Rubrik has announced Apache Iceberg Protection, a new data protection capability for Apache Iceberg on Amazon Web Services (AWS) designed to recover complete, queryable tables following cyber incidents, deletion, or data corruption.
The solution provides coverage for Iceberg tables in AWS Glue Data Catalog and Amazon S3 Tables and is expected to become generally available later this month.
Rubrik targets Apache Iceberg recovery on AWS
In its announcement, the company highlighted that native Iceberg snapshots are metadata pointers rather than independent backups. According to Rubrik, if a table is deleted, corrupted by ransomware, or overwritten, those pointers can be lost along with the data.
While native tools can restore underlying files, Rubrik said they do not rewire the catalog, which can leave data teams to manually reconstruct table metadata before the data becomes queryable again.
Rubrik Apache Iceberg Protection backs up both the data and the metadata that defines each table and re-registers the table in the catalog during recovery. This allows recovered tables to be queried using engines such as Amazon Athena, Apache Spark, and Trino.
“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.
“While Rubrik has long protected the underlying object storage, we now protect the lakehouse itself. That means recovering complete, queryable tables, not just raw files, with immutable backups stored directly in your own AWS account. By unifying these capabilities on a single platform, the same policies protect the lakehouse alongside the surrounding databases, pipelines, and code.”
Immutable backups add another recovery layer
According to Rubrik, Apache Iceberg Protection offers these core capabilities:
- Iceberg-aware recovery: Rubrik backs up an Iceberg table’s data and full metadata, then re-registers the table in the catalog on recovery so it can be queried in Amazon Athena, Apache Spark, or Trino.
- Backup storage options: Customers can store immutable Apache Iceberg backups within their own AWS accounts or within Rubrik Cloud Vault.
- Incremental backups: Rubrik takes forever-incremental backups of the latest compacted snapshots. Customers can also choose the Amazon S3 storage class used for their backups.
- Isolated recovery: Customers can take an on-demand backup before operations such as a schema change or large batch write and restore to an isolated Iceberg branch to validate data and schema before promoting the table to production.
Rubrik claims it is the only Iceberg-aware data protection offering that allows customers to store immutable Apache Iceberg backups within their own AWS accounts.
Rubrik Apache Iceberg Protection is slated to become generally available later this month.
Earlier this year, Rubrik launched new AI solutions and partner integrations focused on AI governance and cyber recovery. Read our Q&A with Rubrik GM of AI Dev Rishi on the announcements and how enterprises can prepare for agentic AI.