Gartner names Rubrik a Leader in Data Center Backup & Recovery

Rubrik’s outstanding data center backup and recovery solution has been re-classified as a Leader by Gartner, and placed accordingly on the relevant Gartner Magic Quadrant. Leaders are the highest rated technology providers.

Data center backup and recovery solutions are designed to capture a point-in-time copy (backup) of an enterprise workload and write the data out to a secondary storage device for the purpose of recovering this data in the future.

Data center backup and recovery, data security and business continuity

Data management is an increasingly complex business concern. Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders are now faced with rearchitecting the backup infrastructure to explore new ways of managing the public cloud, compliance and increasing worries over ransomware, all while delivering maximum value.

Traditional backup solutions that rely on tape and clunky, bolted together legacy systems can seriously dent compliance by leaving businesses vulnerable to data corruption and loss. It can take days to source records and there is no efficient way to access data in order to leverage its value.

Backup and recovery solutions are critical when it comes to data security, disaster recovery and business continuity. Finding the right data center backup solution can take months. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant has become a vital research tool in helping I&O professionals sharpen and shorten their search.

Gartner Magic Quadrant (GMQ) evaluation criteria

In order to receive ‘Leader’ status on the GMQ, businesses must demonstrate:

“… the highest combined measures of Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. Leaders have the most comprehensive and scalable product portfolios and a proven track record of established market presence and financial performance.

For vision, they are perceived in the industry as thought leaders and have well-articulated plans for enhancing recovery capabilities, improving ease of deployment and administration and increasing their scalability and product breadth …

… A cornerstone for Leaders is the ability to articulate how new requirements will be addressed as part of their vision for recovery management … Leaders are strategic vendors, well positioned for the future having established success in meeting the needs of upper-midsize and large data centers.”

Gartner defines the core functionalities of backup and recovery solutions as:

• Backup and recovery of operating systems, files, databases and applications in both physical and virtual environments in the data center

• Assignation of backup and retention policies that align with the organization’s recovery objectives

• Reporting success and failure of backup / recovery tasks

Additional capabilities Gartner look for are:

• Creation of a second backup copy of on-premises backup data in the public cloud and tier backup data to public cloud

• Protection of public cloud IaaS, PaaS SaaS workloads

• Protection of remote sites

Why Rubrik is now classed a leader in data center backup and recovery

In the last iteration of Gartner’s research, Rubrik was classified as a Visionary.

In addition to Rubrik Cloud Data Management (RCDM), its core backup platform, Rubrik’s portfolio contains two more solutions. Polaris is a SaaS-based platform that provides centralized visibility and management, and leverages metadata to provide ransomware remediation and data classification. Mosaic delivers protection of NoSQL workloads.

Rubrik’s operations are now more geographically diverse and its clients are mainly in the large enterprise segment of the market. In 2019, Polaris’ capabilities were developed to further support public cloud IaaS and SaaS data protection requirements.

Two major updates to RCDM occurred - 5.1 and 5.1.1. These introduced native continuous data protection capabilities for VMware and improved data tiering to Azure, among others. It also introduced Polaris Sonar, a SaaS-based application for data discovery, classification and reporting.

All companies included in this Magic Quadrant have three notable strengths and cautions listed.

Rubrik’s strengths are:

• Scalability
• Ransomware detection and remediation
• Database recovery

Cautions are:

• Limited integration with storage array snapshots
• Higher operational costs for public cloud application backup
• Weak active directory support.

What businesses experience using Rubrik

Over 2,500 business around the world are using Rubrik to protect, automate and govern their applications at massive scale in one seamless fabric across data centers and clouds.

Global brands such as Kellogs, Cisco, Honda, Sephora, T-Mobile and Expedia rely on Rubrik to deliver business resiliency, cyber resiliency, automation and self-service and cloud mobility.

“Not only was Rubrik a solution that my engineers could pick up quickly, but it allowed us to create an IT environment focused on innovation rather than maintenance. In terms of ingenuity and operational efficiency, it was clear that Rubrik was in line with how we think next-gen technologies should run.”

Peter Dunn, Director of Infrastructure, Lamar Advertising