Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery

The KuppingerCole Market Compass reviews the market for cloud backup, restore, and disaster recovery solutions in hybrid IT environments common in medium to large organizations. It emphasizes that effective continuity requires backing up not only data but also metadata (structure, permissions) to enable accurate restoration and meet defined recovery objectives such as Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). While traditional on-premises backup to physical media is mature, hybrid and multi-cloud delivery models are creating fast-growing segments for protecting data in IaaS and especially SaaS, as well as using cloud storage as a resilient, geographically distributed repository for backups.

A key risk is the assumption that cloud services inherently provide sufficient continuity. The customer must verify whether the service-level agreement (SLA) satisfies their recovery needs, particularly for SaaS where gaps can include slow recovery or inadequate protection from customer errors like accidental deletion. The report argues for minimizing the number of tools: extending existing on-premises solutions is often preferable, but many incumbent products still lack comprehensive hybrid coverage—most notably broad SaaS protection—driving adoption of newer offerings and cloud-provider-native approaches.

The Compass defines essential capabilities across scenarios: cloud support and choice of region, performance, data location control, restorability with metadata, secure transfer, encryption with customer-controlled keys, administrative controls with role-based access and MFA, and audit logging; it also highlights deduplication, compliance alignment, replication, automated discovery, and backup media emulation. Vendor evaluations show generally strong security and on-premises support, with differentiation largely in SaaS breadth, multi-cloud flexibility, and DR maturity. Featured examples include Acronis’s blockchain-based backup notarization, AWS CloudEndure’s continuous replication to AWS, Unitrends’ strong Office 365 protection via Spanning, and comprehensive platforms like Commvault and Veritas NetBackup.

• The report focuses on backup, restoration, and disaster recovery of IT service data into the cloud for hybrid IT environments in medium to large organizations.
• Restoring an exact copy requires backing up data together with metadata such as structure and permissions.
• Traditional on-premises backup commonly relies on tape and disk stored in separate locations to mitigate fire and theft risks.
• Customers must verify whether a cloud service SLA meets their RTO requirements; this is especially important for SaaS.
• Market segments addressed include on-premises protection, IaaS protection, SaaS protection, and disaster recovery capabilities of solutions.
• AWS acquired CloudEndure in January 2019.
• Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Site Recovery in June 2018.
• Unitrends was acquired by Kaseya in 2018.
• Veeam Software was acquired in February 2020 by Insight Partners.
• Veritas has annual revenue of over $2 billion.

• “Ensuring the continuity of IT services is an essential part of the security triad of confidentiality, integrity and availability.”
• “There is a temptation to believe that the use of a cloud service removes the need for the customer to take data backups.”
• “This is only true where the SLA (Service Level Agreement) meets the customer’s RTO requirements, and this is not always the case.”
• “Adding new solutions increases not only costs but also adds to the complexity of use and maintenance.”
• “One major area where current products are lacking is protecting data held in SaaS.”
• “The rationale behind this is that while the SaaS vendor protects against loss of data because of infrastructure failures they do not cover loss due to mistakes such as accidental deletion by the customer.”
• “CloudEndure works at the raw device level, copying blocks from the disk as they are written.”
• “During failover, cutover, or testing, an up-to-date copy of applications can be spun up on demand and rapidly be fully functional.”
• “Compass reduces up to 90% of daily operational tasks associated with backup.”
• “With NetBackup CloudCatalyst, backup data is deduplicated before being transferred and stored within the cloud.”