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CF20: 2024's Top Backup/Disaster Recovery Providers
The data protection market has experienced convergence in recent years.
20 Slides
JÖRGE RÖSE-OBERREICH/SHUTTERSTOCK
Frost & Sullivan’s Karyn Price said Veeam is among noteworthy backup and disaster recovery providers. In June, Veeam and Lenovo unveiled Lenovo TruScale Backup with Veeam, a cloud-like on-premises experience that helps secure workloads regardless of their location and enables customers to scale infrastructure up or down as needed.
In April, Dell Technologies unveiled an expanded data protection portfolio of appliances, software and as-a-service offerings. With advances across the Dell Technologies portfolio, the company is helping customers build a foundation to protect data on-premises, in public clouds and at the edge. These innovations help address concerns raised in the 2024 Dell Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) survey.
Acronis is among leading backup and disaster recovery providers, Price said.
Omdia's Rik Turner said, overall, the ability for providers to offer incremental backups is more cost efficient, "but I’d say the most pressing question these days is how to keep the backup away from any ransomware attack that hits the production systems."
“If you can’t do that, the backup is about as useful as a chocolate fireguard," he said.
Cohesity is among top backup and disaster recovery providers, Price said. The combined Cohesity-Veritas will continue to invest in all of Cohesity's products and services, as well as Veritas' NetBackup and appliances, and its Alta data protection products and services. The two companies say they will work toward an integrated solution that combines the best technology from both.
Price said Rubrik is a noteworthy provider. The combination of Rubrik and Laminar created a complete cyber resilience offering, bringing together cyber recovery and cyber posture across enterprise, cloud and SaaS.
“The most effective disaster recovery solutions have a variety of features, some are table stakes and some are advanced features,” she said. “The best solutions offer not only automated replication of data, but also a target recovery environment. Automation and AI are now a major focus for the savviest providers. Embedding automated data protection workflows requires less human intervention – and thereby less risk of error – as well as improves the detection of suspicious activity that could compromise data. Ransomware detection and mitigation is another key aspect that providers are adding via automation and AI. Finally, more secure storage options are being offered by many providers, with immutable, air-gapped storage being the current 'gold standard' for the industry.”
IBM Storage solutions for backup and recovery unifies workload protection, delivers cybersecurity capabilities to help protect critical data against ransomware and other data security threats, helps prevent data loss, delivers capabilities to manage backup copies, and enables management of infrastructure.
Commvault is among leaders in backup and disaster recovery, Price said. In April, Commvault announced it was adding data protection capabilities through the purchase of cloud cyber resilience company Appranix.
“We are taking resilience to the next level by marrying Commvault’s extensive risk, readiness and recovery capabilities with Appranix’s next-generation, cloud-native rebuild capabilities,” Commvault president and CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said at the time.
In April, Kaseya launched Kaseya 365, a subscription service that provides MSPs with access to manage, secure, backup and automate all their clients’ environments. It includes all the functionality of remote monitoring and management (RMM), antivirus protection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), managed detection and response (MDR), patch management, ransomware rollback and endpoint backup. It also includes 20 core automations to enhance workflow efficiency and reduce errors.
For a hybrid cloud storage solution with inherent disaster recovery features, Nasuni is currently a market leader to consider, Price said. This month, Nasuni announced a strategic growth investment led by Vista Equity Partners, a global investment firm focused exclusively on enterprise software, data, and technology-enabled businesses. The investment values Nasuni at about $1.2 billion.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Backup is a fully managed backup service centralizing and automating the backup of data across AWS services. AWS Backup provides an orchestration layer that integrates Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Organizations and other services.
Microsoft’s Azure Backup helps protect critical business systems and backup data against a ransomware attack by implementing preventive measures and providing tools that protect an organization from every step that attackers take to infiltrate their systems.
Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company, in May announced the integration of its Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault with HPE Alletra Storage MP, HPE’s next-gen storage solution for running critical workloads with AI-powered performance. The updated Cyber Resilience Vault enables rapid air-gapped recovery after cyberattacks. Now with HPE Alletra Storage MP, the Cyber Resilience Vault includes improved immutability features so that data copies are unavailable to threat actors.
In June, N-able announced its Cove Data Protection has expanded its disaster recovery flexibility by introducing Standby Image to VMware ESXi. The Standby Image recovery feature also includes support for Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure, providing MSPs and IT professionals with improved disaster DRaaS for their end users.
Arcserve offers a portfolio of backup solutions, including Arcserve UDP, Arcserve Backup, Arcserve UDP Appliances, Arcserve Cloud Direct, Arcserve UDP Cloud Hybrid Secured by Sophos, Arcserve OneXafe storage appliances and Arcserve SaaS Backup. Its operations are spread across different regions and primarily serve midmarket clients.
11:11 Systems, which acquired iland and Sungard AS’s recovery business, in June unveiled 11:11 Cloud Object Storage for AWS. By default, it redundantly stores a customer’s mission-critical data across a minimum of three data centers. Customers can also reserve capacity to secure storage discounts through a long-term contract.
In March, NetApp announced general availability of BlueXP disaster recovery, which provides intelligent configuration and management of disaster recovery for VMware environments. In addition, SnapCenter 5.0 extends advanced tamper-proof backup capability to include application-consistent backups and adds the protection of enterprise databases running in the cloud.
Asigra, which sells backup software to MSPs, in June launched a new data protection platform for storage-as-a-service (SaaS) applications called SaaSAssure. Asigra SaaSAssure goes beyond data protection for popular SaaS apps Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Salesforce. It also protects line-of-business applications. It runs in the AWS cloud. MSPs and their customers can choose their backup storage, including Asigra Cloud Storage.
In March, VMware announced the general availability of VMware Live Recovery, a new solution designed for cyber and data resilience in VMware Cloud Foundation environments. This release marks the first integration of high-grade disaster recovery with specialized cyber recovery and a consistent management platform across various clouds.
Nakivo is among the first backup solution vendors to support data protection for Proxmox virtual environments. This integration not only provides a way to back up and restore data, applications and operating systems of Proxmox VMs, but also displays the vendor’s commitment to platform-agnostic data protection.
Druva recently announced new capabilities to help its customers accelerate the investigation and remediation of cyber threats. It scans multiple backups to create a curated snapshot and identify the most recent, clean version of each file, minimizing data loss, ensuring secure recovery and accelerating the recovery process.
Druva recently announced new capabilities to help its customers accelerate the investigation and remediation of cyber threats. It scans multiple backups to create a curated snapshot and identify the most recent, clean version of each file, minimizing data loss, ensuring secure recovery and accelerating the recovery process.
Backup and disaster recovery, which includes various types of providers, continues to be in high demand with the onslaught of ransomware and other threats.
M&A continues to shake up the competitive landscape, such as Cohesity acquiring Veritas’ data protection business in a deal that values the combined company at $7 billion. In addition, a number of acquisitions include vendors buying security-focused startups.
This is our first annual “CF20” focused on top backup and disaster recovery providers; the second if you count our previous CP List. Analysts share their views on what it takes for backup and disaster recovery providers to succeed with the technology. It includes an updated list and fresh views on changes in the competitive landscape.
Malicious Threat Actors Driving Need for Backup, Disaster Recovery
Karyn Price, industry principal at Frost and Sullivan, said all data and application protection services – whether backup, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) or secure file storage with integrated recovery capabilities – continue to be in high demand as businesses are increasingly threatened by malicious actors attempting to access corporate data for nefarious purposes.
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Frost and Sullivan's Karyn Price
“Such attacks can severely impact businesses and result in damage to corporate reputation, loss of customers and revenue, and even the closure of the business,” she said. “In addition to escalating cyber threats, the explosion of data due to AI, coupled with data privacy and handling regulations, are driving adoption of these services.”
The data protection market has experienced convergence in recent years as threats escalate and businesses find data use more important, Price said. Providers that previously only handled backup and recovery are often now also providing at least some security capabilities, especially around ransomware detection and mitigation. Many are also providing heightened security of storage files by offering technologies like blockchain, immutable or air-gapped storage.
“Many major players, like Veeam, Commvault and Acronis, have significantly improved their security features in recent years, some through acquisitions and some through organic growth," she said.
Adjacent Vendors Adding Backup, Disaster Recovery
Additionally, vendors that were previously in adjacent markets – like data security or storage – are adding backup and recovery functionality to their portfolio, whether through partnerships, acquisitions or organic product development, Price said.
“Nasuni is an excellent example,” she said. “The hybrid cloud storage provider offers a full-featured disaster recovery service as a function of its storage platform. The addition of adjacent market players into the data protection space is leading to a more segmented and congested market.”
Brent Ellis, senior analyst with Forrester, said for the backup market, there has been a lot more focus on how to address ransomware and cyber threats over the last few years. In addition, there’s the inclusion of SaaS workloads, container-based workloads and cloud infrastructure as a service-type workloads.
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“But really what's driving adoption is ransomware and cyber threats,” he said. “If you look at all of the vendors in that market space, they've pivoted a lot of their marketing, a lot of their advertising towards recovery from ransomware, and then some of the vendors have even started to look at how you identify indicators of compromise before your data is actually affected. So there's a lot of fuzzy lines that are being crossed into the security space. Some of the vendors hit that stride early. Rubrik rebranded themselves more as a data security company, but all of the vendors are doing some sort of pivot in that direction."
Seven Components of Data Resilience
Forrester identifies the top seven components of data resilience as:
Automation and orchestration
Ransomware defense
Comprehensive backup and restore functionality
SaaS application data protection
Centralized management and reporting
Business alignment
Much of the M&A has focused on bolstering and addressing some of the changes within the market, and not necessarily the acquisition of direct competitors, Ellis said.
“Cohesity buying Veritas is sort of an anomaly,” he said. “But it makes sense for those two vendors because they tend to address different needs within the enterprise and putting them together portfolio-wise would probably work out.”
Protecting Backup from Encryption
Rik Turner, senior principal analyst with Omdia, said backup and disaster recovery providers have discovered a new driver for their technology in the form of ransomware. (Canalys and Omdia are both owned by Informa, Channel Futures' parent company.)
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Omdia's Rik Turner
“Clearly, the ability to restore from backup is critical if your production systems have all been encrypted by a ransomware attack,” he said. “Clearly, that also entails the backup guys knowing how to protect that backup from encryption, which we know the attackers seek to extend to the backup to neutralize that safety net, and some of the backup vendors are clearly addressing that requirement.”
In terms of M&A, Rubrik’s acquisition of data security posture management (DSPM) vendor Laminar was an important development, as was IBM’s acquisition of Polar that preceded it, Turner said.
“DSPM is definitely a logical addition to any backup offering, and those vendors that haven’t added it yet should be thinking about how to do so,” he said.
We’ve compiled a list above of 20 top backup and disaster recovery providers based on analysts’ feedback and recent news reports. It’s in no particular order. The list in the slideshow, is by no means complete. It includes well-known providers as well as lesser-known providers making strides in backup and disaster recovery.
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