Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery

The KuppingerCole Market Compass analyzes the evolving market for cloud backup, restore, and disaster recovery (DR) in hybrid IT environments typical of medium to large organizations. Traditional backup and DR tools were built primarily for on-premises services, often relying on physical media such as tape and disk with offsite storage. As organizations shift toward hybrid and multi-cloud delivery—mixing on-premises, IaaS, and SaaS—new requirements emerge: protecting SaaS and IaaS tenant data, using cloud platforms for resilient offsite storage, and consuming backup/DR as cloud services (BaaS/DRaaS). The COVID-19-driven expansion of remote work increased exposure to ransomware and highlighted gaps in endpoint and unmanaged device protection.

A central theme is aligning solution capabilities with business continuity requirements, especially RPO/RTO objectives for different systems. While organizations often prefer extending existing on-premises solutions to hybrid needs, many incumbent tools still lack comprehensive SaaS coverage beyond Microsoft 365, with limited support for platforms such as Google Workspace and Salesforce and little breadth across other SaaS applications. Adding point solutions increases cost and operational complexity, so a common control plane spanning multiple use cases is emphasized.

The report defines essential capabilities across basic backup/restore, extended features (continuous replication, near-zero RTO, migration, testing), data security (encryption, MFA, RBAC, ransomware defenses), compliance (jurisdiction controls, key management, auditing, certifications), DR orchestration (runbooks, workflows, DRaaS tiers), and coverage for SaaS, IaaS, and on-premises workloads. Vendors are comparatively rated on security, deployment, interoperability, usability, and market standing, with highlighted strengths such as blockchain-based backup notarization, raw-device replication with machine conversion, DMaaS portfolios, broad workload/platform support, and DRaaS offerings with guaranteed spin-up SLAs.

• The Market Compass evaluates solutions that back up, restore, and provide disaster recovery of IT service data into the cloud for hybrid IT environments.
• The primary use cases are on-premises protection, IaaS protection, SaaS protection, and disaster recovery after incidents such as ransomware, failures, or natural disasters.
• Vendors are rated across security, deployment, interoperability, usability, and market standing.
• Vendor capabilities are assessed across eight areas: basic, extended, data security, compliance, disaster recovery, SaaS support, IaaS support, and on-premises support.
• Acronis Notary uses blockchain-based timestamping and fingerprinting by sending file hash codes to an Ethereum blockchain-based database.
• Arcserve UDP can use AWS S3 Object Lock to help provide backup immutability.
• AWS CloudEndure performs replication at the raw device level and includes proprietary machine conversion to run replicated machines natively in AWS.
• Unitrends Premium DRaaS includes a guaranteed 1-hour spin-up SLA option for critical applications.
• Dell APEX Backup Services is delivered 100% as a service with no customer-managed infrastructure and includes client-side deduplication and end-to-end encryption.
• Veritas NetBackup 9.1 supports over 800 workloads, 1,400 storage targets, and 60+ cloud providers.

• “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 RPO/RTO requirements, and this is not always the case.”
• “This hybrid IT delivery model increases the management burden where multiple data protection solutions are required.”
• “Adding new solutions increases not only costs but also adds to the complexity of use and maintenance.”
• “There are several scenarios that solutions must cover.”
• “In our view the market for protection of SaaS and IaaS will increase significantly.”
• “Figure 2 illustrates our view of how the market will evolve from traditional solutions… towards cloud-based solutions…”
• “CloudEndure works at the raw device level, copying blocks from the disk as they are written.”
• “NetBackup Resiliency Platform is designed to help organization move from disaster recovery (DR) to automated business resilience.”