News

Veeam, Rubrik Lead in Enterprise Backup/Recovery Report

• By David Ramel
• 08/09/2023

Veeam and Rubrik are leading the leaders in a new report on enterprise backup and recovery published by research firm Gartner.

In Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" approach, Veeam and Rubrik are grouped in the "Leaders" quadrant, and each leads an axis.

As can be seen in the graphic below, Veeam is furthest on the "Ability to Execute" axis, while Rubrik leads the pack in "Completeness of Vision."

The graphic further shows Commvault, Cohesity, Veritas and Dell Technologies joined Veeam and Rubrik in the leaders quadrant. The "Visionaries" section includes Druva, IBM and HYCU, while other vendors are relegated to "Challenger" and "Niche Player" status.

"Protecting and recovering business application data irrespective of the underlying infrastructure type and location is now more critical than ever before," Gartner said in its Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions report, published Aug. 7 and including data as of July 2023. The report is available in "licensed for distribution" editions typically provided by covered vendors.

"As enterprises move toward more complex environments that include mass amounts of data, enterprise backup and recovery software solutions are expected to protect these workloads, whether they reside in on-premises, hybrid, multicloud or SaaS environments," Gartner continued.

Providing context for the report, the research firm said infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders doing backup must assess and rearchitect the associated infrastructure to include many aspects of technology, operations and consumption, with just a few of those being:

• Invest in backup solutions that address data protection requirements in the data center, hybrid, multicloud and edge environments. Favor solutions that offer a single pane of glass to manage these distributed environments.
• Choose backup solutions that provide a built-in or integrated offering for protecting backup data from a ransomware attack, ransomware anomaly and malware detection, and expedited recovery capabilities from ransomware attacks.
• Understand thoroughly the level of resilience provided on the primary backup copy and the need to invest in additional backup copies to ensure backup resilience, such as cloud, supporting object lock, immutable data vaults or tape.
• Choose products that offer secure and granular recovery testing capabilities.

In its overview of the market, Gartner said researched vendors primarily focus on:

• Centralized control plane: As enterprises move toward a hybrid and mutlicloud IT model, and workloads are distributed across the data center, public cloud and the edge, protecting these workloads, irrespective of location, is critical.
• Centralized control plane: As enterprises move toward a hybrid and mutlicloud IT model, and workloads are distributed across the data center, public cloud and the edge, protecting these workloads, irrespective of location, is critical.
• Ransomware resilience: The increase in the number of ransomware attacks has resulted in vendors taking concrete steps toward advancing a resilient backup infrastructure.
• Ransomware detection and remediation: 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.
• BaaS offerings: Leading backup vendors are expanding BaaS capabilities to include on-premises, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS environments.
• Use of artificial intelligence/machine learning: Leading vendors have introduced AI/ML-based algorithms in ransomware anomaly detection capabilities and to enhance customer support practices.
• Support for public cloud IaaS and PaaS backup: Most on-premises backup vendors have increased their investment to expand capabilities to protect cloud-native workloads, particularly VMs and applications hosted in AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
• Support for SaaS-based 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.
• Tiering to the public cloud: Most vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant support tiering backup data to the public cloud.
• Recovery in the public cloud: Today, leading backup vendors support restoring backup data to servers in the public cloud.
• NoSQL database backup: Traditional enterprises continue to run their core business applications on relational database management system (RDMS) databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL.
• 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 NFS.
• Container backup: Leading vendors announced support for container backup either by building these capabilities natively into their existing platform or through acquisitions.
• Licensing models: While some perpetual licensing options remain available, all major vendors in this market have transitioned to providing their software offerings through subscription-based licensing models.

"Enterprise backup and recovery software solutions are vital to an organization's ability to recover data following events that cause data to become inaccessible," Gartner said. "Whether the event is accidental, malicious or environmental, organizations utilize these solutions to effectively recover and restore access to the affected data.

"Solutions must offer effective capabilities to simplify management of data protection across complex enterprise environments. They must also ensure reliable recovery by protecting backup data against a constantly changing threat landscape, and expedite and orchestrate data recovery responses to traditional disaster and ransomware events."

Read the report to see how Gartner fleshed out the strengths of each vendor and associated cautions.