We currently use Azure's native backup for our virtual machines and SQL workloads, along with Azure Site Recovery for regional replication. Our Recovery Services vaults are configured with immutability enabled.
We're considering a third-party platform such as Rubrik to centralize backup management and potentially keep backup administration and data more independent from our Azure tenant. However, Rubrik would cost more than our current setup, and we may also incur additional Azure network egress charges on top of storage and compute costs.
For anyone who has run Rubrik in production alongside Azure Backup and ASR, what practical advantages did it provide? Did the additional security, management, recovery, reporting, or cross-platform capabilities justify the price, or is Azure's native tooling generally the better choice for an Azure-focused environment?
4 Answers
There isn’t a universal winner. If you are Azure-only and the native services satisfy your retention, immutability, restore, compliance, and testing requirements, staying native is a reasonable choice. A third-party platform becomes easier to justify when you need consistent policies across Azure and other environments, faster or more flexible restores, better operational visibility, or an independent recovery copy. Ask the vendor to demonstrate those use cases with your workloads and include storage, compute, network egress, licensing, and support in the total-cost comparison.
If Azure Backup and ASR already meet your recovery objectives, the native services are usually simpler to operate and easier to justify financially. Moving management or copies outside Azure can add resilience against a tenant- or platform-level incident, but that benefit needs to be part of a clearly defined threat model rather than an assumption. Compare the products against your RPOs, RTOs, restore testing, retention, compliance, monitoring, and support requirements before switching.
Rubrik can offer considerably more than basic backup: centralized policy management, stronger reporting and auditing, broader workload coverage, streamlined recovery workflows, and protection across multiple environments. Those features are most valuable for organizations that are multi-cloud, hybrid, heavily regulated, or managing many different platforms. For an Azure-only estate with straightforward VM and SQL recovery needs, the extra capability may not offset the licensing and operational costs.
That’s the main trade-off I’m trying to evaluate: whether those centralized controls and broader recovery features solve a real operational gap for us or simply duplicate what Azure already provides.
Keeping backup data or administration outside the Azure tenant can improve isolation from an Azure-wide, subscription-wide, or identity-related failure. It can also reduce dependence on a single provider and make it easier to protect workloads outside Azure later. On the other hand, third-party backups may introduce egress charges, additional infrastructure, another vendor lock-in, and more components to maintain. The decision should come from the failure scenarios you need to survive, not just from the product comparison.
That makes sense. The key seems to be proving a specific gap in the current design rather than assuming a third-party product is automatically more resilient.