News

Veeam, Rubrik Lead 'Enterprise Backup and Recovery' Evaluations Amid Ransomware Deluge

• By David Ramel
• 08/03/2022

Veeam and Rubrik were among the leaders in a new research report from Gartner that evaluated enterprise backup and recovery software.

Veeam led 14 vendors on the "ability to execute" axis of Gartner's Magic Quadrant report, which places vendors in one of four sections: Leaders, Visionaries, Niche Players and Challengers.

Rubrik, meanwhile, was highest on the "completeness of vision" axis, edging out Commvault and Cohesity. Other "leaders" include Veritas Technologies and Dell Technologies.

Core capabilities of backup and recovery solutions listed by Gartner include:

• Backup and recovery of operating systems, files, databases and applications in the on-premises datacenter
• Backup and recovery of public cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS data
• Creation of multiple copies of the backup to support resiliency, disaster recovery and other use cases
• Assigning multiple backup and retention policies that align with the organization's recovery objectives
• Reporting success and failure of backup/recovery tasks

Backup/recovery options have become increasingly important amid the years-long ongoing deluge of ransomware and other cybersecurity attacks. In fact, the report mentions the term "ransomware" a whopping 25 times, with the majority of vendors being evaluated for their ransomware protection capabilities.

"Protecting hybrid, SaaS and multicloud environments, preparing for ransomware attacks, and the need to simplify backup and data management are forcing I&O [infrastructure and operations] leaders to rearchitect their backup infrastructure and explore other solutions," said the introduction to the July 28 report.

Gartner said I&O leaders responsible for backup operation should redesign the associated infrastructure to include technology, operations and consumption aspects, specifically saying they should "Choose backup solutions that provide a comprehensive solution for ransomware anomaly and malware detection, and expedited recovery capabilities from ransomware attacks."

For Rubrik, the report listed one strength of the company's wares related to ransomware protection and recovery features: "Rubrik has a comprehensive and secure product offering that protects the backup system and data against cyberattacks, detects anomalies and malware within the backup data, and provides efficient recovery features."

Ransomware functionality for Veeam's offerings, on the other hand, included this caution related to a secure-by-implementation requirement: "Implementing a secure platform together with advanced ransomware immutability, detection and recovery requires clients to carefully design, deploy and manage the deployment to mitigate ransomware threats."

Strengths of Veeam, meanwhile include:

• Any size, anywhere customer base -- Veeam's unique product design supports customers of all sizes using the same codebase, whether a home user or large enterprise. It has extensive geography and partner relationships to support customers of all sizes and locations.
• Kubernetes container support -- Veeam acquired Kasten in October 2020 and has integrated its functionality into its core Veeam scale-out backup repository to provide robust support for container-based workloads.
• Workload and platform support -- The Veeam Platform integrates with a wide range of platforms, servers, storage systems and applications, and all major public cloud service providers to support data center, cloud and edge use cases.

In an overview of the backup and recovery market, Gartner commented on ransomware resilience, detection and remediation: "The increase in the number of ransomware attacks has resulted in vendors taking concrete steps toward providing ransomware detection and remediation as well as a resilient backup infrastructure. While most vendors support the creation of immutable second copies of backup through write once, read many (WORM)-enabled storage, more vendors are aiming to make the primary backup repository more resilient by supporting immutable snapshots. Leading vendors have built capabilities to detect ransomware attacks by monitoring behavioral anomalies of protected data and are adding malware detection provided by partnering with security vendors or by developing these capabilities in-house. Most vendors also aim to simplify the ransomware recovery process through creation of an isolated test environment and provide a clean backup copy to recover specific files. Such efforts remain largely works in progress."

The July 28 report -- like many other Magic Quadrant reports -- is available free of charge in licensed-for-distribution versions that come from vendors who were evaluated. A quick web search for the report's name will find several such free versions.