Gartner Unveiled its Magic Quadrant 2026 for Backup and Data Protection Platforms

As part of its annual tradition, Gartner has recently published its 2026 Magic Quadrant for Backup and Data Protection Platforms. Despite new market pressures, increasingly demanding workloads, and the omnipresence of AI, this year’s edition looks remarkably similar to the 2025 report. We know and understand this exercise is getting even more complicated with AI integrated to these solutions and new workloads to protect.

Only a handful of vendors changed position in a meaningful way, most notably Cohesity, Druva, and Unitrends, while the majority remained almost unchanged, raising the question of what really drove Gartner’s latest assessment.

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The leaders remain clustered within a relatively small area, but several movements deserve attention:

• Cohesity shifted noticeably to the left, almost horizontally, despite benefiting from the NetBackup acquisition, a strong technology portfolio, and a well-established enterprise presence. This move is surprising and is not clearly explained in the report
• Commvault moved slightly downward, even though the strategic transformation initiated under CEO Sanjay Mirchandani has delivered positive business and market results over the past few years
• Druva advanced both upward and to the right, reflecting its growing market presence and strong momentum over the last 12 months
• Rubrik moved slightly downward while continuing to shift to the right. Given its pace of innovation, strong execution, and broad market adoption, this positioning may appear somewhat conservative
• Veeam recorded one of the most significant rightward moves within the leaders quadrant, reinforcing its position as the dominant player in the departmental and midmarket backup segment

The rest of the market, hum…, the rest of the displayed list. Outside the leaders quadrant, several other changes are worth noting:

• HYCU moved backward, as did IBM, although for very different reasons
• Dell Technologies shifted slightly downward
• Huawei moved to the right, edging closer to the leaders sub-quadrant, gaining visibility on the market
• Arcserve now occupies the position previously held by Unitrends
• Unitrends has disappeared from this MQ
• OpenText remains virtually unchanged from last year, did Gartner really study them?

Today, we published the respective press releases highlighting the rankings of Commvault, Druva, HYCU, Rubrik, and Veeam in this report.