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The Rubrik alternative for backup you control
Rubrik has a SaaS control plane with a Rubrik-managed vault. This can inject security and sovereignty questions. N2W runs entirely in your own environment and never accesses your data.
Your data. Your cloud. Your rules.
Sovereignty by default
Built-in cost controls
No black box in your DR path
N2W vs Rubrik
Predictable price, savings built in
Rubrik’s subscription scales with capacity, workloads, and the security modules you turn on. N2W’s flat rate doesn’t move with how much data you protect, and the cost controls are part of the product.
- Resource Control powers down non-critical compute on a schedule. Most teams cut compute about 50%.
- Incremental archiving with ZeroEBS tiers backups into S3, Glacier, Wasabi, or Azure Blob and deletes the original once the archive is verified.
- Flat, predictable rate whether you protect 100GB or 100TB, month-to-month with no commitment or annual for extra savings.
Your vendor shouldn’t hold your data
Rubrik’s model routes management and metadata through its SaaS cloud, and Cloud Vault keeps copies of your backups in a tenant Rubrik owns and controls the credentials for (you supply the encryption key).
No black box in your DR path
Disaster recovery is a discipline, not a model output. AI threat detection earns its place if enterprise-wide cyber resilience is your mandate, but it shouldn’t be the thing your recovery hinges on.
- Deterministic by design. You set the policies. Recovery Scenarios run exactly as configured, in the order you choose, every time.
- Rehearsed, not assumed. Scheduled DR drills prove your recovery works before you actually need it.
- Nothing to over-trust. No model deciding what’s protected, so teams keep real runbooks and guardrails instead of outsourcing judgment to AI.
Questions about Rubrik vs N2W
Where does my data actually live?
With N2W, in your own account. N2W runs as an EC2 instance or Azure VM inside your environment and only makes license calls out, so your backups, metadata, and keys never leave. Rubrik Security Cloud runs management and metadata in Rubrik’s cloud, and Rubrik Cloud Vault stores copies in a Rubrik-owned, Rubrik-managed tenant (Rubrik holds the credentials; you provide the encryption key). Rubrik offers a separate Security Cloud Sovereign edition to keep everything in your boundary.
Isn’t Rubrik more secure? It’s a security company.
Both give you immutable, air-gapped, encrypted backups. The difference is architecture. With N2W, the data and keys never leave your account, so there’s less to trust and a smaller attack surface. Rubrik layers a security platform (threat hunting, sensitive-data discovery, an AI threat engine) on top, which is valuable if cyber resilience is your mandate and beyond what a backup product does.
Do I need Rubrik’s full platform?
If your job is AWS and Azure backup, recovery, and cost control, no. N2W does that without a data-security platform to deploy, learn, and license. If you need enterprise-wide threat detection and data-security posture across every source, that’s Rubrik’s territory, not N2W’s.
Is N2W cheaper than Rubrik?
It depends on scope, but the models differ. Rubrik prices by capacity, workloads, and the security modules you enable, with advanced features billed separately, so the bill grows as you scale. N2W charges one flat monthly rate no matter how much you protect (a 100GB and a 100TB instance cost the same), month-to-month with no commitment or annual for extra savings, and Resource Control and archiving can save more than the subscription.
Can N2W handle ransomware recovery? How is Rubrik different?
Yes. N2W keeps immutable, air-gapped copies in an isolated DR account, Recovery Scenarios orchestrate full failover and failback in 4 clicks with network config restored, and you can recover across regions or into Azure for cross-cloud DR. In contrast, a full environmental Rubrik drill requires scripting and is not straightforward. It also has potentially critical restore gaps regarding metadata restore.