Rubrik for Service Providers
Scaling enterprise cyber resilience through multi-tenant architecture.
A Market Out of Reach
Rubrik's single-tenant architecture required dedicated infrastructure for every customer, making SMBs economically impossible to serve. While competitors reached –% market share, Rubrik remained at ~%, despite a $3.3B market opportunity.
Our goal was to redesign the platform into a secure multi-tenant architecture, enabling hundreds of customers to share infrastructure without sharing data.
Three Rules for a Shared Platform
I approached multi-tenancy as an operational design problem rather than an infrastructure problem. Instead of mapping backend complexity directly into the product, I established a set of design principles that guided cross-functional decisions throughout the project.
Tap a card to read each principle.
MSP's 365-Day Operational Journey
The platform supports every stage of an MSP's operational lifecycle—from customer onboarding to long-term lifecycle management.
Customer Onboarding
MSP Admins can onboard newly signed customers in under a minute through a self-service workflow, creating isolated tenant accounts, selecting deployment regions, and allocating licenses from a shared pool without support intervention.
- Provisioning time: 14 days → under 1 minute
- 100% self-service with zero support tickets
Tenant Health Monitoring
MSP Admins can monitor every customer from a unified Service Health Dashboard, identifying backup failures, SLA risks, and security alerts through deterministic system signals before drilling directly into affected tenants.
- Replaced fragmented dashboards and daily email reports
- Reduced Mean Time to Triage (MTTR)
License Governance
MSP Finance teams can review license consumption across shared pools and dedicated contracts, ensuring accurate chargebacks, preventing revenue leakage, and maintaining compliance across every managed customer.
- Improved licensing compliance
- Eliminated unbilled overages and increased chargeback accuracy
Customer Offboarding
MSP Admins can safely suspend or deprovision customer environments through a staged lifecycle workflow, reclaiming infrastructure while protecting customer data with recovery windows and quorum authorization.
- $5M+ annual infrastructure and licensing savings
- 0% accidental data loss through reversible deletion and two-person approval
Designing Enterprise Platforms
Platforms Need Mental Models, Not More Features
As products scale, complexity cannot be eliminated—it must be organized. Defining clear ownership boundaries and operational models proved more valuable than exposing every system capability.
Trust Comes From Predictability
Enterprise operators make critical decisions under pressure. Transparent system behavior and deterministic signals built more confidence than opaque intelligence or automation alone.
UX Shapes Business Strategy
The project wasn't about redesigning workflows—it enabled Rubrik to expand from a single-tenant product into a multi-tenant platform capable of serving an entirely new market.