2025 Gartner Enterprise Backup Magic Quadrant Review
In this blog
Navigating the evolving landscape of enterprise backup and recovery: A 2024 vs. 2025 vendor comparison
Like the rest of the IT industry, the enterprise backup and recovery market continues to rapidly evolve, with significant changes between 2024 and 2025. As organizations contend with the rise of AI and growing security challenges, the need for robust and agile data protection strategies is more critical than ever, again. The latest Gartner Magic Quadrant reports offer a snapshot of how top vendors are stepping up to these challenges, showcasing innovation, enhanced capabilities, and a keen focus on meeting the demands of modern IT landscapes. Let's examine what's changed and how key players are leading the charge.
Evolving market themes
Cyber-resilient AI-driven automation becomes "table stakes"
In 2024, we saw the emphasis on cyber resilience intensified. AI-driven automation was at the forefront, with Generative AI (GenAI) being integrated, not just to automate tasks, but to significantly enhance cybersecurity. The industry was moving beyond just reacting to threats—it was building fortified, cyber-resilient infrastructures designed to withstand and recover from sophisticated attacks, with the goal of ensuring organizations can maintain business continuity in the face of these modern challenges. In 2025, these trends are continuing, and we're seeing the acceleration of using backup data as a source of AI-generated insight to drive additional business value.
Gartner's strategic planning assumptions and mandatory features in this year's report illustrate the growing importance of these critical features. Vendors with a common solution for on-premise and cloud data protection, with embedded threat hunting and security features, will do well in 2025, while vendors who are more focused on traditional backup and recovery aspects will fare worse.
This emphasis on Cyber Resiliency and AI integration aligns well with WWT's Data Center Priorities for 2025.
Vendor Specific Developments
Cohesity: Combining with the Veritas Lineup
In late 2024, Cohesity closed its transaction to add Veritas (best known for NetBackup) to its enterprise data protection lineup. While this may cause some short-term disruption, the combination of these two companies positions Cohesity to be a comprehensive enterprise data protection powerhouse.
We see Cohesity continuing to innovate and lead with investment in NetBackup 11 security features (threat hunting, post-quantum encryption) and enhanced recovery orchestration. The Cohesity DataProtect platform made significant strides in its M365 support (Entra ID, M365 storage) and added a self-managed option for its Helios control plane, bringing SaaS capabilities to large enterprises.
Commvault: Growing in security and the cloud
In 2025 Gartner noted Commvault's comprehensive cloud workload coverage, integration of its Appranix acquisition as Cloud Rewind and AD Orchestrated Recovery as strengths. We feel Commvault merits its leading role in the MQ, with ongoing expansion of its security and cloud portfolios. Another key strength Gartner didn't highlight is their growing network of storage integration partners, including Dell, Pure, NetApp and Vast.
Gartner also flagged some complexity in initial configuration and the absence of a unified management console. While these factors may require extra planning, they are typically outweighed by the depth of capabilities Commvault brings to large and mid-size enterprises.
Dell: Don't discount the storage platform
Dell maintained its position in the leaders quadrant and delivered important updates such as anomaly scanning and support for Hyper-V protection in PowerProtect Data Manager v19.20. Dell also introduced an All-Flash PowerProtect Data Domain Storage Appliance aimed at improving recovery time objectives. Their strong brand trust, enterprise footprint and global scale give them significant reach with strategic customers.
Gartner moved Dell closer to the center of the quadrant, noting slower delivery of market-differentiating features. Some of this reflects their reliance on the PowerProtect Data Domain storage platform (out of scope for the GMQ) and timing of feature releases after Gartner's cutoff. Even with these considerations, Dell's platform stability and integration remain strong differentiators in the market.
Druva: Newcomer to the leaders quadrant
2025 marks Druva's entrance into the leaders quadrant as the first 100% SaaS offering. For the first time, no on-premise hardware is required to run a Magic Quadrant-leading data protection platform, opening possibilities beyond traditional architectures. This aligns with Gartner's prediction that by 2029, 85% of large enterprises will run a Backup as a Service (BaaS) application either alongside their existing solution or in place of it.
Druva continues to enhance AI-driven features and ransomware defense, earning high marks from Gartner for strategy and execution. As with any cloud-native BaaS platform, customers should plan for contingencies such as internet outages during cyber events or the latency of writing on-premise workloads to AWS or Azure. These considerations are manageable with proper design and help ensure Druva's benefits are fully realized.
Rubrik: A Focus on building its cloud offerings, along with security updates
Rubrik focused on adding support for multiple cloud platforms, including Salesforce, Entra ID, M365 Dynamics & M365 Backup Storage, Azure DevOps and GitHub. Additional coverage for virtual machines and databases on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was also released. Rubrik's focus on building its cloud offerings ensures customers can protect their data as more customers embrace a hybrid approach. Rubrik also shored up its security feature set with anomaly detection and threat scanning in AWS and Azure, and with its partnership with Mandiant, customers can improve resilience and minimize business disruption due to malicious intrusions.
Of note, post MQ release, Rubrik announced a partnership with Sophos with the promise of a Managed Detection and Response optimized recovery solution enabling fast, secure recovery of M365 data in the event of accidental deletion or malicious compromise.
Veeam: Moving to security through Linux
Veeam continues to lead with innovation, making significant strides in cyber resilience. Gartner noted Veeam's established market presence, strong ransomware protection and versatile restore capabilities.
Gartner did note Veeam's dependence on the Windows platform as a caution, which is why we are delighted to see continued development for the Linux platform, with the Linux Hardened Repository in 2024 and full support for running on Linux in 2H 2025.
Conclusion
With an always-changing technology landscape, it's clear that Gartner's evaluation of Backup and Data Protection Platforms remains challenging. It is often difficult to compare previous years' reports to the current year, as the evaluation criteria change with the industry's shifting. Organizations need to take ownership of ensuring their goals and requirements are being met by vendors included in the Magic Quadrant analysis.
This year, we saw enhancements in cloud protection, resiliency, security and, of course, AI adoption within products. The biggest changes were the inclusion of Druva, a software-as-a-service offering, and the departure of Veritas, as its assets became part of the new Cohesity going forward.
Gartner's 2025 report provides some clear guidance on where they see the industry going (cloud integration, cybersecurity and AI), and their guidance on the MQ leaders and their strategies is a great first step in the evaluation process. Customers who want an up-to-the-minute snapshot of the state of the industry can work through their account teams, schedule a one-to two-hour up-to-the-minute "state of the industry" briefing with one of our Data Protection subject matter experts.