Rubrik, a security and AI operations company, unveiled the next stage of Rubrik Annapurna, establishing the AI-ready unstructured data layer for enterprise Data Intelligence platforms of choice.Annapurna scans and catalogs unstructured data in place across distributed systems, publishes a queryable catalog into a lakehouse, and eliminates the data duplication and Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) overhead that has historically kept enterprise unstructured data out of AI pipelines.

Unstructured data represents 90% of most modern enterprise footprints. Because organizations lack visibility into these file estates, critical business data has historically remained siloed, untracked, and unreachable by data science and AI applications. Costly extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines and infrastructure-heavy legacy architectures have forced organizations to duplicate entire environments into a data lake, then spend months on manual engineering to surface the less than 10% of data that AI operations actually need, all while incurring significant ongoing costs for the unused remainder.

“For years, the model to make unstructured data usable for AI meant to move, transform, and store it twice, while paying for the whole estate just to use a fraction,” said Anneka Gupta, CPO, Rubrik. “Annapurna completely inverts that model. It activates data right where it lives, delivers only what Data Intelligence platforms actually need and aligns infrastructure costs to consumption. That is how enterprises truly scale AI.”

The Unstructured Data Layer for Data Science and AI
Annapurna turns unstructured estates into AI-ready inputs for Data Intelligence platform workflows without moving source files. Operating on Rubrik Security Cloud, the unified management plane, it auto-discovers, scans, and indexes billions of files across NAS, S3, and object stores. In hours rather than weeks, Annapurna publishes a queryable catalog of file metadata directly into a lakehouse. Organizations pull only the precise subsets they need for training, fine-tuning, and inference, allowing pipeline costs to scale 1:1 with consumption.

“In financial services, managing petabytes of highly distributed, regulated, and siloed unstructured data across legacy and modern platforms was operationally limiting,” said Corey West, CTO, Piper Sandler & Co. “Annapurna provides an automated approach to map, govern, and index our estate for AI initiatives, reducing the friction of cross-functional configurations and data sovereignty requirements without needing another ETL stack or compromising our compliance posture.”

Key Annapurna Capabilities

• Automated Data Discovery: Auto-discover, scan, and index the full unstructured estate across NAS, S3, and object stores. Raw source files are processed in place with no need to copy or migrate
• Native Lakehouse Integration: Automates the handoff downstream to Data Intelligence platform applications by publishing a queryable catalog of unstructured file metadata directly into a lakehouse. Data engineers query the index to pinpoint exact file targets, and Annapurna stages only that subset for downstream workflows
• Demand-Driven Pipeline Economics: Pipeline costs scale 1:1 with the data AI actually pulls. Customers pay only for what they pull, not for duplicating their full estate
• Continuous Governance: Preserves native source-system access controls directly within the catalog so Data Intelligence platforms can continuously enforce controls  in downstream workflows, closing the security gap created when traditional ETL strips access permissions in transit
• Immutable Chain of Custody: Leverages Rubrik’s Zero Trust foundation to ensure every file Annapurna stages into its managed object store carries verifiable lineage and versioning from source through AI output, with provenance capabilities that directly support general data protection regulation (GDPR) and other compliance programs
• Built on Rubrik Security Cloud: Extends Rubrik Security Cloud, the unified management plane, into the AI-ready unstructured data layer for the enterprise. Annapurna deploys alongside an organization’s existing storage and lakehouse environments, with no new infrastructure or agents to install

Availability
Rubrik Annapurna is available today for qualified enterprise partners and will feature native lakehouse connector support in future releases.