GigaOm Radar for Hybrid Cloud Data Protection for Large Enterprisesv4.0

1. Summary

Data remains a crucial asset for organizations of any size. Whether large or small, the data footprint keeps growing across many dimensions. The steady growth of structured data is overshadowed by massive unstructured data sets generated from new workloads and applications. Software as a service (SaaS) applications and replatforming and refactoring initiatives must also consider data protection requirements. Overall, there is no improvement in sight from an operational complexity perspective.

At this level of scale and complexity, managing regulatory requirements is impossible without software-based solutions. Although some organizations now have better experience with existing data privacy and sovereignty laws, there is still no harmonization at the US federal level, and each year, additional states introduce their own regulations. Large enterprises are particularly under scrutiny. To successfully manage this risk, organizations must rely on advanced, policy-based data management and governance capabilities that can handle the bulk of the work in an automated fashion.

The intensity and impact of ransomware attacks is now so high that cyber resiliency capabilities in data protection solutions are crucial and shouldn’t be considered optional. Data protection solutions are often the last line of defense against a ransomware attack, and enterprises are looking at ransomware protection capabilities with increased scrutiny.

The enterprise market continues to trend toward additional services built on top of data protection. These services are becoming instrumental in collecting and consolidating data across the entire organization to reuse it for other purposes.

Today, the modern workplace generally involves a combination of SaaS applications and virtual desktops, whether on-premises or in the cloud, with increasing demand for network-attached storage (NAS)—file—protection in both environments. Within this scenario, enterprises are building hybrid cloud infrastructures and need solutions that can adequately support their data-driven initiatives. Furthermore, a growing number of enterprises are taking advantage of Kubernetes to redo their business applications, and protecting these assets is becoming crucial.

This is why the market is so active, with both startups and incumbents looking at ways to disrupt traditional backup models, as well as increase the value of the protected data by adding data management and data reuse capabilities to their solutions.

This GigaOm Radar report highlights key hybrid cloud data protection vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report, “Key Criteria for Evaluating Hybrid Cloud Data Protection Solutions,” we describe in more detail the key features and metrics used to evaluate vendors in this market.