Magic Quadrant for Backup and Data Protection Platforms

Market Overview

• Prioritizes the centralized management and orchestration of data protection platforms.
• Increased scope of requirements delivered via backup as a service (BaaS).
• GenAI assistance and agentic backup operations.
• Expands platform use cases to assist data protection, compliance, copy data management, and testing and development requirements.
• Expands backup data insights and access capabilities such as data categorization and classification, sensitive data scanning, search, investigations, business intelligence, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and other API retrieval methods.

• Constant expansion of hybrid, multicloud and SaaS environments that must be protected.
• Emphasizes the requirement for cyber recovery readiness and robust anomaly detection capabilities.
• Emerging capabilities to perform and expedite malware scanning of backup data and alerts to indicators of compromise (IOCs).
• Application-focused discovery, backup, recovery and disaster recovery.
• Expanded common features, such as zero-trust principles and expanded recovery orchestration.

• Ransomware detection and recovery: Most vendors have built capabilities to detect ransomware attacks by monitoring anomalies of protected data. They aim to simplify the ransomware recovery process by expediting identification of the best and cleanest recovery point, creating curated recovery points that combine multiple recovery points, and creating an isolated test-and-recovery environment.
• Malware detection: Vendors are adding malware detection in backup copies by partnering with security vendors or developing these capabilities in-house. They are differentiating in their ability to identify known ransomware variants and zero-day attacks. Recent innovations include malware detection using YARA rule scanning and integrated security vendor feeds, and advanced threat hunting using hash-based tracking to flag IOCs.
• Vendor-hosted storage: Multiple vendors now have vendor-hosted cloud storage offerings. These are often referred to as immutable data vaults (IDVs) or cloud vaults.
• Isolated recovery environments and clean rooms: Leading vendors are expanding packaged IREs and clean rooms offerings to provide improved orchestration services to facilitate routine testing, cleaning and validation, and performing recovery.
• Data discovery: Vendors are integrating data discovery capabilities, including the correlation of data and user identities, to automate identification of critical data and its assignment to protection policies, drive cost optimizations, and improve cyber and disaster readiness.

• SaaS-based control planes: Vendors are offering centralized management platforms that are increasingly backup-vendor-hosted, replacing customer-managed deployments in their own public cloud or data center infrastructure.
• BaaS offerings: Leading backup vendors are expanding BaaS capabilities to include on-premises, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS environments. Gartner clients are investing in BaaS offerings to complement on-premises backup deployments, which simplifies the protection of environments, including selected on-premises workloads, as well as edge and public cloud.
• Multicloud storage options: Vendors are expanding their hosted data plane architecture, allowing customers to choose from multiple cloud service provider target options.
• Sovereign data and operations offerings: Vendors are introducing deployment options and expanding backup storage capabilities to address the demands of sovereign-based regulatory requirements.

• Use of AI/ML: Vendors have introduced AI/ML-based algorithms into ransomware anomaly detection capabilities and to enhance customer support practices.
• Expanding GenAI capabilities: Leading vendors in this market have rapidly introduced GenAI-based capabilities. The primary focus of these solutions is to assist with backup administrative tasks and troubleshooting. Implementations include the use of chatbots, natural-language conversational chats and AI-based responses. In addition, recent innovations include AI agent access via vendor-developed Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
• Accelerating use of agentic AI: Vendors are accelerating the addition of agentic AI capabilities to automate more backup tasks. Leading vendors have introduced governed and autonomous features such as recovery planning, identification of unprotected data, step-by-step recovery guidance, failure diagnosis, and forensic investigations.
• Protection of AI infrastructure: Vendors are introducing specific AI workload protection extending beyond protection of persistent layers such as object storage, NoSQL and relational databases. AI data includes categories such as vector databases, feature stores, streaming systems and caching layers.

• Cloud-native data protection: Vendors in this market are expanding their coverage of additional cloud services to increase their clients’ abilities to protect cloud-native data. The scope of requirements requires vendors to keep pace with the expanding scope of IaaS and PaaS infrastructures, and multiple cloud data locations.
• Multicloud protection: As organizations deploy applications and workloads to multiple cloud environments, the requirement of solutions to integrate with and protect multicloud environments is now more critical.
• Cloud application and infrastructure recovery: Leading vendors are adding application infrastructure and cloud services discovery, and integration with their own, third-party or public cloud services, to back up and protect the application, test and perform failover, and recover the entire application and data environment. This includes extending protection capabilities to identify gaps in infrastructure as code (IaC) and protect application development platform offerings such as GitHub and Microsoft Azure DevOps to orchestrate infrastructure recovery.

• SaaS application protection: Most vendors evaluated in this research support Microsoft 365 and Salesforce backup via partners or have developed these capabilities in-house. Vendors are innovating to protect other SaaS applications and accelerate the integration with new applications. Additional SaaS application protection is available in the market for applications such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Apps, Atlassian Jira and ServiceNow.
• Identity access management (IAM) backup and recovery: Most vendors have introduced backup and recovery capabilities for critical identity access management data. They simplify protection and granular recovery of IAM offerings such as Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID and Okta. This includes orchestrated forest-level recovery of Microsoft Active Directory, following Microsoft best practices. Additional use cases extend to IAM monitoring and change log management to detect, identify and roll back changes caused by administrators as well as malicious actors.