Gartner published a new Hype cycle for Backup and Data Protection technologies on July 23. The recent surge in ransomware attacks has increased focus on backup technologies and has forced vendors to respond with innovative solutions. This hype cycle highlights key technologies in the data protection space and their current state of maturity. Until last year, key backup technologies were covered in the storage hype cycle which was published earlier this month.
What is a hype cycle?
A Gartner Hype cycle provides end users, vendors and investors a visual representation of adoption and maturity of technologies in a given market. Gartner says that every technology traverses through five phases through its lifecycle – Innovation Trigger, Peak of inflated expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment and Plateau of productivity. Each technology is color coded to represent the time take to reach plateau of productivity – the final phase of maturity of the technology.
Hype Cycle for Backup and Data Protection technologies
Key technologies in the ‘Innovation trigger’ are ‘Backup data reuse’ and ‘Cyberstorage’, both of which currently are in embryonic phase of evolution. Gartner defines Cyberstorage as a system that actively defends storage systems and data against cyberattacks through prevention, early detection and attack blocking. Such solutions can also support data analytics, forensic attack analyses and storage-specific recovery capabilities.
Noting that leading vendors Cohesity, Commvault and Rubrik have recently announced AI Co-pilot related features to simplify AIOps, Gartner has placed Gen AI for Backup operations in ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ and expects it to reach plateau of productivity in less than 2 years. Container backup which helps back up persistent volumes of containerized application data and Kubernetes configuration data like Kubernetes (K8S) objects is also in the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ category. With increasing number of workloads being containerized and using persistent storage, protecting container environments is becoming more important.
Sliding through the trough are Backup as a Service – a now mature consumption model, Immutable Data Vaults and Data Archiving. The ‘Plateau of Productivity’ lists only one technology – Data Classification, a process of organizing information assets for effective data security and management.
Footnote
The Gartner Hype Cycle usually covers a subset of technologies in a given market. It is not a comprehensive view of the tech landscape of a market. Given the rapid changes in the landscape, Gartner will add new technologies and drop some that they feel are no longer relevant.
While Gartner’s Hype Cycle is an invaluable tool for understanding the progression of emerging technologies, it’s important to recognize its limitations. The report captures a snapshot of current trends, but it doesn’t account for every nuance and development in the field. Technologies can evolve rapidly, often faster than analysts can update their reports. Consequently, while the Hype Cycle is a useful guide, it should be used in conjunction with other sources of information and expert opinions to get a well-rounded view of the market dynamics.
