Jason Buffington .com

IDC recently published its MarketScape on SaaS data protection for 2026. If you’re an IDC client, you’ll want to read the entire report. Else, there’s a lot that you can glean from their chart that ought to raise some hard questions and fresh ideas for your overall Data Protection strategy.

video transcript

IDC recently published its MarketScape on the SaaS data protection landscape for 2026. If you’re an IDC client, you’ll want to read the entire report. Else, a few of the vendors mentioned have excerpts that summarize the overall MarketScape, IDC’s view of that vendor, and this handy chart.

The first thing you’ll notice is there’s only 6 vendors shown, because one of the inclusion criteria is that the vendors protect 5 or more SaaS applications. That’s really key when you think of quadrants, or waves, or other charts – because this suggests that most traditional datacenter vendors evidently don’t protect 5 or more SaaS applications.

In fact, notice that three of the predominant leaders on other analyst scorecards are here and yet they’re not in the leader portion (yet). That’s partially because the vendor highest in the chart boasts something like 90 different SaaS platforms that they protect.

I’m not endorsing any of these vendors, though I’m a fan of a few. The takeaway is to recognize that if your data center backup solution is not on this chart, then I’m guessing they probably have a solution for Microsoft 365, maybe Google workspace or Salesforce, and that might be all. So, now ask yourself: how many SaaS applications are you running in your environment today? Then, ask yourself how are you backing them up?

If your business relies on an application (on-prem or in the cloud), you have to back it up.

If you rolled the clock back 15 years, you might find a chart like this one for protecting virtual machines and most legacy solutions weren’t on it. So, most folks continued to run their legacy backup solution for their legacy workloads and brought in a VM-specific solution for the hypervisors. Over time, VM’s became your primary form-factor – and as such, what used to be your secondary or supplementary backup solution “just for VMs”, became your primary backup solution … BECAUSE the core of your IT shifted from legacy platforms to modern VMs.

I’ll repeat that: a new backup solution (or service) is often introduced because it protects key workloads that the legacy solution doesn’t. Maybe the shift happens because you like the UI better – or maybe because your production mix shifts away from legacy workloads to the new ones.  It happened Netware to Windows … and Physical to VMs … so why not from datacenters to clouds?

Fast forward to today, it’s probably worth looking at this list and considering if you have SaaS applications that are not backed up by your legacy solution. If so, you might consider complementing your existing backup architecture with something that is more SaaS capable. Just don’t be surprised if, five years from now, if SaaS are the majority of your production workloads, then that secondary SaaS backup solution or service might end up being your primary solution in the future.

Leave your thoughts below.