2022 Gartner Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions Magic Quadrant Review

Gartner's perspective on the enterprise backup and recovery market, and their evaluation of vendors, gives customers a broad understanding of vendor capabilities — where they are strong and where they may be lacking. 

Gartner's research is thorough, and their reports are often used by enterprises to make decisions about their existing and future IT strategies. However, we believe the gaps — both solutions/ features and architectural considerations — limit the report's potential usefulness to organizations looking for help to make the best decisions for their environments.

What's missing from the evaluation?

As detailed and extensive the report is, it is worth noting that the evaluation is based on offerings available on or before March 31, 2022. In the enterprise backup and recovery software solutions market, a four-month lag from analysis to report leaves potential gaps in the "Completeness of Vision" category.

Let's examine the most recent features and products that didn't make it into the 2022 Magic Quadrant evaluation:

Cohesity:

• FortKnox is a software as a service (SaaS) data isolation and recovery solution that extends Cohesity's data management as a service (DMaaS) portfolio.
• Cohesity Pegasus 6.8 focuses on support for FortKnox, additional cyber resiliency features, expanded database support and streamlined SmartFiles management.

Commvault:

• Commvault's Metallic SaaS solution adds enterprise data protection for Oracle Cloud workloads.
• Commvault Platform Release 2022E highlights include extended Kubernetes protection capabilities, expanded hypervisor file indexing, cross-hypervisor restores, public cloud integration and disaster recovery capabilities.
• On March 15, Commvault announced that new major releases will be available every six months vs. every three months as they move to a Long-Term Support (LTS) format for their offerings, bringing them into alignment with common industry practice.

Dell Technologies:

• PowerProtect Data Manager 19.11 release offers extended coverage for applications, Kubernetes and functional improvements to its platform capabilities.
• Additionally, Networker and Avamar 19.7 releases brought user interface updates, application integrations and enhanced compatibility across enterprise ecosystems.
• Although not included in Gartner's Research, it should be noted the PowerProtect Data Domain OS has also improved on the initial Smart Scale functionality which enables multiple appliances to run under a unified namespace.

Rubrik:

• Rubrik Security Cloud was made generally available on August 15. This is where Rubrik is embracing resilience, observability and recovery functions of their offering.
• Rubrik CDM version 8.0, released in July, introduces operational efficiencies for customer management of restores, backups and upgrades. This release also provides abundant bug fixes for the platform.

Veeam:

• Newly released updates to their backup solution for GCP, AWS and Azure improve Veeam's capabilities and user experience when operating within these cloud solutions.
• M365 Backup Version 6a incorporates considerable performance improvements, integrates MS Teams chat backup capability and GDPR support.

Veritas:

• NetBackup 10.0 released on March 28 was the most recent major release and was included in Gartner's research. Subsequently, 10.0.0.1 was released June 27 with fixes and minor updates.
• Backup Exec 22 was released on June 6, expanding coverage for M365 Exchange and OneDrive data. Cloud storage and performance improvements were also incorporated into this release.

Additional considerations

Apart from an understanding of the latest features and capabilities, there are additional architectural considerations customers should keep in mind when evaluating solutions. 

1. Scalability from an infrastructure perspective and an operations undertaking is crucial for customers to understand. This aspect applies across a solution holistically but also varies for specific mission-critical workloads, both on-prem and in-cloud. It is important to recognize how the vendors are centralizing management while providing self-service, as workload mobility is often a strategic goal for customers.
    
2. The most prominent scenario that we are finding the industry solving for is cyber recovery. There are differences in the anomaly detection capabilities of vendors and the levels of isolation that they can provide, which is why we focus on alignment with our clients' security and recovery posture. This alignment informs our vendor evaluations, and we work to offer solutions for the outcomes customers need.
    
3. Accomplishing business goals may require a multi-vendor solution. Software-only solutions rely on a storage vendor on the backend to complete a solution. This separation of storage and software assumes a critical role in determining supportability and scalability for customers. Data reduction and resiliency services are key differentiators in this space, and these data services are not equal amongst the leaders in the quadrant.

How we work with clients

One of the most challenging technical hurdles to overcome is ensuring your data protection and cyber recovery solution is achieving the outcomes the business expects. 

At WWT, our team of industry experts accelerate customer success by addressing challenges in a unique and powerful way. We can help customers identify the outcome that best serves their business requirements and produce a short list of vendors who will best align with that strategy. 

We also recognize common trends in our OEM partners go-to-market strategy, which have been focused on security (particularly ransomware), user experience, multi-cloud capabilities, enhanced recovery and next-generation workload coverage. 

And by leveraging our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), customers can test and validate innovative solutions and confidently make decisions about their investments.