1 Management Summary

The KuppingerCole Market Compass provides an overview of a market segment and the vendors in that segment. It covers the trends that are influencing that market segment, how it is further divided, and the essential capabilities required of solutions. It also provides ratings of how well these solutions meet our expectations.

This Market Compass covers solutions that...

provide backup, restore, and disaster recovery of all data held in IT services into the cloud in the context of the hybrid IT service delivery environment that is now commonly found in medium to large organizations. It provides an assessment of the capabilities of these solutions to meet the backup and disaster recovery needs of organizations with a complex hybrid IT delivery environment.

There is a mature market with many existing backup and disaster recovery solutions that support the protection of data in IT services delivered on premises by backing up data to physical media. However, the way in which IT services are delivered is changing as organizations move to a hybrid delivery model. This is leading to emerging markets for solutions that protect data in SaaS (Software as a Service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a Service) as well as for solutions that use cloud services to secure the backed-up data. There is also an emerging market to offer enterprise backup and DR as software as a service.

The changes in working patterns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have also led to increased risks as people work from home. These risks include increased susceptibility to ransomware through the use of unmanaged end user equipment as well as a lack of data protection for these devices.

Most of the existing vendors are adapting their solutions to this new model, but most still have some way to go, especially around SaaS platforms. In addition, new vendors, including the cloud service providers themselves, are offering solutions covering their cloud as well as for storing data from on premises and other clouds. For SaaS, most vendors now offer solutions for customers to back-up the data held, especially for Microsoft 365. A few also offer solutions that cover Google Workplace and Salesforce, however, there is a lack of comprehensive coverage for other data in other SaaS platforms.

The essential capabilities that customers should look for in solutions must be aligned with their business requirements for service continuity. This includes considering how business critical the various systems and data are, and hence, the protection that is needed (recovery objectives). In general, where an organization is already using an existing solution for on-premises protection, this will be preferred over adding other solutions, providing it meets their evolving business needs. Adding new solutions increases not only costs but also adds to the complexity of use and maintenance. However, in our research we see that some existing solutions on the market do not yet provide comprehensive coverage for the hybrid IT model. Where an existing solution does not meet the business requirements, the organization should consider the new to market solutions, if only as a stop gap.

Highlights:

• This report covers solutions that provide backup, restore, and disaster recovery of IT service data into the cloud in the context of the hybrid IT service delivery environment.
• Ensuring the continuity of IT services is an essential part of the security triad of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
• The increasing business dependence on IT services through digital transformation, together with prevalence of ransomware, make backup and disaster recovery an essential for organizations.
• There is a mature market with many existing backup and disaster recovery solutions that support the protection of data in IT services delivered on premises by backing up data to physical media.
• This model is now changing as organizations are now using a mixture of on premises and cloud delivered services. In addition, the cloud services are useful to provide longer term storage for backed-up data and disaster recovery capabilities.
• There are also benefits from delivering backup and disaster recovery as a cloud service (e.g., DRaaS). This avoids the need to buy and maintain backup devices and infrastructure at a secondary site.
• There are several scenarios that solutions must cover. These are: on premises workloads, IaaS workloads, SaaS data, as well as disaster recovery.
• In our view, the market for protection of SaaS and IaaS will increase significantly. In addition, organizations will adopt backup and disaster recovery as a cloud service.
• In this report vendor's products are evaluated against the following capabilities: basic capabilities for backup and restore, extended capabilities, data security, compliance support, disaster recovery, SaaS support, IaaS support and on premises support. Our evaluation of these capabilities is displayed for each vendor on a spider chart.
• In addition, each vendor is evaluated against our standard criteria of Security, Deployment, Interoperability, Usability and Market standing.
• The report also identifies the vendors that in our evaluation provide noteworthy capabilities in certain areas.