Gartner has unveiled an unchanged ‘Leader’ line-up for its annual Backup and Data Protection Magic Quadrant, as it made several eye-catching predictions about how the market will evolve.
Getting the nod as Leaders for 2026 are Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, Cohesity, Druva and Dell (see below).
That’s the exact same line-up as last year.
According to the analyst, who shared its latest report directly with us, those in the top-right square of its research “can be expected to be considered as part of most new purchase proposals”.
Just like in 2025, you could throw a blanket over the dots of the first four of these vendors (with Veeam perhaps just securing bragging rights in terms of where its dot is positioned this year).
Talking through its ‘strategic planning assumptions’, Gartner revealed a number of predictions for how the market will evolve.
By 2030, some 35% of enterprises with external SLA obligations will include minimum viable recovery in their incident response plans, up from pretty much none today, the market watcher said.
By the same year, 40% of regulated organisations operating in jurisdictions with active data sovereignty or operational resilience mandates will deploy jurisdiction-specific backup and recovery architectures to ensure regulatory compliance and independent recovery (up from fewer than 10% today), it added.
Eleven vendors in all made the cut for Gartner’s latest quadrant. That’s one fewer than last year (due to Kaseya being dropped).
Huawei retained its status as a ‘Challenger’, which Gartner sees as vendors who can execute today, but “may have a more limited vision” than Leaders.
IBM and HYCU were named as ‘Visionaries’, these being players who fall down on their overall execution despite being forward thinkers.
Arcserve and Opentext made the cut as ‘Niche Players’ for a second year running.
Gartner stressed that it “does not recommend” eliminating Niche Players from customer evaluations, emphasising that they are consciously focused on a sub-segment of the market, or offer broad capabilities without very large-enterprise scale.
It also gave an “honourable mention” to Acronis, Bacula Systems, Kaseya and Synology.
