Critical Capabilities for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions

This is an abstract of a report, Critical Capabilities for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions, published 20 July 2020 and written by Nik Simpson, Santhosh Rao, Jerry Rozeman and Michael Hoeck, analysts at Gartner Inc.

Critical data needs protection whether it is in the data center, the cloud, SaaS applications or at the edge, forcing I&O leaders to reevaluate their backup strategy and vendor selection. This research assesses 9 backup and recovery vendors based on 9 critical capabilities in 2 use cases.

Key Findings
• Comprehensive protection from ransomware is a key driver for many clients considering replacing existing backup and recovery platforms.
• Disk-to-disk-to-cloud is the backup architecture of choice as enterprises adopt public cloud for long-term retention or for storing a second copy of backup data.
• Basic backup functionality offered by cloud vendors is being supplanted by enterprise backup solutions to improve data protection and make cloud data protection consistent with on-premises capabilities.
• Backup of data stored in SaaS applications isn’t available except for the most common SaaS platforms, such as Office 365.

Recommendations
I&O leaders tasked with modernizing data center infrastructure for backup and recovery should:
• Upgrade or replace existing backup architectures to support applications in the cloud and edge locations, as well as new workloads in the data center and SaaS applications.
• Choose backup software that supports tiering and replication of backup data to public cloud providers, including low-cost archival storage such as Amazon Glacier.
• Select backup software that provides consistent data protection regardless of whether the application is deployed in the data center, public cloud or SaaS vendor infrastructure.
• Choose third-party backup software where necessary to supplement enterprise backup software and protect SaaS applications, such as Office 365 and Salesforce.
• Make ransomware protection and support for regulatory compliance a key part of any backup platform selection and evaluation process by emphasizing these capabilities in their procurement criteria.

Strategic Planning Assumption
By 2022, 40% of organizations will completely replace or supplement their backup applications, compared with what they had deployed in 2018.

What You Need to Know
Protecting and recovering business applications regardless of the underlying infrastructure type and location is critical. This requirement becomes more challenging every year by the creation of new application and data types and the addition of new application deployment models such as SaaS. To help clients understand the suitability of different backup platforms, this research evaluates vendors based on 3 use cases – physical, virtual and public cloud environments. The ability of vendors to address these use cases is measured by evaluating each use case vs. 9 critical capabilities – application support, platform support, performance and efficiency, security and compliance, user experience, manageability, reporting and analytics, ecosystem integration, and scalability.

Critical Capabilities Use-Case Graphics

Vendors’ Product Scores for the Physical Server Environments Use Case

Vendors’ Product Scores for the Virtual Environments Use Case

Vendors’ Product Scores for the Public Cloud Environments Use Case

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Gartner Magic Quadrant Data Center Backup and Recover Solutions
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