Jason Buffington .com

Gartner’s latest MQ for #DataProtection just dropped; go pull up the chart. The trio now appears as a quartet, but that isn’t the most interesting or actionable part of the story. Let’s talk about it.

video transcript

Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Backup and Data Protection just came out. Quick reminder: the MQ is not a product vs product bake-off, it’s a broad set of vendor considerations. And if you’re a Gartner subscriber, you can actually reweight what matters to you and watch those dots move. So, pull the chart up yourself (since I can’t show it for copyright reasons) and let’s talk about it.

If you go back and look at older versions of this chart, focusing on whoever sits furthest right (what I think of as the innovation edge), there’s been a tight cluster of three there for a couple years. Trailing that group was a fourth vendor; which in baseball terminology “had the height, just not the distance.” This year, that gap closed, so now there are four in a cluster that I’ll call the ‘quartet’.

It would be easy, and wrong, to treat those four dots as basically equal. If you assumed each axis was zero to 100 and plotted the actual XY coordinates of each dot, they’re surprisingly close. Don’t do that … and besides, that’s not the story from an IT lens.

For example, some in the quartet offer a unified UI … to a holistic control plane … built on a single or consolidated installable software stack. Others require a variety of UI’s … to separate control planes … across multiple, otherwise disconnected software stacks. On good days, that might just be an inconvenience; but on bad days, that could really matter for your actual ability to achieve resilience.

Then there’s SaaS. Almost everybody has an offering for Microsoft 365 (with varying granularity and controls), also some Entra ID, maybe Salesforce or Google Workspace; that’s four apps. Another analyst firm set the bar for their report at being able to protect five SaaS protections, and that same quartet of four drops to three. Push the bar to seven or ten SaaS’es, which is even a midsized company runs today, and it’s easy to see why so many organizations supplement their primary data center solution with something purpose built for SaaS breadth; and as your organization embraces more SaaS, don’t be surprised when that supplement becomes your primary and the legacy solution gets minimized.

On another note: I’ve got huge respect for my friends at Gartner, but no chart tells the full story. Take cyber resilience; all four in the quartet “assume breach” (which you should) … but their stacks are mostly built to prepare for remediation, aka recover your clean data. Dell’s approach begins earlier in the prevention stages with cyber resistant endpoints and production storage platforms. Unfortunately, none of that fits neatly into a backup and recovery scorecard, so it doesn’t show up the same way in these quadrants.

There are other scenario examples, like governance, but you get the idea.

So, go grab the full report; am guessing all four in the quartet will be happy to let you download it from them. Look up what you’re running today, read what Gartner says about it, then go look at a couple alternatives based on what are the workloads that you are most concerned about today, because what you were solving for 2024 might not be what gets you through 2027.

Leave your thoughts below.