Translate

Monday, July 27, 2020

Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions - July 2020

Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions

Published 20 July 2020 - ID G00464149 - 45 min read
The move toward public cloud, heightened concerns over ransomware, and complexities associated with backup and data management are forcing I&O leaders to rearchitect their backup infrastructure and explore alternative solutions. This research provides analyses of backup and recovery vendors.

Market Definition/Description

Data center backup and recovery solutions are designed to capture a point-in-time copy (backup) of an enterprise workload and write the data out to a secondary storage device for the purpose of recovering this data in the future.
The core functionalities of a backup and recovery solution are to:
  • Back up and recover operating systems, files, databases, and applications in both physical and virtual environments in the data center.
  • Assign backup and retention policies that align with the organization’s recovery objectives.
  • Report success and failure of backup/recovery tasks.
Additional capabilities that can be provided by the solution are to:
  • Create a second backup copy of on-premises backup data in the public cloud, and tier backup data to public cloud.
  • Protect public cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS workloads.
  • Protect remote sites.

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions
Source: Gartner (July 2020)
Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Acronis

Acronis is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was a Niche Player. Its Cyber Backup platform focuses on providing an integrated data protection and security solution that covers on-premises, cloud and edge environments. Its operations are geographically diversified, and a majority of its clients tend to be in the midmarket segment. In 2019, Acronis announced a disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering as a part of the Acronis Cyber Cloud for Enterprise portfolio. It further improved the Cyber Backup platform by introducing new security capabilities and enhancing its virtual machine (VM) backup capabilities.
Strengths
  • Vertical industry focus — Acronis has data protection solutions specifically targeted at automotive, healthcare, energy and government verticals as a result of joint development efforts with OEMs and independent software vendors (ISVs) in these verticals.
  • Differentiated cybersecurity capabilities — Acronis’ ransomware protection capabilities and its ability to verify the authenticity and recoverability of backup copies strongly complement its backup capabilities.
  • Product localization — Acronis products and documentation are localized in 25 languages, the highest number among all vendors evaluated in this research.
Cautions
  • Database support — Acronis’ backup and recovery capabilities for databases such as Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL, SAP HANA and NoSQL databases are not comprehensive and lag competition.
  • Widening capability gap — Acronis trails competition in its ability to provide comprehensive data protection capabilities for public cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and network-attached storage (NAS) environments.
  • Ecosystem integration — Acronis has limited integration with hardware snapshots from storage array vendors and lacks direct integration with third-party IT service management (ITSM) and IT monitoring tools.

Actifio

Actifio is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was a Visionary. Its product, Actifio Sky, is mainly focused on providing data protection and copy data management capabilities for virtual machines and large databases, both on-premises and in a wide variety of public clouds. Its operations are mainly focused in the North American market, and its clients tend to be in the large enterprise segment. In 2019, Actifio announced the CDX backup appliance, a two-node high availability (HA) appliance based on Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) software designed for smaller backup environments. In December 2019, it announced Actifio 10c, a major software update that introduced several key features, notably the “mount and migrate” feature for efficient database and VM recovery, automated disaster recovery (DR) orchestration and cloud VM snapshot management.
Strengths
  • Deployment flexibility — Actifio’s platform can be deployed as a virtual appliance (Actifio Sky) or a bare-metal appliance (CDX), or deployed and consumed as a SaaS offering (Actifio GO) in all leading public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
  • Extensive database support and quick recovery — Actifio provides instant recovery capabilities via its “mount and recover” feature for all major databases including IBM Db2, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL and SAP HANA, both in on-premises and public cloud environments. This is particularly useful in environments with several large databases.
  • Low cloud backup/recovery costs — The ability to directly mount data from object storage without rehydrating to block storage, efficient storage tiering and a multitude of other features ensure lower operational costs, recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for “backup to cloud” and “backup in cloud” use cases.
Cautions
  • Limited presence outside North America — Actifio has limited direct and indirect presence outside North America, relying on a relatively small network of partners alongside OEM relationships with Dell and IBM. This impedes overall customer experience during the presales cycle and results in suboptimal account management in these regions.
  • High acquisition and maintenance costs — The list price for software licenses and annual maintenance is higher than most vendors evaluated in this research.
  • No tape support — Lack of native integration with tape libraries and drives limits adoption in environments where users rely on tape as the primary media for short-term operational recovery or long-term backup retention.

Arcserve

Arcserve did not respond to requests for supplemental information. Gartner’s analysis is therefore based on other credible sources, including Gartner client inquiries, Gartner Peer Insights, press releases from Arcserve and technical documentation available on Arcserve’s website.
Arcserve is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was a Niche Player. Arcserve’s backup portfolio includes: Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP); Arcserve Backup for tape support; Arcserve Appliances Secured by Sophos; Arcserve Cloud Direct; and Arcserve UDP Cloud Hybrid Secured by Sophos for cloud-based backup, off-site retention and DR. It also includes Arcserve Cloud Backup for Office 365 Secured by Sophos for cloud-to-cloud protection of Microsoft Office 365 email, files and SharePoint sites. Arcserve’s operations are geographically diversified and most of its clients are in the midmarket and enterprise segments. In the past year, Arcserve introduced Arcserve UDP 7.0, which provides support for Nutanix AHV and Microsoft OneDrive. It also continued to enhance its backup as a service (BaaS) offerings — Arcserve Cloud Direct and UDP Cloud Hybrid Secured by Sophos.
Strengths
  • Breadth of platform support — Arcserve UDP addresses the data protection requirements of a broad range of operating systems, hypervisors, databases and public cloud environments.
  • Recovery assurance — Arcserve’s recovery assurance capability allows users to verify the integrity of the backups performed, thus providing additional levels of data protection.
  • Low acquisition cost — Arcserve offered the lowest socket-based license pricing among all vendors evaluated in the market in 2019.
Cautions
  • Tape support — Arcserve customers that require tape support must separately install Arcserve Backup alongside Arcserve UDP.
  • Service and support — Gartner’s Peer Insights survey and client inquiries indicate that the overall quality of support needs to be improved.
  • Ransomware detection and remediation — Arcserve UDP offers limited capabilities for detecting ransomware attacks on the backup copy and ransomware recovery and testing.

Cohesity

Cohesity is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was a Visionary. Cohesity’s backup product portfolio mainly consists of DataProtect, which is part of the Cohesity DataPlatform, a scale-out software-defined platform that consolidates application and backup management. Cohesity’s operations are mainly focused in North America and Western Europe, and its clients tend to be in the upper midmarket and enterprise segments. In the past year, Cohesity announced support for Oracle RAC, SAP HANA, AIX and Active Directory backup, thus narrowing the overall capability gap in protecting traditional workloads. It also continued to innovate and deliver capabilities in emerging areas such as data management and data protection for edge and public cloud environments. In May 2019, it acquired Imanis Data, which helped further expand its capabilities to include NoSQL data protection.
Strengths
  • Centralized monitoring and management — Cohesity customers can leverage Helios, a SaaS-based platform that facilitates centralized management of multiple Cohesity environments. It provides ransomware detection, capacity management, issue root cause analysis, and case management, as well as search and compliance capabilities.
  • Heterogenous cluster support — A Cohesity cluster can comprise server nodes from different OEMs, namely Dell, Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), or Cohesity nodes. This provides increased flexibility when customers begin to scale the system.
  • Support experience — Cohesity scores above average in service and support capabilities. This can be attributed to a combination of superior account management and the use of its Helios SaaS platform to proactively detect, notify and remediate issues.
Cautions
  • Release cadence and code quality — Cohesity’s frequent major update cadence to its DataProtect platform has resulted in a relatively high number of known issues and issues reported by customers, indicating an inadequate prerelease quality assurance testing process.
  • Reporting — Cohesity customers have indicated that Cohesity does not offer granular-level reporting and that overall the reporting capability needs to be improved.
  • Limited presence in emerging markets — Cohesity has limited direct presence and a relatively small number of channel partners in emerging markets, requiring customers to ensure they work with a credible partner and rely on local references when selecting Cohesity.

Commvault

Commvault is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was a Leader. Its backup/recovery portfolio mainly comprises Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery and Commvault HyperScale; the latter is also sold in an appliance form factor. Commvault’s operations are geographically diversified and its clients tend to be in the large enterprise segment. As a part of its expansion strategy, in October 2019 it announced Commvault Metallic, a backup-as-a-service offering targeted at the midmarket segment. In September 2019, Commvault acquired Hedvig, a software-defined storage vendor that addresses multiple primary and secondary storage requirements. During the past year, Commvault introduced several new capabilities that addressed data protection requirements in hybrid cloud, public cloud IaaS and PaaS environments.
Strengths
  • Broad ecosystem support — Commvault supports the broadest range of applications, databases, public cloud environments, OSs and hypervisors, NAS systems, and primary storage arrays of all the vendors evaluated in this research.
  • Cloud-native data protection — A majority of Commvault’s customers migrating to AWS, Microsoft Azure and other clouds continue to rely on Commvault’s ability to protect cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS workloads. As of March 2020, Commvault protects the largest number of public cloud VM instances among all vendors evaluated in this research.
  • Subscription licensing — Commvault has been able to successfully transition a significant number of customers from a traditional perpetual-licensing model to subscription-based licensing. While this resulted in decline in revenue for Commvault, it aligns well with customer’s aspirations to shift toward convenient operating expenditure (opex)-based, cloudlike pricing and provides an opportunity for license consolidation.
Cautions
  • Deployment complexity — Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery requires installation of several components — client interfacing agents, data movers, an operations console, and a central management and monitoring console, as well as additional tools for orchestration and search and compliance; more than most vendors in this research.
  • Commvault HyperScale and Red Hat — The HyperScale appliance is built on Red Hat and not a proprietary file system, thus creating an external dependency for providing critical file system updates and fixes. This may increase the overall time to deliver critical OS updates as Commvault is responsible for testing and delivery of these updates to the customer.
  • Commvault HyperScale available as subscription only — Customers, particularly in the emerging market, government and utilities sectors, often procure backup solutions as a perpetual license, following a capital expenditure (capex) model of investment. Since the HyperScale appliance is available only via a subscription, such customers may have to explore alternative solutions.

Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was a Leader. Its backup and recovery software portfolio mainly consist of the Data Protection Suite, comprising Avamar, NetWorker and PowerProtect Data Manager, which was delivered in July 2019. Its appliances portfolio comprises Integrated Data Protection Appliances, PowerProtect DD Series Appliances and newly announced PowerProtect X Series Appliances. Dell Technologies’ operations are geographically diversified, and its clients span the midmarket and enterprise segments of the market. In the past year, it released two new updates for NetWorker and Avamar that included enhancements to the GUI, deeper integration with VMware and three new updates for PowerProtect Data Manager, demonstrating investment across all three backup and recovery software products.
Strengths
  • Data reduction efficiency — PowerProtect DD in combination with Data Protection Suite provides data reduction ratios that are higher than most vendors evaluated in this research. This reduces overall storage consumption and costs.
  • Product quality — Updates to Avamar and NetWorker and the newly announced PowerProtect Data Manager, collectively, had the lowest number of issues reported by customers, and fewer known product issues at the time of release, which indicates a strong focus on product quality.
  • Global presence — Dell Technologies has a strong direct and indirect sales and support presence via a large network of channel partners in both mature and emerging markets.
Cautions
  • Public cloud — With multiple products that address cloud-native data protection requirements — Avamar Virtual Edition, PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition, NetWorker Virtual Edition and PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager, Dell Technologies extends the same level of complexity and overlap associated with its on-premises solutions into the public cloud.
  • Management complexity — A unified monitoring and management experience covering both on-premises and public cloud environments is work in progress
  • High maintenance costs — Gartner client interactions demonstrate that existing Dell Technologies Data Protection Suite customers continue to express concerns regarding high annual maintenance fees.

IBM

IBM is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was a Leader. Its Spectrum Protect portfolio consists of Spectrum Protect, Spectrum Protect Plus and Spectrum Copy Data Management that together address data protection and reuse requirements for a broad range of applications. IBM’s operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be in the large enterprise segment of the market. In the past year, it introduced several key features in Spectrum Protect Plus — support for Microsoft Exchange Online and OneDrive, MongoDB, and VMware Cloud on AWS, and support for containers.
Strengths
  • Licensing models — Spectrum Protect Suite is priced at convenient per-back-end-TB pricing, reducing overall total cost of ownership (TCO).
  • Container support — Spectrum Protect Plus protects data in containers managed by Kubernetes, by integrating with Container Storage Interfaces (CSIs), which provide the capability to snapshot the persistent volumes associated with the container.
  • Global presence — IBM has a strong direct and indirect presence via a large network of channel partners in both mature and emerging markets.
Cautions
  • Integration with public cloud snapshots — Spectrum Protect Suite does not integrate with public cloud snapshot APIs provided by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Microsoft Azure VMs or Google Compute Engine (GCE).
  • Dependency on third-party vendors — IBM depends on third-party vendors to address backup requirements for SharePoint, some NoSQL databases, Nutanix AHV VMs and bare-metal recovery of operating systems, requiring users to deploy additional products and thereby increasing management complexity.
  • Deployment complexity — Enterprise customers may need to install both Spectrum Protect and Protect Plus to ensure complete data protection requirements are addressed. Product consolidation and efforts toward unified management remain largely works in progress.

Rubrik

Rubrik is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was a Visionary. Rubrik’s product portfolio mainly consists of Rubrik Cloud Data Management (RCDM), its core backup platform; Polaris, a SaaS-based platform that provides centralized visibility and management and leverages metadata to provide ransomware remediation and data classification; and Mosaic for protection of NoSQL workloads. Rubrik’s operations are geographically diverse, and its clients are mainly in the large enterprise segment of the market. In 2019, it further augmented Polaris’ capabilities to support public cloud IaaS and SaaS data protection requirements. It released two major updates to RCDM — 5.1 and 5.1.1 — that introduced native continuous data protection capabilities for VMware and improved data tiering to Azure, among others. It also introduced Polaris Sonar, a SaaS-based application for data discovery, classification and reporting.
Strengths
  • Scalability — RCDM is based on a proprietary file system that can scale the appliance both in performance and capacity. Rubrik has reported that it has multiple customers that protect more than a petabyte of backup data in a single cluster.
  • Ransomware detection and remediation — Polaris Radar monitors the backup environment for anomalies by applying machine learning models that are continuously refined, to better align with the changing threat landscape. Backup data is stored in an immutable format, which increases overall resilience against ransomware.
  • Database recovery — RCDM supports near-instant availability of Microsoft SQL databases and Oracle Databases through the “live mount” feature, which reduces the overall recovery time objective.
Cautions
  • Limited integration with storage array snapshots — Rubrik integrates with hardware snapshot APIs from a limited number of primary storage array vendors.
  • Higher operational costs for public cloud application backup — RCDM requires a four-node VM cluster to be deployed in the public cloud in order to support granular protection and recovery of applications and databases hosted in public cloud IaaS. This increases the total cost of ownership of running the backup infrastructure in the public cloud.
  • Weak Active Directory support — RCDM does not support granular recovery of Active Directory objects. Backup/recovery of the Azure Active Directory environment is not supported.

Unitrends, a Kaseya Company

Unitrends did not respond to requests for supplemental information. Gartner’s analysis is therefore based on other credible sources, including Gartner client inquiries, Gartner Peer Insights, press releases from Unitrends and technical documentation available on Unitrends’ website.
Unitrends is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was a Niche Player. Its data center backup portfolio consists of the Unitrends Backup Software, Recovery Series Backup Appliance, and Spanning Backup for Office 365. Its operations are geographically diverse, and its customers tend to be in the midmarket segment. In March 2019, it introduced the Recovery Series MAX Appliance, offered in six configurations that address various requirements of small and midsize business (SMB) and midmarket customers. It also introduced Helix in early 2020, a SaaS-based management platform that centrally manages software updates for backup appliances and monitors backup failures in Windows environments.
Strengths
  • Appliance offerings — Recovery Series Generation 8 (Gen 8) appliances, Recovery Series MAX, and Unitrends virtual appliances collectively address a broad range of backup capacity and recovery requirements for SMB and midmarket enterprises at a low cost.
  • Long-term retention in public cloud — Unitrends Forever Cloud program supports long-term retention of data beyond seven years in Unitrends’ managed cloud infrastructure with no egress charges and with options for performing regular recovery testing in the cloud.
  • Geographic presence — Unitrends has a strong direct and indirect presence via channel partners in all major geographies.
Cautions
  • Database support — Support for backup of Oracle Database and SAP HANA databases is not granular or comprehensive when compared to other vendors evaluated in this research.
  • Public cloud IaaS support — Unitrends’ backup instance does not integrate with native snapshot capabilities provided by AWS and Azure. Backing up from on-premises to public cloud storage is supported for AWS, Google and Rackspace Technology, but backup copies to Azure require a Unitrends virtual appliance to be installed in the cloud environment, increasing operational costs.
  • Limited integration with storage array snapshots — Unitrends has limited integration with hardware snapshot capabilities offered by storage vendors.

Veeam

Veeam is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was a Leader. Veeam leads with the Veeam Availability Suite, which comprises Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE for backup monitoring and analytics. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, Veeam Backup for AWS and Veeam Availability Orchestrator are add-on products to this suite. Veeam’s operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be in the midmarket and enterprise segments. In March 2020, Insight Partners acquired Veeam; this move is expected to fuel Veeam’s growth in the U.S. market. In 2019, Veeam made incremental improvements to its cloud tiering, ransomware and NAS capabilities. After the sale of N2WS, Veeam announced the internally developed Veeam Backup for AWS in December 2019 to offset the capability gap. It also announced Nutanix Mine with Veeam, a backup solution based on Nutanix hyperconverged systems.
Strengths
  • Monitoring, reporting and diagnostics — The Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics feature detects configuration and performance issues in the customer environment and provides an option for automatic remediation via Veeam ONE. The diagnostics engine is updated several times a month with key lessons from Veeam support.
  • Licensing portability — The Veeam Universal License option provides customers with the flexibility to repurpose the same licenses when they switch hypervisors, migrate from physical to virtual or cloud environments, or from on-premises to cloud.
  • Comprehensive Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 support — Veeam offers comprehensive backup and granular recovery of on-premises Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 environments that uses a single pane of glass, also enabling a unified target storage repository for all three environments.
Cautions
  • Deployment complexity — Some customers report that large-scale Veeam deployments are complex to manage because the deployments typically comprise several components — multiple backup servers, proxy servers, mount servers, agents and backup repositories.
  • Cloud-native application backup — Veeam does not support application-consistent backups for applications and databases hosted within virtual machine instances in AWS and Microsoft Azure, and lacks support for backup of database as a service (DBaaS) products such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Azure SQL databases.
  • Immutable backup storage — Veeam relies on security capabilities provided by the storage target or file system software to ensure the primary backup copy is immutable.

Veritas Technologies

Veritas is a Leader in this year’s Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was a Leader. Its backup product portfolio mainly consists of the NetBackup software, NetBackup Appliances, NetBackup CloudPoint, Flex Appliance and Backup Exec. Veritas’ operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be mainly in the large enterprise segment, with some presence in the midmarket. In 2019, it announced NetBackup 8.2, which included support for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and OpenStack backup. It also announced the Flex 5150 Hardware Appliance designed for remote office/branch office (ROBO) and branch office use cases. Veritas also released three updates to its Backup Exec product line, which included enhancements to ransomware detection and remediation capabilities, tiering to public cloud and improved support for VMware and Hyper-V environments. In March 2019, Veritas acquired APTARE, which specializes in monitoring and analytics for VMs, storage and backup environments.
Strengths
  • Scalability — Veritas has several customers that have deployed NetBackup to protect multiple petabytes and more than 10,000 virtual machines in a single environment.
  • Cloud-native data protection — NetBackup CloudPoint protects virtual instances deployed in AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP by integrating with the native snapshot capabilities these providers offer, and with plug-ins for Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases to provide application-consistent backup in AWS and Microsoft Azure.
  • Global presence — Veritas has a strong direct and indirect presence via a large network of channel partners in both mature and emerging markets.
Cautions
  • External dependency for SaaS backup — Data protection requirements for Office 365, Salesforce and G Suite are delivered via a third-party SaaS backup vendor.
  • Immutable storage — NetBackup’s primary backup copy, with the exception of tape, is not immutable, thus requiring additional backup copies based on immutable storage for additional resilience.
  • Higher-than-average maintenance costs — Gartner client inquiries indicate that some NetBackup software license renewals cost more than those of some vendors evaluated in this research.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor’s appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added

None

Dropped

Micro Focus

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion, vendors need to meet the following criteria at the commencement of initial research and survey process (5 March 2020):
  1. The vendor must meet at least one of the following revenue criteria. Revenue must be derived solely from its backup and recovery product portfolio. This revenue should not include revenue generated from implementation services and managed services:
    • The vendor must have generated a revenue (generally accepted accounting principles [GAAP]) of greater than $50 million from the sale of product licenses and maintenance over the last four quarters (as of 1 March 2020).
    • The vendor must have generated subscription revenue of greater than $25 million (GAAP) over the past four quarters (as of March 2020).
    • The vendor must have generated a revenue (GAAP) of greater than $25 million from the sale of product licenses and maintenance over the past four quarters (as of March 2020) combined with a growth rate of 20% or greater from the prior four quarters.
  2. The vendor’s qualifying backup and recovery solution(s) must be sold and marketed primarily to upper-end midmarket and large enterprise organizations. Gartner defines the upper-end midmarket as being 500 to 999 employees, and the large enterprise as being 1,000 employees or greater.
  3. The vendor’s qualifying backup and recovery solution must focus on protecting enterprise environments running in the data center. The data center can either be a traditional data center or a colocation facility. Protection of cloud-based IaaS, PaaS and SaaS workloads and remote sites is seen as an extension to these core capabilities.
  4. The vendor must have at least one backup and recovery solution commercially available for use by enterprises for three calendar years prior to 5 March 2020, i.e., it must have been commercially available at least as early as March 2017.
  5. New products or updates to existing products that were released in the past 12 months must be generally available on or before 5 March 2020 in order to be considered for evaluation.
  6. The vendor should serve an installed base of at least 350 customers within the market. In addition, at least 250 of the 350 customers must have deployed the backup solution for a minimum of 100 physical servers or 100 virtual servers in a single deployment site. This excludes endpoint backups.
  7. The vendor must actively sell and support its backup and recovery products under its own brand name in at least two of the following major regions — North America, Europe or Asia/Pacific. At least 20% of total revenue and existing customer count must originate from outside of its major region.
  8. The vendor’s solution must support backup and granular restores of data in both physical and virtualized deployments. It must support at least the following environments:
    • Hypervisor: VMware and Hyper-V via integration with backup frameworks provided by these hypervisors.
    • Applications: Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint via integration with backup frameworks provided by these applications to ensure application consistency.
    • Operating Systems: Windows and Linux.
    • Databases: Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server via integration with their native backup frameworks to ensure database consistency.
  9. The product may be sold either as a software-only offering or as an integrated backup storage appliance (backup application plus backup storage in a single integrated offering) or both.
Exclusion Criteria
Vendors were excluded from this Magic Quadrant if any of the following criteria applied:
  1. Vendors offering products or solutions that are sourced entirely from a third-party ISV.
  2. Products that serve only as a target or destination for backup but do not actually perform the backup and restore management function. Examples include purpose-built deduplication appliances, storage area network (SAN), NAS or object storage.
  3. Vendors that back up directly to the public cloud without storing a local copy on-premises.
  4. Vendors whose main source of product revenue (more than 75% of total revenue) is from data center hosters and managed service providers.
  5. Products or solutions that are designed and mainly positioned as solutions for backing up endpoints such as laptops, desktops and mobile devices.
  6. Products or solutions that are designed and positioned as solutions to back up remote offices, edge locations and lower-midmarket/SMB environments.
  7. Products or solutions designed for homogeneous environments, such as tools designed to back up only Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware or Red Hat or containers.
  8. Products or solutions designed to back up specific storage or hyperconverged system vendors.
  9. Products that serve primarily as replication and disaster recovery tools.
  10. Products that serve primarily for managing snapshot and replication capabilities of storage arrays.
  11. Products that are positioned mainly for copy data management.
  12. Products that are mainly true continuous data protection solutions.

Honorable Mentions

Clumio
Clumio is a SaaS-based data protection platform vendor headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Its backup-as-a-service offering addresses data protection requirements for AWS, Microsoft Office 365 and VMware environments, all with a single service.
Clumio was not included in this year’s Magic Quadrant evaluation as it did not meet the revenue inclusion criteria.
Druva
Druva is a SaaS-based data protection platform vendor headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Its backup-as-a-service offering addresses data protection requirements for workloads and applications on-premises and in the cloud. These range from VMware, VMware Cloud on AWS, Hyper-V, Oracle, SQL Server, NAS and file servers to SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, Salesforce and G Suite, public cloud workloads and endpoint devices.
Druva was not included in this year’s Magic Quadrant evaluation as it did not meet the criteria for minimum number of enterprise backup customers that deployed the solution at the scale described in the inclusion criteria.
HYCU
HYCU is a SaaS-based data protection platform vendor headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Through its multicloud data management platform, HYCU Protégé, it offers backup, migration and disaster recovery capabilities for on-premises virtual and physical environments as well as public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and GCP.
HYCU was not included in this year’s Magic Quadrant as it did not meet the revenue inclusion criteria.
Zerto
Zerto is an IT resilience platform vendor co-headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, and Herzliya, Israel. It addresses continuous data protection, backup, disaster recovery and workload mobility requirements for on-premises virtual environments and public clouds.
Zerto was not included in this year’s Magic Quadrant as it did not meet the revenue inclusion criteria.

Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

Gartner analysts evaluate vendors on the quality and efficacy of the processes, systems, methods or procedures that enable IT provider performance to be competitive, efficient and effective, and to positively impact revenue, retention and reputation within Gartner’s view of the market.
Product/Service: This criterion refers to core goods and services that compete in and or serve the defined market. This includes current product and service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills, etc. This can be offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Vendors will be assessed mainly on:
  • Information gathered as a part of product evaluation in the Critical Capabilities research.
  • Overall product portfolio capability.
  • New capability released/products launched during the evaluation period.
  • Severity 1 and Severity 2 bugs reported from field in the past 12 months (as determined by the authors from customer inquiries, publicly available information and vendor responses).
  • Known issues at the time of product release that impact customer experience (information sourced from product release notes and other technical documentation).
  • Steps taken in the past 12 months to simplify and/or consolidate existing products for better customer experience.
  • Steps taken to integrate products acquired as a result of acquisitions into the product portfolio.
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization): Financials: Viability includes an assessment of the organization’s overall financial health, as well as the financial and practical success of the business unit. It views the likelihood of the organization to continue to offer and invest in the product, as well as the product position in the current portfolio.
Vendors will be assessed mainly on:
  • Overall profitability of the enterprise backup/recovery software portfolio.
  • Total revenue from sales of perpetual backup/recovery software licenses in the four quarters prior to 1 March 2020.
  • Total revenue from backup/recovery software maintenance contracts in the four quarters prior to 1 March 2020.
  • Total revenue from backup/recovery software subscription sales from the four quarters prior to 1 March 2020, as well as prepaid subscriptions for FY21 and FY22.
  • Net new customers in the past 12 months in the defined backup market.
  • Financial structure of the organization.
  • Current market share in the backup/recovery software market.
  • Presence and account wallet share in very large enterprises (more than 10,000 employees/more than $10 billion revenue).
Sales Execution/Pricing: This criterion refers to the organization’s capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Vendors will be assessed mainly on:
  • Pricing competitiveness and pricing options offered to the client.
  • Discounts and other strategies used to steer the deal in your favor.
  • Extent of support provided to partners in complex deployments to expedite sales cycle.
  • Level of transparency, accuracy and consistency, and the extent to which details are provided to customers when offering pricing information (either directly or via partners).
  • Customer proof-of-concept experience and help extended during solution design.
  • Account management.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: This criterion refers to the organization’s ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve, and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor’s history of responsiveness to changing market demands.
Vendors will be assessed mainly on:
  • New products or capabilities released during the evaluation period that address market demands and gaps in the existing product portfolio.
  • New products or capabilities released during the past 12 months that created competitive differentiation.
  • Track record of on-time delivery of roadmap during the past two years.
Marketing Execution: This refers to the clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization’s message in order to influence the market, promote the brand, increase awareness of products and establish a positive identification in the minds of customers. This “mind share” can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional activity, thought leadership, social media, referrals and sales activities.
Vendors will be assessed mainly on:
  • Number of local and international events targeted at customers and prospects and their outcome.
  • Number of events run jointly with technology partners and their outcome.
  • Number of events targeted at channel partners and their outcome.
  • Digital marketing campaigns run throughout the year and their outcome.
Customer Experience: This criterion refers to products and services and/or programs that enable customers to achieve anticipated results with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes quality supplier/buyer interactions, technical support, or account support. This may also include ancillary tools, customer support programs, availability of user groups, service-level agreements, etc.
Vendors will be assessed mainly on the following factors. Data will be sourced from Gartner client inquiries, Gartner peer review feedback, publicly available resources and vendor customer reference survey:
  • Tools used to proactively identify issues with the customer deployment and remediate or notify the customer.
  • Quality of technical support and account support.
  • Quality and transparency of technical documentation.

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria
Weighting
Product or Service
High
Overall Viability
High
Sales Execution/Pricing
High
Market Responsiveness/Record
High
Marketing Execution
Low
Customer Experience
High
Operations
Not Rated
Source: Gartner (July 2020)

Completeness of Vision

Gartner analysts evaluate vendors on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements. This includes current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs, and competitive forces and how well they map to Gartner’s view of the market.
Market Understanding: This criterion refers to the ability to understand customer needs and translate them into products and services. Vendors that show a clear vision of their market listen, understand customer demands, and can shape or enhance market changes with their added vision.
Specific characteristics include:
  • Alignment of current product portfolio with market needs.
  • Company vision that demonstrates high-level understanding of future market direction.
Marketing Strategy: This refers to clear, differentiated messaging consistently communicated internally, and externalized through social media, advertising, customer programs, and positioning statements.
Vendors will be assessed based on:
  • Clear and consistent guidance to customers on the value of each product in the product portfolio.
  • Clear messaging and guidance to customers and partners on the evolution of different generations of products.
  • Understanding of various target customer personas and the ability to communicate value to those personas.
Sales Strategy: A sound strategy for selling uses the appropriate networks including: direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communication. This includes partners that extend the scope and depth of market reach, expertise, technologies, services and their customer base.
Vendors will be assessed based on:
  • Strategies used to sell direct or leverage global system integrators (GSIs), SIs, value-added resellers (VARs) and distributor networks effectively to extend market reach.
  • Strategies used to onboard new partners and retain existing partners.
  • Strategies used to effectively leverage technology partners and explore alternative routes to market.
Offering (Product) Strategy: This refers to an approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes market differentiation, functionality, methodology, and features as they map to current and future requirements.
Vendors will be assessed based on:
  • Ability to introduce new features/products in a timely manner that aligns with customer priorities.
  • The ability to introduce new features to the core product, avoiding disparate point-based solutions.
  • Extent of dependence on other ISVs for specific software functionality.
  • Hardware sourcing strategy.
  • Build versus buy strategy, and the ability to integrate products from acquisitions into the core product portfolio.
  • Past and planned future release cadence.
  • Overall focus on backup/recovery capability development.
Business Model: This criterion refers to the design, logic and execution of the organization’s business proposition to achieve continued success.
Vendors will be assessed based on:
  • Strategies used to sustain business growth in the long term despite external factors such as price fluctuations, technology obsolescence and new competition.
  • Strategies used to offset risks associated with sourcing hardware and software components from partners. Risks include hardware quality, supply chain management challenges and postsales support.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: This refers to the strategy to direct resources (sales, product and development), skills and products to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including verticals.
Vendors will be assessed based on their ability to:
  • Deliver solutions that address specific industry data protection requirements.
  • Collaborate with industry specific technology providers to create reference architectures and jointly go to market.
  • Co-create products with industry-specific technology providers.
Innovation: This is the direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or preemptive purposes.
Vendors will be assessed mainly on:
  • Ability to effectively leverage company IP (patents) to create differentiation or enhance product capability.
  • A product roadmap that reflects the ability to create competitive differentiation in the market.
  • A track record of product announcements (past 12 months) that differentiate itself from competition, resulting in increased sales and customer satisfaction.
  • Innovation in sales and business models that helps increase revenue and retain customers.
  • Innovation in postsales support that helped reduce issue resolution time and increase overall customer satisfaction.
Geographic Strategy: This criterion refers to the vendor’s strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the “home” or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market.
Vendors will be assessed mainly on:
  • Number of sales offices set up outside the home region.
  • Channel partners onboarded outside the home region.
  • Strategies used to enter new challenging markets.
  • Product localization efforts to address language barriers.
  • Product or features introduced to address country-specific or geography-specific requirements.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria
Weighting
Market Understanding
High
Marketing Strategy
Medium
Sales Strategy
Medium
Offering (Product) Strategy
High
Business Model
Medium
Vertical/Industry Strategy
Medium
Innovation
High
Geographic Strategy
Medium
Source: Gartner (July 2020)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders

Leaders have the highest combined measures of Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They have the most comprehensive and scalable product portfolios. They have a proven track record of established market presence and financial performance. For vision, they are perceived in the industry as thought leaders, and have well-articulated plans for enhancing recovery capabilities, improving ease of deployment and administration, and increasing their scalability and product breadth. A fundamental sea change is occurring in the backup and recovery market. For vendors to have long-term success, they must plan to address the legacy requirements of traditional backup and recovery, while looking to expand their integration with and exploitation of emerging applications, hypervisors, snapshot and replication technologies, and public cloud capabilities. 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 part of most new-purchase proposals and to have high success rates in winning new business. This does not mean, however, that a large market share alone is a primary indicator of a Leader. Leaders are strategic vendors, well positioned for the future having established success in meeting the needs of upper-midsize and large data centers.

Challengers

Challengers can execute today, but they have a more limited vision than Leaders, or they have yet to fully produce or market their vision. They have capable products and can perform well for many enterprises. These vendors have the financial and market resources and the capabilities to potentially become Leaders. Yet, the important question is whether they understand the market trends and market requirements to succeed tomorrow, and whether they can sustain their momentum by executing at a high level over time. A Challenger may have a robust backup portfolio but has not yet been able to fully leverage its opportunities or does not have the same ability as Leaders to influence end-user expectations and/or be considered for substantially more or broader deployments. These vendors may not devote enough development resources to delivering products with broad industry appeal and differentiated features in a timely manner, or effectively market their capabilities and/or fully exploit enough field resources to result in a greater market presence.

Visionaries

Visionaries are forward-thinking, advancing their portfolio capabilities ahead, or well ahead, of the market, but their overall execution has not propelled them into being Challengers or possibly Leaders. (Often, this is due to limited sales and marketing or elongated time to initially install and configure, but sometimes due to scalability or breadth of functionality and/or platform support.) These vendors are predominantly differentiated by product innovation and perceived customer benefits. However, because some are relatively new to the market, they have not yet achieved solution completeness or sustained broad sales, marketing and mind share success, or demonstrated continued successful large-enterprise deployments required to give them the higher visibility of Leaders. Some vendors move out of the Visionaries quadrant and into the Niche Players quadrant because their technology is no longer visionary (the competition caught up to them). In some cases, they have not been able to establish a market presence that justifies moving to the Challengers or Leaders quadrants, or even remaining in the Visionaries quadrant.

Niche Players

It is important to note that Gartner does not recommend eliminating Niche Players from customer evaluations. Niche Players are specifically and consciously focused on a subsegment of the overall market, or they offer relatively broad capabilities without very-large-enterprise scale, or the overall success of competitors in other quadrants. In several cases, Niche Players are very strong in the upper-midsize-enterprise segment, and they also opportunistically sell to large enterprises, but with offerings and overall services that, at present, are not as complete as other vendors focused on the large-enterprise market. Niche Players may focus on specific geographies, vertical markets, or a focused backup deployment or use-case service; or they may simply have modest horizons and/or lower overall capabilities compared with competitors. Other Niche Player vendors are too new to the market or have fallen behind, and, although worth watching, have yet to fully develop complete functionality, or to consistently demonstrate an expansive vision or the Ability to Execute.

Context

I&O leaders tasked with backup operations must redesign the backup infrastructure to include the following aspects of technology, operations and consumption:
  • Invest in backup solutions that address data protection requirements in the data center, public cloud and edge environments. Prefer solutions that offer a single pane of glass to manage these distributed environments.
  • Choose backup solutions that provide a comprehensive solution for ransomware detection and recovery. Thoroughly understand the level of resilience provided on the primary copy of backup and the need to invest in additional copies of backup to ensure backup resilience. Choose products that offer a secure and granular recovery testing experience.
  • Align the backup architecture with your organization’s operational recovery needs. Optimize backup storage usage by using disk-based backup appliances or SAN storage for operational recovery and either tape or object storage for long-term retention.
  • Thoroughly understand the long-term total cost of ownership of moving from perpetual licensing to subscription-based licensing models. For subscriptions, understand the cost implications of annualized payments versus upfront payments and exiting the subscription before the term is complete.
  • Understand the long-term cost implications of various pricing models offered by vendors — VM-based, socket-based, node-based, front-end TB, back-end TB, agent-based. Invest in the right model based on the application and infrastructure roadmap of the organization.
  • Select vendors that support tiering of backup copies to the public cloud to save on-premises storage costs. Choose solutions that support recovery of backup copies in the public cloud to address test/development or disaster recovery use cases.

Market Overview

The data center backup and recovery market underwent significant transformation in the past two years. Backup vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant mainly focused on the following areas:
  • Centralized management: As enterprises move toward a hybrid IT model, and workloads are distributed across the data center, public cloud and the edge, protecting these workloads, irrespective of location, is critical. Leading backup vendors are addressing this by offering a management platform that can be deployed either in the main data center or via a SaaS-based platform.
  • Ransomware resilience, detection and remediation: The recent 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 creation of immutable second copies of backup through write once, read many (WORM)-enabled storage, others such as IBM and Rubrik aim to make the primary backup repository more resilient by supporting immutable snapshots.
    Leading vendors are building capabilities to detect ransomware attacks by tracking large changes to file system, and through other means, 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 copy of backup to recover specific files. Such efforts remain largely a work in progress.
  • Support for public cloud IaaS and PaaS backup: During the evaluation period, leading on-premises backup vendors increased their investment toward building capabilities to protect cloud-native workloads, particularly virtual machines and applications hosted in AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. While some vendors integrated the backup software with the native snapshot capabilities offered by these cloud providers, most vendors continue to reuse their existing backup software “as is” in the cloud to provide agent-based backup of the applications hosted in the cloud.
    Some backup vendors are also supporting backup of DBaaS products such as Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora and Microsoft Azure SQL.
  • Support for SaaS-based applications: In the past two years, I&O leaders have begun to include SaaS applications such as Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite and Salesforce as a part of their backup strategy. Most vendors evaluated in this research have started delivering Office 365 backup via partners or developing these capabilities in-house. Protecting G Suite and Salesforce remains largely a work in progress.
  • Tiering to the public cloud: Most vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant support tiering backup data to the public cloud. This reduces on-premises backup storage costs. The most commonly supported public cloud storage targets are Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Azure Blob storage. Backup data in most cases is self-describing, meaning if the on-premises data and catalog are lost, an instance of the backup software can be reinstalled and data can be restored. Some vendors also integrate with the life cycle policies of cloud providers, for example, data migration from AWS S3 to Glacier or Azure Blob to Azure Archive Blob storage.
  • Recovery in the public cloud: Today, leading backup vendors support restoring backup data to servers in the public cloud. An instance of the backup software can be installed in the public cloud, and backup data can be restored to a compute instance in the public cloud. This provides for quick operational recovery if the on-premises environment is not available. The backup data can also be used for test/development purposes in the public cloud.
  • NoSQL database backup: While traditional enterprises continue to run their core business applications on relational database management system (RDMS) databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL, Mode 2 projects such as big data usually leverage NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra. As these projects begin to scale and deliver tangible value, there is a growing need to protect such environments. Backup vendors such as Commvault, Dell and Veritas have started addressing these backup requirements by building such capabilities natively into the backup platform. Emerging vendors such as Rubrik and Cohesity have made strategic acquisitions in the last year to address this capability gap.
  • Instant recovery of databases and virtual machines: A majority of vendors support instant recovery of virtual machines by mounting the backed-up virtual machine directly on the production host via NFS. Virtual machines can thus become instantly available, while the actual recovery process can be initiated in the background. Similarly, vendors such as Actifio, Cohesity and Rubrik offer instant recovery of databases such as Microsoft SQL and Oracle.
  • Subscription licensing: In 2019, several vendors began to prioritize subscription-based licensing over a perpetual licensing model. Enterprises that are migrating to the public cloud find the subscription-based model is a simpler way to procure backup solutions. While subscription-based licensing is not necessarily less expensive compared to perpetual licensing, it is more predictable and simpler to manage.

Evidence

Gartner Peer Insights
Client inquiries

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute

Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

source: https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-1ZHGKFPJ&ct=200716&st=sb&linkId=94820537
at