From Backup to Business Resilience: Inside Cognizant and Rubrik’s New BRaaS Model

Why It Matters

BRaaS gives CIOs a proactive, unified defense against sophisticated attacks, protecting revenue and reputation while simplifying compliance. It signals a market move toward service‑based resilience that integrates security, IT operations, and governance.

Key Takeaways

• Ransomware now targets backup systems directly
• Hybrid and AI workloads increase recovery complexity
• BRaaS unifies protection across on‑prem, cloud, SaaS
• Pre‑validated recovery points cut downtime dramatically
• Service model aligns costs with operational budgets

Pulse Analysis

The rise of ransomware, supply‑chain attacks, and AI‑driven workloads has exposed the inadequacy of traditional backup solutions, which were built for accidental loss rather than intentional compromise. Modern enterprises operate in a hyper‑connected hybrid cloud fabric where a single breach can cascade across partners, applications, and data stores. As business continuity expectations tighten, CIOs are forced to adopt cyber‑recovery time objectives that demand instant, trustworthy restoration of not just data but also identity, configuration, and AI context.

Cognizant’s partnership with Rubrik introduces Business Resilience as a Service, a platform that consolidates data protection, configuration validation, and continuous resilience monitoring into a single pane of glass. By leveraging Rubrik’s immutable, air‑gapped snapshots and Cognizant’s global delivery expertise, the service automates the creation of clean recovery points, orchestrates end‑to‑end runbooks, and provides on‑demand expert assistance during incidents. This approach eliminates tool sprawl, reduces blind spots, and delivers predictable, OPEX‑aligned pricing, allowing organizations to scale resilience in line with business growth.

The BRaaS model reflects a broader industry shift toward resilience‑as‑a‑service offerings that embed security, ITSM, and financial governance into everyday operations. As boards demand measurable risk mitigation and regulators tighten audit requirements, service‑based resilience provides the transparency and compliance readiness needed for modern enterprises. Looking ahead, AI‑driven recovery analytics and tighter identity controls will further evolve the BRaaS ecosystem, making proactive resilience a competitive differentiator rather than a cost center.