Cloud data management and data security company Rubrik Inc. today announced Rubrik Apache Iceberg Protection, a backup and recovery capability for Apache Iceberg tables on Amazon Web Services Inc.
The target is a gap Rubrik argues native tooling leaves open. Iceberg snapshots are metadata pointers rather than copies, so a table that gets deleted, encrypted by ransomware or overwritten by a misfiring artificial intelligence agent takes its snapshot history down with it.
Restoring the underlying files does not rebuild the catalog entry. Data teams are left reassembling table metadata by hand before anything will run a query again.
Rubrik Apache Iceberg Protection copies that metadata, not only the underlying data files. Recovery re-registers the table in the catalog. Analysts can query the restored table in Amazon Athena, Apache Spark or Trino straight away. Restore the files on their own and the result is a set of Parquet files needing manual repair, according to Rubrik.
Iceberg tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog are in scope. So are Amazon Simple Storage Service or S3 tables. Backups are immutable wherever they land, and customers choose whether that is their own AWS account or the air-gapped Rubrik Cloud Vault. Rubrik claims the capability is the only Iceberg-aware protection offering with the in-account option.
After an initial full copy, Rubrik captures only the latest compacted snapshots, which the company said keeps backup windows manageable once tables reach petabyte scale. The S3 storage class is the customer’s pick, so rarely touched backup data need not sit in a premium tier.
An on-demand backup can also be taken ahead of risky work such as a schema change or a large batch write. Restores can land on an isolated Iceberg branch. Teams check data and schema there before promoting the table back into production.
“Data lakes have grown beyond analytics and AI to now run the entire business, and Apache Iceberg is one of the most critical systems built on them,” said Anneka Gupta, chief product officer at Rubrik. The company has long protected the object storage underneath, Gupta said, and now covers the lakehouse itself, with the same policies reaching the databases, pipelines and code around it.
Apache Iceberg Protection will be generally available later this month.
Rubrik has been extending its platform into cloud-native workloads through the year. Cloud SQL protection and governance for Gemini agents arrived at Google Cloud Next in April. Agent Cloud launched last October, putting a control layer over enterprise AI agents.
