Gartner Magic Quadrant 2023 Summary – Enterprise Backup and Recovery

In a business scene dominated by hybrid and multicloud expansion and persistent ransomware threats, the importance of backup and recovery within enterprises has reached unprecedented levels. Gartner’s quarterly report serves as a guide for I&O leaders as they navigate these complexities. As enterprises embrace diverse environments, robust backup and recovery capabilities become essential.

The analysis examines backup and recovery vendors and their solutions that protect business application data regardless of location or infrastructure. These solutions are pivotal in ensuring data access, resilience, and recovery in the face of challenges. This blog provides a broad summary of the latest Gartner report about enterprise backup and recovery.

Definition of Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions

Enterprise backup and recovery software solutions developed by vendors capture point-in-time copies of workloads across diverse environments. These solutions secure data in secondary storage, facilitating recovery from loss.

These solutions protect business data across various infrastructures, available as software, hardware, virtualized appliances, or SaaS-based services. They are particularly relevant in intricate environments with large datasets, offering protection for on-premises, hybrid, multicloud, and SaaS workloads.

These solutions are crucial in restoring data following accidental, malicious, or environmental events. Their ability to streamline data protection across complex landscapes ensures reliable recovery against evolving threats and accelerates disaster and ransomware responses.

Key Capabilities of Optimal Backup and Recovery Solutions

Solutions that provide optimal Backup recovery possess several capabilities, including:

• Multifaceted Protection

Optimal solutions safeguard components within on-premises data centers, including operating systems, files, databases, virtual machines (VMs), and applications. Furthermore, they extend this protection to encompass public cloud structures such as hybrid cloud, multicloud, infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).

• Resilient Backup Copies

Creating multiple backup copies enhances resiliency, supporting disaster recovery and other diverse use cases. These solutions enable flexible assignment of backup and retention policies aligned with recovery objectives.

• Advanced Reporting and Management

Key features include comprehensive reporting of task outcomes and the ability to tier data to multiple targets, including public cloud and object storage. Integration with immutable storage ensures data security.

• Orchestrated Recovery

Solutions orchestrate disaster recovery and ransomware processes, offering centralized management. Some providers extend their capabilities to encompass data discovery, compliance, copy management, and protection for various workloads, including containers, remote sites, and endpoints.

• Ransomware Detection and Recovery

A notable capability is ransomware detection through advanced anomaly monitoring. Moreover, solutions provide isolated recovery environments, enhancing resilience against malicious threats.

How does Storware meet your enterprise data protection needs?

Storware offers the capability to back up data from various sources such as servers, virtual machines, databases, and endpoints. This ensures comprehensive data protection. The solution may provide options for full backups, incremental backups, and differential backups to optimize storage space and backup times. Storware may support a wide range of data types, including virtual machines, cloud instances, files, applications, and databases.

Scalability: Enterprise backup solutions need to scale with the growing data volumes in organizations. Storware offers scalability options that allow businesses to expand their backup infrastructure as needed.

Data Recovery: One of the primary functions of an enterprise backup solution is to facilitate data recovery. Storware may provide tools and features for granular file-level recovery, application-level recovery, and complete system recovery. It may support various recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) to meet different business continuity requirements.

Centralized Management: Storware offers a centralized management console that allows administrators to configure, monitor, and manage backup and recovery tasks across the entire organization from a single interface. This centralization simplifies the management of backup policies, schedules, and data retention policies.

Security and Compliance: Enterprise data is often subject to strict security and compliance requirements. Storware includes encryption, access controls, and audit trails to ensure data security and compliance with industry regulations.

Disaster Recovery: Storware may integrate with disaster recovery solutions to provide a comprehensive approach to data protection. This ensures that organizations can recover their data and systems in case of natural disasters or other catastrophic events.

Cloud Integration: To address the needs of modern enterprises, Storware offers cloud integration, enabling data backup and recovery to and from cloud storage solutions like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

Monitoring and Reporting: Storware provides monitoring and reporting capabilities that allow administrators to track the status of backups, detect issues, and generate reports for compliance and auditing purposes.

Support and Training: Storware Backup and Recovery comes with comprehensive support and training options to assist organizations in implementing and maintaining their backup infrastructure.

Gartner’s Evaluation: The Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions

In the latest Gartner report of July 2023, the Magic Quadrant for enterprise backup and recovery software solutions comprehensively evaluates providers positioned as Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, or Niche Players. This assessment is valuable for making investment decisions based on the providers’ execution and vision. Closely analyzing each provider’s strengths and considerations provides valuable insights into their capabilities.

• Acronis (Niche Player)

Acronis offers integrated backup and security solutions, including Acronis Cyber Protect for on-premises and cloud setups. Strengths include unified cybersecurity and data protection and broad hypervisor support, but it lacks critical enterprise capabilities and focuses on MSPs for commercial outreach.

• Arcserve (Challenger)

Arcserve provides diverse backup solutions like UDP, Backup, and UDP Appliances. Geographically widespread, it serves the midmarket. Strengths include versatile workload support and direct-to-cloud storage. However, bundled detection with Sophos, ransomware gaps in OneXafe, and no container backup are limitations.

• Cohesity (Leader)

Cohesity offers DataProtect and a BaaS offering called DataProtect as a service. During the evaluation period, Cohesity introduced FortKnox, a cloud vault storage, and DataHawk, a threat detection and classification solution. Cohesity’s comprehensive solution includes unified management through Cohesity Helios and multicloud support.

• Commvault (Leader)

Commvault provides Commvault Backup & Recovery, Commvault Disaster Recovery, and Metallic SaaS offerings. Commvault’s strengths include its comprehensive BaaS scope, software-based interoperability, and competitive pricing. However, there’s a lag in on-premises innovations compared to cloud updates.

• Dell Technologies (Leader)

Dell Technologies offers various backup and recovery software solutions, including PowerProtect Data Manager, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, and more. Strengths include its offerings for on-premises and cloud environments and comprehensive multicloud support. However, Dell lacks an extensive SaaS-based control plane and consistent management interface.

• Druva (Visionary)

Druva provides the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud platform focusing on BaaS offerings leveraging AWS infrastructure. Its strengths include a cloud-native architecture and a scope of guarantee. However, there’s a limited expansion of native cloud protection capabilities, and Druva lags in multicloud data plane options.

• HYCU (Visionary)

HUCU offers the HYCU Protégé hybrid and multicloud BaaS platform. Strengths include ease of use, multicloud and hybrid support, and SaaS backup. However, on-premises limitations and ransomware detection capabilities are areas to consider.

• IBM (Visionary)

IBM offers a portfolio that includes IBM Storage Protect and Plus, Snapshot, Copy Data Management, and Storage Protect for Cloud. While promising, IBM’s ongoing portfolio shift is a work in progress and may impact current and potential customers.

• Microsoft (Niche Player)

Microsoft offers a range of solutions, including Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, MABS, DPM, and MARS agent. Microsoft focuses primarily on Microsoft workloads, though it lacks multicloud support.

• OpenText (Niche Player)

OpenText completed the acquisition of Micro Focus and provides Data Protector for on-premises and cloud workloads. However, OpenText faces challenges with product integration.

• Rubrik (Leader)

Rubrik excels in innovation and ransomware protection. With a loyal customer base, Rubrik stands out, though it lags in SaaS application coverage.

• Unitrends (Niche Player under Kaseya)

Unitrends, operating under Kaseya, caters to the SMB market. It emphasizes unified administration and Kaseya integration, though it has limited suitability for larger enterprises.

• Veeam (Leader)

Veeam boasts the Veeam Data Platform with hybrid and multicloud support. While it maintains a loyal customer base, its responsiveness to specific market trends may be sluggish.

• Veritas (Leader)

Veritas offers a comprehensive backup portfolio with a focus on cloud-native architecture. However, its primary focus on large enterprises could limit its appeal to midsize businesses.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

Gartner’s report on enterprise backup and recovery software evaluates vendor inclusions and exclusions. Microsoft and OpenText met the criteria for inclusion, while firms like Zerto, Replication, DR, and others faced exclusion.

Specific inclusion attributes include revenue, target market focus, multicloud support, and product availability. Exclusion criteria cover third-party software, cloud-only backup, revenue sources, and specific solution types.

• Quadrant Positioning

Gartner’s report defines each quadrant’s positioning abilities. This provides insights into each vendor’s strengths, capabilities, and market approach. Here is the provided positioning:

• Leaders

Leaders excel in the ability to execute and completeness of vision, offering extensive hybrid and multicloud data protection portfolios. Established as thought leaders, they define recovery enhancement, scalability, and product breadth, making them attractive for large enterprise data centers.

• Challengers

Challengers deliver capable products but may lack comprehensive visions like Leaders. They must execute consistently and understand the market to sustain momentum, often focusing on retention and existing accounts.

• Visionaries

Visionaries innovate ahead of the market, but scalability or sales limitations might prevent them from being Challengers or Leaders. They differentiate through innovation but may lack broad sales success, potentially transitioning to Niche Players.

• Niche Players

Niche Players focus on specific segments or offer specialized capabilities without large-enterprise scale. Some excel in upper-midsize-enterprise areas but lack complete offerings. Despite limitations, they remain significant within niches, catering to specific needs.

Evolving Market Trends

Finally, Gartner’s overview of the enterprise backup and recovery software market highlights significant shifts in the industry. Vendors are concentrating on key areas such as centralized control plane deployment, multicloud protection, ransomware resilience, and detection and remediation.

BaaS offerings are expanding, AI/ML integration is improving efficiency, and support for cloud IaaS, PaaS, SaaS applications, and public cloud tiering is rising. Recovery and backup solutions in the public cloud, NoSQL database backup, instant recovery, container backup, and evolving licensing models round out the changing trends.

These trends underscore the ongoing efforts of vendors to provide robust backup solutions that align with the changing IT landscape and the increasing demand for data protection and recovery solutions.

To Sum Up

The latest Gartner report on Enterprise Backup and Recovery underscores these solutions’ vital role amid hybrid and multicloud expansion and the persistent threat of ransomware attacks.

This report guides leaders in navigating the dynamic landscape by offering insights into vendors’ capabilities and positions. As organizations adopt diverse environments, reliable backup and recovery becomes crucial.

The Magic Quadrant evaluation aids decision-making, helping users choose providers aligned with individual unique requirements. This report is a vital resource for enterprises seeking effective data protection solutions.