with it.

The new capability copies the table metadata as well as the underlying data files, so recovery re-registers the table in the catalog and analysts can query the restored table in Amazon Athena, Apache Spark or Trino straight away. Iceberg tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog and Amazon S3 tables are in scope, with backups stored immutably either in the customer’s own AWS account or in the air-gapped Rubrik Cloud Vault.

After an initial full copy, Rubrik captures only the latest compacted snapshots to keep backup windows manageable at petabyte scale. Customers can choose the S3 storage class for rarely touched data, and can take on-demand backups ahead of risky work such as schema changes. Restores can land on an isolated Iceberg branch for validation before promotion back to production.

Anneka Gupta, chief product officer at Rubrik, said the company has long protected the object storage underneath and now covers the lakehouse itself. Apache Iceberg Protection will be generally available later this month.