Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions 2021

The magic quadrant is a qualitative data analysis market research conducted by an IT consulting company, Gartner. Based on several categories, it ranks some of the most influential players in the backup and recovery market. In this way, Gartner provides a highly reliable vision of the market in the future, deduced from the current technological trends. Here is a quick rundown of some of the most critical information in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery.

What are the criteria for Gartner Magic Quadrant?

Vendors are evaluated for time based on two primary criteria. The two key elements correspond to the two scales on which the companies are ranked: the completeness of the company’s business vision and its ability to execute it. The total rating of each vendor is a combination of many different factors. In the 2021 Quadrant, these factors were:

Completeness of Vision Ability to Execute

• Market Understanding
• Marketing Strategy
• Sales Strategy
• Offering (Product) Strategy
• Business Model
• Vertical/Industry Strategy
• Innovation
• Geographic Strategy
• Product or Service
• Overall Viability
• Sales Execution/Pricing
• market Responsiveness/Record
• Marketing Execution
• Customer Experience
• Operations

Based on these categories, the companies ranked are then relegated to four categories:

Leaders — possibly the most important category of the research, these companies are predicted by Gartner to become the next leaders in the market. These are the vendors who hold strong market positions and, simultaneously, have a clear business vision and the means to execute it.

Challengers — these companies are prospering and doing well in the market. However, they might still lack completeness of their business vision for the future of backup and recovery software. The challengers have the financial and market resources to become Leaders. The important question is whether they understand the market trends necessary to succeed tomorrow and whether they can expand or keep their current position in the market.

Visionaries — visionaries are the vendors who might have a significant overall business vision, or their product provides impressive Innovation in the backup and recovery market. Still, they lack the resources to expand further into the category of leaders or challengers. Many new companies that show promise start in this sector; however, those that remain visionaries for a long time risk losing this status as their backup and recovery solutions stop being innovative.

Niche players — These companies either have fallen behind in the market or are simply dedicated to a specific market niche or a geographical region. Although They are not as influential or forecasting such great market results as the other parts of the quadrant, niche players can still represent a significant part of the data backup and recovery market.

Who were the 2021 leaders?

At the outset, it is worth noting that companies such as Storware could not be included in the list due to the high income threshold. Despite the fact that their functionalities do not differ from the leaders of the list, and often offer more flexible and future-oriented solutions than the competition.

The six most essential companies in the 2021 quadrant named as the leaders were:

• Veeam

Coming in strong with its Veeam Availability Suite, the Veeam company is projected as one of the future leaders in the data and backup market. Last year, Veeam announced that it would expand its product portfolio with further Azure and Google Cloud Platform backup tools, a backup repository for Linux-based environments, and various plug-ins for Oracle. The company operations are also geographically diversified, reaching markets in many different parts of the world. Veeam offers instant recovery of any virtual machine environments, as well as Microsoft SQL server and databases. The number of tools and valuable features, coupled with the company’s overall performance in the backup and recovery market, ensures that Veeam will most likely hold a position of leader for the foreseeable future.

• Veritas Technologies

Another company ranked as a leader is Veritas Technologies. Its clients are primarily various large enterprises, with some in the midmarket. This, combined with its geographically diversified operations, secures Veritas Technologies a strong position in the backup and recovery market. Veritas Technologies announced several new inclusions in the last year in its portfolio. Amongst these were two major updates to NetBackup, which included extended support for Azure and improvements for backup of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and NAS. In January, Veritas Technologies also acquired Hubstore, a company specializing in cloud storage. With its broad range of support for different ecosystems and easy automation of backup and recovery processes, Veritas Technologies is projected to remain a strong player in the market.

• Commvault

Commvault has strengthened and expanded its cloud backup and recovery storage position by significantly expanding its cloud-native data protection capabilities. With a geographically diverse market and clients mostly stemming from large enterprises, Commvault remains a serious player in the backup and recovery market. Its portfolio mainly contains three tools: Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault HyperScale X, and Commvault Metallic. Commvault allows easy deployment regarding which environments might be necessary for its users. However, all three environments can be easily and intuitively managed from a single Commvault Command Center. With increased focus on the data protection offered, Commvault is projected to remain a leader in the market.

• Rubrik

In the last 12 months, Rubrik has made two significant additions to its portfolio: backup Support for AWS RDS, Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive, SAP HANA on Google Cloud Platform, and VMware Cloud on AWS. These updates also improved the overall backup and recovery performance of SQL servers and VM environments. Rubrik seems to continually expand with a clear business vision. Most of the company’s market is with large enterprises, where Rubrik is a significant player. Offering its users a number of benefits regarding their data security, the Polaris SaaS platform also provides increased visibility to different Rubrik deployments. The simplicity and automation offered by Rubrik, coupled with its impressive database support, allow the company to settle itself in the leaders’ quadrant of the backup and recovery magic quadrant.

• Dell Technologies

One of the more popular leaders in the quadrant is Dell Technologies. This globally recognized company has made four significant updates to its PowerProtect Data Manager. The updates introduced support for application-consistent backups in Kubernetes, guest workload support for Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and several improvements to Oracle Database and VMware backup, such as increased protection of VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure. Representing a large part of the data backup and recovery market, Dell Technologies so far presents an optimistic view of its future endeavors and is projected to remain in the leaders’ quadrant.

• Cohesity

Cohesity is the last leader in the 2021 magic quadrant, with most of its market located in Northern America and Western Europe upper mid market enterprise. Despite being less geographically diverse than other leaders of this year’s data backup and recovery quadrant, Cohesity remains a significant influence in the market. The vendor released two major software updates last year, 6.5.1 and 6.6. Some new features introduced include support for instant restoring Oracle Databases and improvements to Azure VM backup and tiering. The operational simplicity, easy management, and lots of support position Cohesity as the leader in this quadrant.

Backup and recovery market overview

The 2021 Gartner magic quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions also reveals several trends that remain prevalent in the current backup and recovery market. This makes it possible to predict the direction in which the market will be heading in the nearest future.

An analysis of the market activity of vendors who found themselves in the Leaders category reveals that the most important features in backup and recovery technology that deserve further focus are:

• Centralized management: More companies are heading toward hybrid IT systems. Because of this, vendors that can offer a centralized method of managing workloads regardless of their location found themselves in the leader quadrant.
• Ransomware resilience: Over the last twelve months, many ransomware attacks have been noted. Customers looking to expand their backup and recovery options will most likely focus on vendors who can offer an increased level of anti-ransomware detection and resilience.
• Support for public cloud IaaS and PaaS backup: Over the last year, leading vendors have increased the protection capabilities for cloud-native workloads. Some companies are also supporting the backup of various DBaaS products.
• Support for SaaS-based applications: In the last two years, most leading companies have begun to include SaaS applications as a part of their backup strategy via partners or in-house development.
• Tiering to the public cloud: Almost all of the vendors subjected to evaluation in this quadrant support tiering backup data to the public cloud to reduce backup storage costs. Most of the backup data is self-describing, so if the data on-premises is lost, then a backup can be reinstalled in the cloud and data restored.
• Recovery in the public cloud: With cloud integration being a significant part of data backup and recovery, vendors who want to stay on the top in the current and future market must offer data backup and recovery for cloud services.
• NoSQL database backup: More databases, particularly those associated with big data, utilize NoSQL databases. As these projects build further traction and generate considerable income, there is a growing need for backup and recovery of such environments. Most of the leaders have already started building such capabilities natively into the platforms. Other vendors are currently expanding further in that direction.
• Instant recovery of databases and virtual machines: Most vendors analyzed for the 2021 backup and recovery quadrant offer instant recovery of virtual machines. Similarly, many top vendors offer instant recovery of other databases such as Microsoft SQL or Oracle.
• Container backup: Gartner anticipates that clients’ interest in container backup will increase in the nearest future as more containers will be used to support growing workloads. Because of this, many leading vendors started building container backup capabilities in their platforms.
• Subscription licensing: Enterprises migrating to the public cloud find the subscription-based model a more straightforward way to procure backup solutions. While subscription-based licensing is not necessarily less expensive compared to perpetual licensing, it is more predictable and easier to manage. Due to the migration to the public cloud, many companies find that the subscription-based model suits their needs better than perpetual licensing. Because of this, leading vendors offer several subscription levels with their platforms, and these functions will most likely continue to expand.