Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions

Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

Key features and pros and cons of top Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions products:

Cohesity - Leader

Pros:

Unified and simplified management: Cohesity Helios, a SaaS-based control plane, provides a centralized administrative experience that is common and intuitive for all products in its backup offering.
Multicloud BaaS and storage: Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service and FortKnox products allow customers to choose from multiple cloud data plane storage locations, including AWS and Azure.
Security alliance strategy: Cohesity has proactively engaged multiple vendors with varying disciplines in the security market. The goal of its Data Security Alliance is to drive collaborative solutions and develop integrated products to more broadly address data security and resilience concerns of customers.

Cons:

New investments introduce reliance on third-party technology: Cohesity's DataHawk solution includes dependencies on two new OEM partnerships to bolster its investments in recent add-on offerings.
Limited BaaS capabilities compared to customer managed: Cohesity products and related features of FortKnox and DataHawk are not yet available to customers protecting their data with its BaaS offering, DataProtect delivered as a service.
Less geographic coverage: Cohesity lags other leading vendors in market presence and execution in South America.

Commvault - Leader

Pros:

BaaS scope of coverage: Commvault Metallic's comprehensive coverage of SaaS applications, multicloud, on-premises and endpoints is complemented by the addition of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) protection, bring your own OCI object storage, and new offerings Metallic File and Object Archive, and Metallic ThreatWise.
Comprehensive software-based interoperability: Commvault Backup & Recovery software provides broad coverage and capabilities for on-premises, hybrid and multicloud environments. Public cloud support now includes extensive support for Azure, AWS, GCP and OCI.
Bringing enterprise features to competitive pricing levels: Commvault has priced its per-VM licensing for Commvault Backup & Recovery to gain entry into new market segments that may have otherwise been unavailable before.

Cons:

On-premises innovations lag cloud update cadence: Commvault's product strategy updates Metallic BaaS before equivalent features are available for Commvault Complete Data Protection and HyperScale X products. This results in new features initially being available to the cloud-based subset of the Commvault customer base.
Variable Commvault Metallic customer experience: Some Gartner clients have voiced concerns with challenges associated with inconsistent Metallic performance and initial configuration difficulties.
Inconsistent management capabilities: Gartner Peer Insights reviews indicate that unified command and control between the Commvault Command Center HTML5 user interface lacks some features of the local application console.

Dell Technologies - Leader

Pros:

PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for cloud and on-premises: Dell's data vault and ransomware recovery solution, called PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, now includes deployment options for on-premises, and AWS, Azure and Google cloud environments.
PowerProtect DD appliance scale: Dell's introduction of Smart Scale allows PowerProtect Data Manager customers to combine capacity of multiple PowerProtect DD appliances, allowing simplified backup data balancing and migration between them.
PowerProtect Data Manager multicloud support and availability: PowerProtect Data Manager provides consistent and comprehensive support for workloads in AWS, Azure and GCP. It is also readily available from the respective marketplaces and includes licensing for APEX Protection Storage.

Cons:

No SaaS-based control plane: Dell lacks a comprehensive SaaS-based control plane and common administrative interface for all components of its solution, often found in leading vendor solutions.
Limited backup storage options: PowerProtect DD appliances remain a requirement for use of most Dell data protection solutions, limiting the use of alternative backup targets.
Advanced ransomware data analysis requires a dedicated environment: Advanced anomaly and malware detection requires a separate and dedicated PowerProtect DD appliance and additional compute infrastructure.

Rubrik - Leader

Pros:

Innovation in product strategy, pricing, branding and bundling: Rubrik is innovative in its approach to expanding its security-focused offerings around backup and recovery, providing new pricing options with competitive, capacity-based user tiers for Microsoft 365, and simplifying its branding and bundling of product packages.
Ransomware protection and recovery features: Rubrik has a comprehensive and secure product offering that protects the backup system and data against cyberattacks, includes capabilities to detect anomalies and malware within the backup data, and provides efficient recovery features.
Enterprise adoption: Rubrik's scaling capabilities and differentiated customer support continue to attract large enterprise organizations, replacing a variety of different competitive solutions.

Cons:

Balance of security with backup: Some customers have expressed concern with Rubrik's ability to balance its data security offering initiatives while maintaining focus on emerging market requirements for backup.
Limited SaaS application coverage: Rubrik has limited support of SaaS applications beyond Microsoft 365. Coverage is not yet available for applications such as Salesforce, Google Workspace, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Azure AD, ServiceNow, Azure DevOps and GitHub.
Narrow vendor-managed cloud storage offerings: Rubrik only offers Azure storage for its BaaS and vendor-managed vault solutions.

Veeam - Leader

Pros:

Loyal and satisfied customer base: Veeam's customer growth and retention, and its customers' participation level in user group communities and forums such as Veeam Community, indicate a loyal and satisfied customer base.
Hybrid and multicloud support: The Veeam Data Platform is available for all three major public cloud providers where it offers a consistent hybrid, multicloud and cross-cloud recovery experience for the most commonly used workloads.
Large network of partners and MSPs: Veeam offerings are available through an extended global network of authorized partners. This includes reseller, alliance, implementation and MSP partners.

Cons:

Slow response to key market trends: Veeam has been slow to react to key market trends and customer expectations in offering vendor-hosted services, such as BaaS, SaaS-based control plane and storage vaults, and native, data analysis-based ransomware anomaly detection capabilities.
Overall complexity: Some Gartner clients indicate that Veeam can be more complex to manage as the size of the backup environment increases. This includes deployment of separate Veeam agents per protected environment, management of multiple backup and storage proxies, and proper selection and management of compute and storage infrastructure to align to performance and storage requirements.
Secure by implementation requirement: Implementing a secure Veeam Data Platform requires clients to thoughtfully design, configure and manage the deployment to mitigate cyberthreats, integrating ransomware immutability and detection provided by third-party solutions.

Veritas - Leader

Pros:

Comprehensive backup and management options: The Veritas Alta cloud offerings, combined with the capabilities of NetBackup software and its scale-out and scale-up hardware appliances, provide enterprise clients with a comprehensive portfolio of backup and recovery capabilities, and multiple deployment and management options.
Cloud-native architecture: NetBackup and Alta services run in Kubernetes clusters that run natively in Azure, AWS and GCP. In this design, the data plane services run independent of the management plane to deliver an elastic and inherently flexible multicloud architecture.
Broad geographical coverage: Veritas and its partners can sell, deploy and support Veritas solutions in every major geography. This makes it easier for customers with worldwide responsibilities to find a backup solution that meets their technical and business requirements.

Cons:

Certain cloud products are new to market: Veritas's new Alta BaaS and Alta View SaaS-based management offerings are new to the market. Little data is available regarding market adoption or customer satisfaction, requiring a comprehensive proof of concept (POC) to determine the customer experience levels of onboarding and performance.
Enterprise-centric product and services strategy: Veritas's primary focus is on large enterprise customers in its Alta and NetBackup product and services strategy, making it potentially less suitable for midsize, commercial and SMB customers.
Less comprehensive SaaS application support: Veritas lags other vendors in supporting other SaaS applications such as Microsoft Azure AD, Azure DevOps, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and GitHub with Alta BaaS.

Acronis - Niche Player

Pros:

Integrated cyber and data protection capabilities for endpoints, application servers and public cloud IaaS deployments: Acronis delivers a single, agent-based offering that combines security, backup and disaster recovery (DR), and IT management for endpoints, workstations, application servers and public cloud IaaS deployments in Azure and AWS.
Broad hypervisor support: Acronis offers support for a broad set of hypervisors beyond VMware and Microsoft such as, Citrix XenServer, Virtuozzo, Red Hat, Oracle VM, Nutanix, Linux KVM and Scale Computing.
Global coverage in multiple languages: Acronis offers a globally available and differentiated data protection solution for remote sites/edge locations for servers and endpoints localized in more than 25 languages.

Cons:

Limited enterprise and public cloud capabilities: Acronis lacks critical enterprise capabilities, with limited support for enterprise databases, cluster architectures, operating systems, network-attached storage (NAS), enterprise storage integration, storage pooling, deduplication and public cloud application support.
Limited scalability: Acronis's agent configured direct-to-backup-storage architecture is less suitable for large enterprise deployments due to missing enterprise functionalities and limited scalability.
Commercial focus on managed service providers (MSPs): Acronis focuses mostly on selling through MSPs to provide a managed solution delivering backup, DR, cybersecurity, collaboration and endpoint management. With this go-to-market approach, commercial relationships and customer experience, including support, security and performance, will be a primary responsibility of the chosen MSP.

Arcserve - Challenger

Pros:

Broad workload support: The combination of Arcserve Backup and Arcserve UDP give Arcserve the ability to support many enterprise workloads in data centers and public cloud. This broad workload support in combination with a scalable platform and multiple storage target integration options is able to protect multiple petabytes of data.
Direct-to-cloud object storage: UDP allows customers to backup data direct-to-cloud object storage with deduplication. It is compatible with AWS S3, Wasabi and Google Cloud Storage.
Performance and capacity improvements for OneXafe storage appliances: OneXafe enhancements provide faster recoveries and larger scale at a smaller footprint with available solid-state drive (SSD) storage and individual disk drive capacity greater than 24TB.

Cons:

Limited detection and recovery capabilities: Arcserve UDP bundled with Sophos anti-malware lacks anomaly detection capabilities and guidance to the recommended recovery points.
Limited OneXafe immutability: The immutable design of OneXafe storage appliances lacks object storage locking and multiperson authentication controls, which limits its optimal data loss protection capabilities against ransomware and insider threats.
Lacks container backup: Arcserve does not provide backup capabilities for container workloads.

Druva - Visionary

Pros:

Scope of guarantee: Druva Data Resiliency Guarantee offers a comprehensive scope of service-level objectives, including backup success rate, availability, immutability, durability and confidentiality.
Cloud-native BaaS solution architecture: Building off its mature BaaS solution, Druva has made significant investment in a nondisruptive-to-customer redesign of its backup architecture platform to establish a new framework for future scalability, agility and multicloud capabilities.
Data center to cloud client experience: Many customers convey a positive experience in use of Druva's BaaS for protecting SaaS application data, on-premises environments and cloud VMs.

Cons:

Limited native cloud workload protection capabilities: Druva has been slow to expand its native cloud protection offerings compared to leading vendors. It lacks agentless integration with Azure VM, Google Compute Engine (GCE) and OCI. Workload integrations with Azure SQL, Azure Blob Storage, MongoDB and Cassandra are unsupported.
Narrow multicloud capabilities: Druva's BaaS solution remains solely based on AWS cloud architecture for its control and data planes. It lags leading vendors that provide customer choice of multicloud data plane locations for their BaaS and vendor storage offerings.
Less comprehensive SaaS application backup integration: Druva's expansion of protecting new SaaS applications is limited. It lacks support for MS Dynamics, Azure AD, ServiceNow, Azure DevOps and GitHub.

HYCU - Visionary

Pros:

Ease of use: Gartner client inquiries indicate a high level of satisfaction for ease of use, product stability, and management of backup and disaster recovery for the HYCU Protégé hybrid management solution.
Multicloud and hybrid support: HYCU Protégé simplifies protection of multicloud and hybrid environments by supporting Azure, AWS, Google and data center workloads with a single unified SaaS solution.
SaaS backup: R-Cloud has the potential to accelerate support for SaaS backup beyond the most popular SaaS applications, like Microsoft 365 and Salesforce.

Cons:

On-premises limitations: HYCU's on-premises offering lags leading vendors in features such as global data deduplication, continuous data protection (CDP), support for container workloads and enterprise clusters such as Oracle RAC, and support for non-x86 workloads such as Power/AIX.
Limited ransomware detection capabilities: HYCU is missing advanced backup data analysis-based ransomware detection, such as encryption and entropy detection, and recovery point guidance capabilities found in competitive offerings.
Customer responsible for on-premises storage and security: HYCU has no direct control over on-premises storage and storage security, making customers responsible for setting up a secure solution for protecting backups against cyber attacks.

IBM - Visionary

Pros:

Product strategy: IBM announced a strategic shift in its backup and recovery offerings by integrating it with its primary storage product line and multiple complementary OEM products. Storage Defender is positioned to deliver an integrated and unified cyber protection solution under a common control plane. IBM has partnered with Cohesity to replace its current VM protection capabilities and to provide the new SaaS-based control plane.
OpenShift container backup: IBM has continued to make significant investments in IBM Storage Protect Plus for Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes and IBM Cloud Paks backup and recovery. Recent additions include protection of Red Hat OpenShift environments that are attached to clusters, and cluster-scoped and namespace-scoped resources and updated CSI integrations with Ceph, IBM block storage and Hitachi NAS.
Microsoft 365 protection: IBM Storage Protect for Cloud offers end-user, self-service restore for Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, OneDrive and Groups.

Cons:

Portfolio shift in progress: IBM's strategy and execution on the announced portfolio change is a work in progress. This new portfolio will impact existing and prospective customers as new replacement products are released. IBM customers will require multiple products, based on a greater number of ISV and OEM technologies, to meet their multicloud and hybrid data protection requirements.
Limited execution: IBM has often changed its vision and product strategy for the integration and positioning of the former Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus products, and has demonstrated limited success in its execution of these changes. This includes previous efforts to position Spectrum Protect Plus as its market-leading offering.
Limited cross-platform recovery capabilities: IBM Storage Protect Plus requires customer or ISV API integrated disaster recovery solutions or use of ISV partner solutions to support cross-platform recovery.

Microsoft - Niche Player

Pros:

Optimized offering for Microsoft dedicated customers: Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery are suitable offerings for backup and disaster recovery that protect workloads for a wide range (small to large enterprise) of customers primarily using on-premises Microsoft Windows and Azure VMs.
Comprehensive roadmap: Microsoft articulates a very comprehensive roadmap with deep integration of existing and new upcoming features to enhance its backup security portfolio with several capabilities in public or private preview mode.
Low total cost of ownership (TCO): Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery offer a low TCO when compared to competitive third-party offerings.

Cons:

Minimal workload coverage: Azure backup support matrix is limited to protection of on-premises Microsoft Windows Servers or Microsoft Windows VMs, Azure VMs, SQL Server in Azure VM, SAP HANA in Azure VM, Azure Files, Azure Postgres, Azure Blobs and Azure Disks. Other Microsoft PaaS and SaaS services such as Azure SQL Server, Azure AD, Azure DevOps, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 are not covered.
No multicloud support: Azure backup does not offer support for protection of AWS, Google, or other cloud services or SaaS services as it is dedicated to Azure and on-premises workloads.
Overlapping product offering: Microsoft backup and recovery options are a complex mix of multiple, interconnected and overlapping products.

OpenText - Niche Player

Pros:

Capacity-based pricing: OpenText has improved its licensing model by simplifying a large number of SKUs into a single capacity-based part number. This approach gives customers an easily understood operating expenditure option for entry into a capacity-based, pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Traditional enterprise data center support: Data Protector has broad data center backup capabilities. It supports a large number of workloads at low TCO compared to other vendors.
Broad storage target support: Data Protector supports a broad range of purpose-built backup appliances, multiple storage protocols and tape libraries.

Cons:

Lacks anomaly and malware detection: Data Protector significantly lags other vendors in ransomware anomaly and malware detection capabilities. These capabilities are in the OpenText ecosystem but have not yet been integrated into Data Protector.
Core product integration: Covering a full range of data center and cloud workloads requires two separate products: Data Protector and Data Protector for Cloud Workloads, which lack any meaningful integration.
Unclear product positioning: At this time, it is unclear if the product technology will be fully integrated into the larger OpenText portfolio or if it will continue as a stand-alone product.

Unitrends - Niche Player

Pros:

Unified administration: Unitrends UniView offers single administrative access to all components of the solution, including management of appliances, endpoint backup and SaaS applications.
Complete portfolio: Unitrends continues to expand its software and appliance offerings with the addition of integrated cloud disaster recovery services.
Kaseya integration: Unitrends continues to focus integration into the Kaseya IT Complete portfolio. This will streamline access to technical, billing and support resources, and provide more features for its customers.

Cons:

Narrow enterprise suitability: With its focus on SMB and midsize enterprise markets, Unitrends' growth initiatives and limited scalability of appliances contribute to reduced suitability for large enterprise accounts.
Limited multicloud capabilities: Unitrends Backup for Microsoft Azure only supports Azure VMs and lacks support for other workloads in Azure, such as Azure SQL and Azure Blob. Expansion to support other cloud providers, such as AWS and GCP, is work in progress.
Limited BaaS strategy: Unitrends lags behind other major players whose vendor-managed BaaS solutions support multiple cloud and on-premises workloads, and other SaaS applications, such as Azure AD, ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

A: Cohesity, Commvault, Dell Technologies, Rubrik, Veeam, Veritas

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

A: Leaders have the highest combined measures of Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They have the most comprehensive and scalable product portfolios to support data protection requirements of hybrid and multicloud IT environments. They have a proven track record of established market presence and financial performance. For their vision, they are perceived in the industry as thought leaders and intellectual property (IP) creators, and have well-articulated plans for enhancing recovery capabilities, improving ease of deployment and administration, and increasing their scalability and product breadth. A cornerstone for Leaders is the ability to articulate how new requirements will be addressed as part of their vision for recovery management. As a group, Leaders can be expected to be considered as part of most new purchase proposals and to have high success rates in winning new business. However, a large market share alone is not a primary indicator of a Leader. Leaders are strategic vendors that are well-positioned for the future, having established success in meeting the needs of upper-midsize and large enterprise data centers.

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

A: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/magic-quadrants-research

Report:

Top Vendor Products for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions in 2023

Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

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FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

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