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Veeam, Rubrik Lead in Enterprise Backup/Recovery Market Report

• By David Ramel
• 08/09/2024

"I&O [Infrastructure and Operations] leaders are challenged to protect and recover critical business applications and data from multiple threats," says research firm Gartner in its latest Magic Quadrant-style report on the enterprise backup and recovery software solutions market. It also said that market "is responding with more workload coverage, ransomware recovery capabilities and delivery models, and focus on simplicity."

Those "leaders" are currently Veeam Software and Rubrik, which Gartner has positioned as leading the "Ability to Execute" axis and the "Completeness of Vision" axis, respectively. Joining them in the Leaders quadrant are Commvault, Cohesity, Veritas and Dell Technologies.

Those two companies similarly ruled last year's report, which featured the exact same leaders, along with most other placements being the same.

Gartner predicts big changes -- or rather makes "strategic planning assumptions" -- for the market in the next four years, with AI a contributor:

• By 2028, 75% of enterprises will use a common solution for backup and recovery of data residing on-premises and in cloud infrastructure, compared with 20% in 2024.
• By 2028, 75% of enterprises will prioritize backup of SaaS applications as a critical requirement, compared with 15% in 2024.
• By 2028, 90% of enterprise backup and recovery products will include embedded technology to detect and identify cyberthreats, compared with fewer than 45% in 2024.
• By 2028, 75% of large enterprises will adopt backup as a service (BaaS), alongside on-premises tools, to back up cloud and on-premises workloads, compared with 15% in 2024.
• By 2028, 75% of enterprise backup and recovery products will integrate generative AI (GenAI) to improve management and support operations, compared with fewer than 5% in 2024.

As far what makes a good vendor in the enterprise backup and recovery software solutions market, Gartner says must-have capabilities include:

• Backup of data and systems across on-premises and hybrid multicloud environments. On-premises requirements include protection of operating systems, files, databases, virtual machines and applications. Cloud requirements include protection of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), database as a service (DBaaS) and SaaS.
• Recovery of data and systems from any failure or data loss scenario, such as operational, system or application failure, accidental error, natural disaster and cyberattack. This demands capabilities to implement backup and data management policies to support an enterprise's business requirements for recovery point objectives (RPOs), recovery time objectives (RTOs), resilience, data life cycle and compliance.

"The enterprise backup and recovery software market underwent significant transformation in the past two years," Gartner said, noting that the evaluated vendors are innovating and changing the market the following areas:

• SaaS-based control planes: Vendors are offering centralized management platforms that are increasingly backup-vendor-hosted, replacing customer-managed deployments in their own public cloud or data center infrastructure.
• Expanding GenAI capabilities: Vendors in this market have rapidly introduced their initial offerings of GenAI capabilities. The primary focus of these solutions is intended to assist with backup administrative tasks and troubleshooting. Implementations include the use of chatbots, natural-language question dialogues and AI-based responses. The use of GenAI is expected to lead to expanded levels of automation to accelerate recovery and further simplify administration.
• Multicloud protection: As organizations deploy applications and workloads to multiple cloud environments, the requirement of solutions to integrate with and protect multicloud environments is now more critical. The flexibility to choose which cloud provider is used to store backup data is ideal.
• Cloud-native application and data protection: Vendors in this market are expanding their coverage of additional cloud services to increase their clients' abilities to protect cloud-native applications. The scope of requirements requires vendors to expand protection to more DBaaS, IaaS and PaaS infrastructures, multiple cloud data locations and cloud application configuration. Vendor capabilities may include automated application discovery, integration with cloud services to orchestrate and store native snapshots, and reuse of existing backup software “as-is” in the cloud to provide agent-based backup of the applications hosted in the cloud.
• Ransomware detection and recovery: Vendors have built capabilities to detect ransomware attacks by monitoring behavioral anomalies of protected data and are adding malware detection by partnering with security vendors or developing these capabilities in-house. Most vendors also aim to simplify the ransomware recovery process by expediting identification of the best and cleanest recovery point, creating curated recovery points that combine multiple recovery points, and creating an isolated test-and-recovery environment. Vendors are also introducing curated snapshot recovery. It combines multiple snapshots with the latest, clean and safe scanned file version available for restore. This feature eliminates the need to perform multiple granular restores from various snapshots and restores the most recent update.
• BaaS offerings: Leading backup vendors are expanding BaaS capabilities to include on-premises, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS environments. Gartner clients are investing in BaaS offerings to complement on-premises backup deployments, which simplifies the protection of environments, including selected on-premises workloads, as well as edge and public cloud.
• Expanded as-a-service offerings: Leading vendors are introducing new services to complement their backup and recovery offerings. The focus of these new services center around expanding services to support ransomware protection and recovery. Multiple vendors now have vendor-hosted cloud storage offerings. These are often referred to as immutable data vaults (IDVs) or cloud vaults. Leading vendors are expanding this service to include anomaly and malware detection capabilities. In addition, some vendors are introducing orchestration services to facilitate routine testing, cleaning and validation, and performing recovery.
• Use of artificial intelligence/machine learning (ML): Vendors have introduced AI/ML-based algorithms in ransomware anomaly detection capabilities and to enhance customer support practices. Newer capabilities include advancements in automated data classification and conversational-based administrative activities.
• Support for SaaS applications: I&O leaders have begun to include SaaS applications, such as Microsoft 365, Google G Suite and Salesforce, as a part of their backup strategy. Most vendors evaluated in this research support Microsoft 365 and Salesforce backup via partners or have developed these capabilities in-house. Vendors are innovating to protect other SaaS applications and accelerate the integration with new applications. Additional SaaS application protection is available in the market for applications, such as Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Apps, Atlassian Jira and ServiceNow.
• Instant recovery of databases, virtual machines and file systems: A majority of vendors support instant recovery of VMs by mounting the backed-up VM directly on the production host via network file system. VMs can thus become instantly available while the actual recovery process is initiated in the background. Vendors such as Cohesity and Rubrik offer instant recovery of databases such as Microsoft SQL and Oracle, while Veeam also offers point-in-time file share access from backups via read-only Server Message Block file share.
• Licensing models: Some perpetual licensing options remain available, but most vendors in this research have transitioned to providing their software offerings through subscription-based licensing models. Most subscription-based licensing offers are multiple-year-term agreements. Consumption-based licensing is an emerging trend for licensing that provides the ability to license what is in use based on metering at more frequent intervals.

While Gartner's research reports are typically available only to for-pay clients, licensed-for-distribution Magic Quadrant reports are often made available for free by the companies that are named in them. A quick internet search will find this one.