How to Choose the Best Enterprise Backup Software in 2024? Best Enterprise Backup Solutions and Tools.

What is an enterprise backup solution?

An enterprise-grade backup solution consists not only of backup software itself, but also likely includes immutable storage of various types and network connections with high-rate bandwidth. In addition, your internal knowledgebase, training for new employees as well as the vendor’s documentation are all vital elements of your backup system.

Enterprise backup software tools have become indispensable components of modern business operations as more and more organizations increasingly depend on their IT infrastructure. These solutions now play a pivotal role in transforming organizations by safeguarding data from loss, corruption, human error and theft.

The leading enterprise backup software solutions not only support specific technical features, but also help to:

Reduce backup and recovery costs

The recovery costs, in case the data sits in the cloud, can be significant. Cloud storage providers tend to charge less for uploading data, whereas they charge much more in case when the data is downloaded for recovery reasons. Good backup software should minimize the download volume in this particular case, not to mention  the minimization of disk and tape storage costs.

Simplify backup administration

Enterprise IT infrastructures with tens of thousands of endpoints (computers, servers, VMs and others) may be complex to manage. Backup can be a nightmare for an admin who has to think about where to backup the specific endpoint, if there is enough storage available, network bandwidth, what the retention policies are for this data and where the older copies need to be migrated from to free up space. If your backup solution supports helpful efficiency tools such as automated copy or migration of backed up data, automated restart of backup jobs after cancellation, job scheduling and sequencing with priorities – it can help system administrators sleep better at night.

Minimize staff training and ongoing support

Similarly to the previous point, enterprise companies usually have large numbers of IT staff and teaching new employees on how to use the backup system can be extremely time-consuming. Leveraging intuitive UI and automation features can significantly reduce the need for extensive staff training and ongoing support, making the management of enterprise backup solutions more efficient and cost-effective.

Enhance regulatory compliance

The system of backup needs to adjust with the organization’s regulation mandate. Depending on the nature of the enterprise, compliance regulations might be generic like GDPR or industry-specific like HIPAA, ITAR or CMMC 2.0. Also local regulations can apply here as well, examples can include Australia’s Essential Eight, UK’s Government Security Classifications and more. Enterprise companies operating worldwide must navigate into a complex landscape of compliance regulations all over the world.

What is NOT an enterprise backup solution?

Solutions that try to appear – or even be – enterprise-grade may in fact not be of true  enterprise level, and this creates an additional risk for a customer looking to replace an existing solution or establish a brand new backup infrastructure. Below is, what I think might not be an option for those with true enterprise-grade requirements:

• When data is being backed up to a public consumer cloud service like Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, this is unlikely to be being used in an enterprise level scenario. These tools have synchronization features, but lack significant security, disaster recovery and performance qualities for enterprise datasets. Instead, the solution would be better to integrate with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and other private clouds through S3 interface.
• Consumer-grade backup solutions and solutions which were targeted towards the consumer market in the past, when they were initially released. Certainly, most backup companies try to target both consumer and enterprise markets and evolve their technology accordingly, but a solution which was designed for personal use from the early beginning is very hard to modify for enterprise needs. Scalability and flexibility, which are needed in huge heterogeneous IT environments, can rarely be adequately achieved in such cases.
• Solutions which lack offsite storage backup options, including tape media can’t be considered as enterprise-ready. Relying solely on server disks, NAS or SAN is not longer enough – there needs to be an offsite air gapped location like tape or special cloud data center, which will deliver redundancy and DR to your system.
• Open source backup tools without enterprise support. There are some open source enterprise-grade backup tools available, and they have a decent amount of technical features to satisfy demanding IT environments. However, the problem of open source backup can be a lack of professional support and reliability through SLAs which increases risks to lose data and not be able to restore it. One notable exception is Bacula, which is open source-based, but which provides full SLA’s to the highest levels for even the largest organizations.

A good enterprise backup solution should be able to offer features such as:

• Extensive data protection capabilities. Features such as backup immutability, backup data encryption, 3-2-1 rule support and granular access control lists are essential when it comes to protecting information against any kind of tampering. Enterprises across the world are the constant target for ransomware attacks of all kinds, so the protection of the backed up data should be the strongest possible.
• Support for multiple backup policies and different backup levels. Different backup variations are suitable for specific use cases and situations. Full backups are slow but include all of the folders and files within the backed up environment. Differential backups only copy files modified since the last full backup. Incremental backups only cover data modified since the previous backup, no matter the type. Enterprise-ready solutions frequently face large datasets, which is why the best of them provide the opportunity to create synthetic full – the new full backup which is made of all incrementals since the last full. Synthetic backups help to save storage space, network bandwidth and budgets.
• Disaster recovery & business continuity. Minimal downtime and ensured business continuity are critical parameters for enterprises, so backup solutions for enterprises have to be able to offer automated failover for business-critical systems and support high availability infrastructures. Data replication to offsite storage like tape is also necessary for resilience. A very important aspect of a successful DR is bare metal backup and recovery, which needs to be supported for both Windows and Linux environments.
• Support for various storage media types. The majority of enterprises run sophisticated systems that consist of multiple storage types with complex infrastructure. Being able to support different storage media types, be it on-premise servers, virtual machine disks, enterprise cloud storage (both public and private), and magnetic tape is a must-have for an enterprise backup solution. With the rise of 3-2-1 rule, air gapping and other security measures, it goes against best practices for an enterprise-grade backup to support only disk, and for example, not being able to backup to tape.
• Flexible data retention options. The capability to implement long-term and short-term data retention policies is a significant advantage in this market since enterprises and large corporations have to adhere to various regulatory requirements (including the necessary data storage time period) regarding the  different types of data they own. A good backup solution should be able to offer flexible retention controls, support custom deletion protocols and automated pruning jobs.

The list above is far from conclusive, the topic of necessary enterprise-grade backup features is explored later in the article.

2024 objectives and challenges of enterprise backup solutions

In 2024 the importance of data security is at an all-time high, with geopolitical conflicts being backed by cyberattacks on a regular basis. Ongoing hacking campaigns for example, gain more momentum as time goes on, and the number of cyber attacks continues to grow in strength and complexity.

In this context, no security feature can be considered excessive, and some of the most sophisticated options become far more common and widely used than ever. For example, air gapping as a concept works well against most forms of ransomware due to the ability to physically disconnect one or several backups from the outside world.

A very similar logic applies to backup immutability – the ability to create data that cannot be modified in any way once it has been written the first time. WORM (write-once-read-many) storage works great with providing backup immutability, and plenty of enterprise backup solutions can also offer such capabilities in one way or another.

Here are some of the most recent issues that enterprise-grade backup software has to work with:

• Shrinking backup windows are becoming the norm, necessitating backup solutions that deliver exceptional performance without compromising application and system availability. The size of data (even the incremental parts of backups, not even talking about fulls) will be growing even more in 2024, and what was possible to backup during the night non-business hours in the past, is no longer working even during 24 hours time frame. Thus, enterprises with big data need backup systems which can work granularly with selected parts of your infrastructure, compress and deduplicate data to lower the bandwidth and ensure low I/O load to support the apps performance stability.
• Evolving regulatory landscapes demand stricter compliance, placing additional burdens on enterprise backup solutions and the way they process data. More and more vendors will be looking to comply with regulations and standards released recently in 2023 and in the future 2024, including global ones like FIPS, NIST, CMMC 2.0, ITAR, NATO Stanag and local ones like Government Security Classifications in the UK, Australia’s Essential Eight, and many more. Enterprise backup solutions should comply with these and future regulations. To do this, not only securing data against cyber threats becomes important but also managing data security procedures to comply with the increasingly complex legal and regulatory landscape.
• During the growing complexity of data protection, IT organizations face increasing pressure to control costs, streamline operations, and maximize resource utilization. Enterprise organizations need to optimize backup budgets in 2024 and hence choose backup software licensing which does not charge by data volume. In addition to backup software itself, it is important to minimize storage costs, specifically data transmitted to and from the cloud, which minimizes your cloud costs. Deduplication on the client and storage side needs to be in the list of priority features in this case. Tiered storage might also be a benefit – less critical datasets can be stored on cheaper and slower storage, while important ones can reside on more expensive media with better RTO and RPO.
• Data is no longer confined to traditional on-premises infrastructure. The rise of public, private, and hybrid cloud environments has introduced new complexities in data protection. Organizations need solutions that can seamlessly safeguard data across diverse cloud environments. Cloud-agnostic backup solutions allow for better flexibility, and in 2024 you have to choose ones with encryption at rest and in motion in order to secure your backed up data.
• Similarly, enterprise organizations tend to adopt diverse microservice and container technologies and build their infrastructures using them, so in 2024 it will be increasingly vital to choose backup solutions that support backing up Kubernetes, OpenShift, Tanzu, Docker and others.
• The proliferation of data-driven technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), HPC, big data, video applications, and data-intensive applications, has resulted in an exponential surge in data volume. Organizations will be grappling with the sheer scale of data they need to deduplicate, backup and restore in 2024. The rise of machine learning and AI algorithms will help in better data deduplication, identifying critical data to backup and ensuring optimal backup windows.

Why is business size important when it comes to choosing a backup solution?

Data backup challenges are unique to each business size. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are more likely to encounter sudden influxes of data that exceeds their current management capabilities. While SMBs may not utilize multiple data storage mediums, the sheer volume of data they collect can still pose significant challenges. SMBs should prioritize cloud backup solutions that offer exceptional scalability, especially if they are experiencing rapid growth. Also, cloud backup solutions for SMBs should be easier to manage because they don’t require a lot of IT support and are much easier to deploy.

On the other hand, large and geographically dispersed teams often face challenges with managing incredibly large amounts of data that may be stored in multiple locations, causing plenty of inconveniences when it comes to retrieving all this data in a structured manner. Larger organizations also tend to find out that significant parts of their data are stored separately from the rest of the information in the infrastructure, creating a massive number of issues for business continuity and data recoverability. The reliance of large enterprises on a diverse range of applications, DBs, virtualization and container technologies in the IT environment makes data backups particularly complex. Storage types can also include multiple cloud locations, tape, NAS devices and disks. Large enterprises should prioritize enterprise backup solutions that can effectively manage data in hybrid and complex IT environments.

Choosing the correct enterprise-grade backup software solution

If we assume that a typical enterprise company organizes and processes an ongoing and increasing volume of information (petabytes of data) in a big data center with thousands of servers, the below criteria list should be taken into account when defining best solutions for enterprise backup.

Since the average level of requirements for an enterprise-grade backup solution is high, it would be easier to split these characteristics into multiple thematic groups for better reading comprehension. In this list we are going to review 3 categories: Performance, Versatility, and Accessibility.

Performance

An enterprise backup software solution should:

• Be reliable and guarantee the execution of backup and recovery operations in an integral and consistent manner, without loss or omission of data. Fault tolerance should be ensured by data integrity checks, corruption detection, verification of backups and granular file-level recovery.
• Provide the options to maintain several concurrent instances of backup and recovery. These elements should have the ability to be automated so that the process is carried out efficiently and with minimum execution time, without affecting the consistency of data.
• Provide tools that optimize the data volume transmission during the backups in order to save storage capacity and network bandwidth at an enterprise-grade scale. This is done using both hardware and software capabilities: snapshots, 2-side deduplication, comm line compression and other methods.
• Provide strongest encryption of the backed up data (AES 128, AES192, AES256 or blowfish as well as EFS for Windows) in order to guarantee its privacy and guarantee TSL (SSL) communication between backup system components. Storage daemons also need to be encrypted.
• Support HPC, complex and big data IT infrastructures which deal with petabytes of data and millions of files and ensure sufficient performance in HPC environments (Hadoop, SAP HANA, Oracle, IBM HPSS and others).

Versatility

• Have the capability to adapt to heterogeneous environments, since in many enterprise-level organizations it is common to use software and hardware of different types, characteristics and manufacturers, including servers, NAS devices, tape drives, operating systems, virtualization systems, applications, and databases.
• Provide the ability to grow and adapt in accordance with the rising data volumes and data retention requirements. This growth should not be impeded by a backup solution which becomes too expensive as it scales up, and by a storage media.cost growth.
• Facilitate the implementation of enterprise-specific backup tasks necessary to perform effective data backup strategies. These can include: condition- and event-based backup stopping and starting services, creating and deleting files, replication and migration of data, validating the execution of a backup job, generating alerts when job is not completed successfully, backup scheduling and others.
• Allow the configuration of different levels of backup that conform to an organization’s backup policies in an efficient way, in terms of proper RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective). Enterprise-grade organizations typically require full, incremental, differential and virtual full (synthetic) backup levels.
• Support a wide range of virtualization systems incl. VMware, Hyper V, Citrix Xen, Red Hat Virtualization, Azure VM, KVM, Nutanix and Proxmox. Many of these hypervisors can be used in a single enterprise-level organization in a single data center. It’s important to be able to backup not only the full VM images, but also to be able to restore single files from them as it can affect restore speed on enterprise levels.
• Support a substantial range of databases incl. MS SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SAP HANA and Sybase. With enterprise-grade DBMS systems it’s important to ensure the ability to backup databases incrementally and have the PITR (point-in-time recovery) features.
• Offer tools to manage backed up data in various cases such as:
  • Applying IT legal compliance regulations;
  • Applying compliance with quality standards, such as ISO;
  • Applying compliance with methodologies such as ITIL.
• Support data backup in hybrid cloud environments, since it allows the implementation of a high availability environment with adequate levels of redundancy. Cloud storage can be used as a media itself, and also needs to be backed up as an endpoint. Cloud connectivity needs to include Amazon S3, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and Glacier at a minimum.
• Be FIPS 140-2 compliant and provide advanced security controls incl. CRAM-MD5 authentication between components, various immutability features, SIEM integration, silent data corruption detection and automated malware detection.
• Support container-based infrastructures that use Docker, OpenShift or Kubernetes and be able to backup Docker volumes and Kubernetes clusters These technologies are the most likely ones used to build enterprise-grade container environments.
• Be able to perform bare metal recovery for both Windows and Linux as a part of organization’s disaster recovery strategy

Accessibility

• Integrate with enterprise monitoring systems and send notifications of backup operation processes. Additionally notifications can be set up through emails, push notifications on mobile devices, web browsers, etc.
• Allow interrelation with enterprise BI tools that can provide backups’ statistics, and in this way generate reports and dashboards that can be used in companies for diverse activities such as storage capacity planning, bandwidth state, system functional indicators, and more.
• Allow backup and recovery administration to be multi-channel, but complete. To do this, it must have utilities or tools as part of the application that are cross-platform, easy to use, offer functionality to users with various expertise levels in configuration, administration and monitoring of backups.
• Allow the organization to manage the storage resources where the backed up data is stored. In enterprise-level companies this may include disks, tape drives, auto-changers, cloud storage devices, NAS or SAN devices or online storage applications.
• Allow integration with mobile devices, phones or tablets, including not only notifications but also administration and monitoring capabilities.

All these characteristics contribute to protecting the enterprise-grade IT infrastructure of a company, including operating systems, server, user data and applications, to avoid potentially catastrophic data losses that may affect a company’s business continuity. Knowing what to look for makes it a lot easier to figure out what solution is the best possible option for your specific company.

Enterprise cloud backups

One more important topic needs to be discussed before we move on to the list of backup software examples. The topic in question revolves around cloud backups – a relatively common element of enterprise-grade backup solutions that offers cloud storage as one of several storage locations for enterprise backups.

It is not uncommon for large-scale enterprise backup software to offer cloud storage capabilities in some way. As such, there is a list of factors that potential clients have to keep in mind when it comes to enterprise backup software with cloud capabilities:

• Understanding your expectations from a cloud backup is a good way to begin, since a lot of enterprise-grade companies have to find software that meets their specific RPO or RTO requirements. That way, the company can also clearly understand which of these two parameters is preferable while learning what features are likely to be critical to them in this context.
• Performing bandwidth capability assessment is another good starting point, since cloud storage transfers the entirety of a company’s information using network connection. Making sure that a cloud service’s backup constraints would not affect the company’s regular operations is a necessity for enterprises. Some specific cloud backup storage features exist for the purpose of reducing the potential network load, such as the support for continuous incremental backups.
• Evaluating the capabilities of customer support is entirely logical in the context of long-term relationships with which most enterprise cloud storage solutions work. Every single issue with cloud storage that cannot be solved in a timely manner can be a significant detriment to an enterprise’s data recovery process – and potentially to its business, and competent customer support directly contributes to solving these issues in most cases.
• Learning about the reporting and alerting capabilities of the cloud storage solution is another necessary step in the process of evaluating these systems. One of the biggest goals of these systems is to keep track of a company’s data stored in cloud storage. Receiving regular updates on the current data state from a cloud storage provider is a great way to make the overall workload of administrators a little easier.

Enterprise-grade cloud storage can be a great addition to practically any existing backup system or infrastructure, especially in the context of a well-known “3-2-1 rule”. This rule implies three different backup copies stored using at least two different device types and with at least one copy being stored in a geographically different location from the rest. The last part of this explanation can be a good fit for cloud storage.

The remote location in this case can be a physical storage that is geographically different from your current location – or cloud storage that does not have a dedicated storage location.

Best enterprise backup solutions list

Rubrik

Rubrik is well-known in the market and their specialization is hybrid IT environments. Rubrik Cloud Data Management (RCDM) is their own invention that makes data protection and cloud integration so much easier. Of course, they also have their own data management platform called Polaris. Polaris consists of Polaris GPS – policy management and reporting, and Polaris Radar with ransomware detection and rehabilitation as its main function.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.7/5 stars based on 45 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 9.1/10 stars based on 198 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.6/5 stars based on 59 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Clean and organized administrative interface
• Multi-cloud and hybrid offerings and integrations with multiple cloud storage providers
• Vast automation capabilities

Shortcomings:

• Cannot backup Azure SQL directly to cloud, requires extra steps to do so
• First-time setup can be long and difficult
• Could use more documentation such as helpful articles and whitepapers

Pricing:

• Rubrik’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a personalized demo or one of the guided tours.
• The unofficial information states that there are several different hardware appliances that Rubrik can offer, such as:
  • Rubrik R334 Node – from $100,000 for a 3-node with 8-Core Intel processes, 36 TB of storage, etc.
  • Rubrik R344 Node – from $200,000 for a 4-node with similar parameters to R334, 48 TB of storage, etc.
  • Rubrik R500 Series Node – from $115,000 for a 4-node with Intel 8-Core processors, 8×16 DIMM memory, etc.

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Jon H. – Capterra – “Rubrik has allowed us to stop focusing on the minutiae of running a homegrown backup storage/orchestration product and focus on automation of the infrastructure/deployment instead Rubrik has improved the performance of our backup jobs, allowing us to perform more backups with fewer resources overall Rubrik has given our clients more choice in how backups function”
• Verified Reviewer – Capterra – “It’s improved operational efficiency, as we now don’t have to spend time scheduling backups, and has created very tangible savings. In the next 5 years we expect to save over 55% switching from our legacy provider to Rubrik. It’s also mitigated us against any future data centre blackouts through its Azure replication capabilities – while significantly reducing our power consumption and footprint in the data centre.”

My personal opinion on Rubrik:

Rubrik is a reasonably versatile enterprise backup solution that includes many features one might expect from a modern backup solution of this scale. It can offer extensive backup and recovery options, a versatile data management platform, a host of data protection measures for different circumstances, extensive policy-based management, and so on. Rubrik’s main specialization is in working with hybrid IT environments, but it can also work with practically any company – if the customer in question is fine with the price Rubrik takes for its services.

Unitrends

When it comes to Hyper-V and VMware backup solutions, Unitrends is always an option for these cases. First of all, it’s free for the first 1 TB of data, and there are multiple editions (free, essentials, standard, enterprise, and enterprise plus) for different needs of customers with different data limits. Other features of Unitrends’ backup solution include instant VM recovery, data compression capabilities, ransomware detection service, protection for virtual and physical files, and, of course, community support.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.7/5 stars based on 34 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 7.9/10 stars based on 613 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.3/5 stars based on 355 customer reviews

Advantages:

• The backup process is easy to initiate once it is set up properly
• Granular control over the entire backup process
• Convenient dashboard with centralized access to a wealth of information

Shortcomings:

• Single file recovery is not easy to initiate in the web interface
• Infrequent false alerts
• No instruction sets in the interface itself – only in web forums

Pricing:

• Unitrends’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a quote, a free trial, or a guided demo.
• The unofficial information states that Unitrends has a paid version that starts at $349 USD

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Yuri M. – Capterra – “it give us less time to restore in case of the emergency and also the learning curve is quick. The reports are also very informative so we can know exactly what is happening with the backups and make sure we can restore in case we needed.”
• Richard S. – Capterra – “Support has been really good. But they suggested and did a firmware and software upgrade. I had to remove the client from all my servers and reinstall it. Then the backups didn’t run for several days. Have to work with support to get everything working again correctly.”

My personal opinion on Unitrends:

Unitrends puts a lot of emphasis on “solving the issue of complex backup solutions” in its marketing – the software itself is fairly competent. The biggest offering of Unitrends is a backup and recovery platform that can cover virtual environments, physical storage, apps, cloud storage, and even endpoints. The ability to offer a centralized approach to managing a multitude of data sources at once greatly boosts the overall convenience of using such a solution, and most of its processes are highly customizable. It has its own issues, including a confusing pricing model and a problematic granular restore process, but none of its issues deter from the overall effectiveness of the software as a whole.

Veeam Backup & Replication

If we’re talking about virtual environments, then Veeam might be our first pick, with their cutting-edge technologies that allow flexible and fast data recovery when you need it. Their all-in-one solution is capable of both protecting your VMware vSphere/Hyper-V virtual environments and doing basic backup and recovery jobs, as well. The scalability of the solution is quite impressive, too, as well as their number of specific features, like deduplication, instant file-level recovery, and so on. Veeam’s distribution model is not exactly complex, either: there are several versions with different capabilities and variable pricing.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.8/5 stars based on 69 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 8.8/10 stars based on 1,237 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.6/5 stars based on 387 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Initial setup is simple and easy
• Most of Veeam’s solutions are available for free for smaller companies with some limitations
• Decent customer support

Shortcomings:

• UI could use some work in terms of user-friendliness
• The pricing of the solution is higher than average
• Learning the entirety of Veeam’s capabilities takes a lot of time and resources
• Security levels can be questionable

Pricing:

• Veeam’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a quote or a free trial. What it does have is a pricing calculator page that lets users specify the number of different environments they want covered with Veeam’s solution, as well as the planned subscription period. All of that can be sent to Veeam in order to receive a personalized quote.

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Rahul J. – Capterra – “I am using Veeam since from February 2021. It’s actually a best software but faced many times backup issue when Server size were more than 1TB. Otherwise restoration process are good, Instance recovery process are also simple and useful for migration also.it’s seriously very good software for full server type backup(Host base backup).”
• Joshua H. – Capterra – “I use this to manage backups of office-facing and production servers in a non-profit business. We have less than 10 servers to care for and the free Community Edition is perfect. I have found the features and reporting to be robust. Practicing restores is no trouble. I have never needed vendor support to operate or configure this Veeam Backup & Replication – it works well and has good documentation!”

My personal opinion on Veeam:

Veeam may be the most popular backup solution on this list – it is one of the most popular ones, at the very least. It may be focusing quite a lot on its VM-related backup capabilities, but the solution itself is also suitable for working to some extent with other environments – physical, cloud, applications, and more. It is a fast and scalable solution that has plenty to offer to practically every possible client type – from small startups and companies to massive enterprises. At the same time, it can be quite tricky to learn all of its capabilities, security levels may be questionable, and the pricing of the solution is well above the market average.

Bacula Enterprise

Bacula Enterprise is a highly reliable backup and recovery software that presents various functions like data backup, recovery, data protection, disaster recovery capabilities and more. It offers especially high security and is mainly targeted at medium enterprises and larger Bacula provides an unusually large range of different features, from various storage types and easy setup to low deployment costs and extra-fast data recovery times. It can work with practically any (well over 34) Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.), and a lot of other operating systems, too, like Microsoft, MacOS X, Solaris, and more. Bacula also has a unique modular architecture that gives even further significant protection against ransomware and other attacks. It offers a choice (or combination) of both command line and Web-based GUI’s. Its very strong range of security features and many additional high performance, enterprise-grade technologies such as advanced deduplication, compression and additional backup levels make it a favorite among HPC and mission-critical, demanding enterprises. The licensing model also avoids charging per data volume, which makes it especially attractive to MSPs, ISVs, Telcos, Military and Research establishments, large data centers and governmental organizations.

Customer ratings:

• TrustRadius – 9.8/10 stars based on 62 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.7/5 stars based on 56 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Especially high security levels and deployment flexibility
• Job scheduling is incredibly useful for many reasons
• Creates an effective backup and disaster recovery framework
• Support for many different data environments, such as servers, databases, VMs, Cloud interfaces, in-cloud apps, etc.
• Users only pay for the technology they use, creating even more savings

Shortcomings:

• Web interface’s broad functionality requires time to get used to it
• Initial setup process takes a decent amount of time
• Additional price for plugins that are not in the basic solution package

Pricing:

• Bacula Enterprise’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a quote.
• There are plenty of different subscription plans that Bacula Enterprise can offer, even though there is no pricing available to any of them:
  • BSBE – Bacula Small Business Edition, it can cover no more than 20 agents and 2 contracts, offering features such as web support and BWeb management suite
  • Standard – can cover up to 50 agents and 2 contracts, adds support answer deadlines (from 1 to 4 business days)
  • Bronze – can cover up to 200 agents and 2 contracts, offers phone support and shorter deadlines for customer support (from 6 hours to 4 days)
  • Silver – can cover up to 500 agents and 3 contracts, introduces a deduplication plugin and a lower customer support answer deadline (from 4 hours to 2 days)
  • Gold – can cover up to 2000 agents and 5 contracts, drastically reduces customer support answer deadline (from 1 hour to 2 days)
  • Platinum – can cover up to 5000 agents and 5 contracts, has PostgreSQL catalog support and one training seat per year for Administrator courses
• Unofficial sources claim that Bacula Enterprise’s pricing starts at $500 per month

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Jefferson Lessa – TrustRadius – “During these two years, we have been using Bacula Enterprise as a backup and disaster recovery solution for our entire data environment. This tool solved the problems we had in monitoring backups and in the agility to recover information. We are currently using this solution for more than 2Tb of data in a primarily virtualized environment. Bacula Enterprise’s technical support has perfectly met all the needs we’ve had in recent years. The installation of the tool was easy and the entire team adapted well to the daily use of this solution.”
• Eloi Cunha – TrustRadius – “Currently, the Brazilian Naval Supply System Command uses Bacula Enterprise to backup and restore the database. As a result, we have advanced features and the ability to handle the high volume of data we need for daily life, performing snapshots, advanced deduplication, single-file restores efficiently and reliably. I can detail as pros & cons the following personal use cases. Reliability and great cost-benefit. 
• Davilson Aguiar – TrustRadius – “Here at Prodap, we have been struggling for a long time to access a Backup software that was good and cheap, we found Bacula as the best value for money. Right from the start, it solved our compression problem because the others we used weren’t very efficient about it. It made us take up less storage.”

My personal opinion on Bacula Enterprise:

There may be a bit of a bias involved in this case, but I believe that Bacula Enterprise is currently one of the best possible options on the backup and recovery market for large companies and enterprises. It is a versatile backup solution with a proverbial ocean of features and capabilities. At the same time, plenty of features that are not a part of Bacula’s original package can be added to it via a system of modules that extend the functionality in some way. Bacula can offer a modular architecture, a variety of supported operating systems, and impressive flexibility when it comes to supporting specific storage types or data formats. Above all, Bacula’s superior levels of security and its ability to mold those security layers into an organization’s (often very) specific needs cannot be overstated in today’s world of aggressive ransomware and other security attacks.  It can take time to learn initially, and users need to have at least a little Linux knowledge, but the wealth of features that is available to an average Bacula user is more than worth the effort it takes to learn it.

Acronis Cyber Backup

Acronis is a well-known competitor in the software market, and its Cyber Backup solution keeps up with the company’s standards, offering a secure and effective backup solution for multiple use cases. Acronis can help you with protecting your information from a wide variety of threats, including software failures, hardware problems, cyber-attacks, accidents, and so on. There are also more features within the same field, such as in-depth monitoring and reporting, minimized user downtime, the ability to ensure if a backup is authentic or not, and so on.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.1/5 stars based on 70 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 7.8/10 stars based on 133 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.3/5 stars based on 668 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Compatibility with large variety of workloads
• AI-based malware protection
• Easy data collection operations

Shortcomings:

• The solution’s pricing is significantly above the market average
• The backup agent is incredibly demanding in terms of system hardware
• User interface can be confusing and is often considered outdated

Pricing:

• Acronis Cyber Protect’s Backup capabilities differ in pricing depending on the nature of the backup target:
  • From $109 per one workstation, be it physical or virtual, macOS or Windows
  • From $779 for one server, be it physical or virtual, Linux or Windows
  • From $1,019 per one virtual host, be it Hyper-V or VMware (no limitations on the number of virtual machines per host)
  • From $139 for either Microsoft 365 data (across SharePoint Online, Teams, OneDrive for Business or Exchange Online) or Google Workspace data (across Contacts, Calendar, Drive, or Gmail)
• Acronis Cyber Protect – Backup Advanced can offer file-level backups, image-based backups, incremental/differential backups, ransomware protection, vulnerability assessment, group management, AD integration, reports, and more.

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Gábor S. – Capterra – “Easy to operate because cloud backup can be performed with the same configuration as on-premises. Pricing is more economical than other services. An introductory one for those who do not use cloud services. We only restored the server as a test, but we converted the image to a model different from the physical server. Servers can be restored even in case of fire or disaster damage.”
• Chase R. – Capterra – “A solid backup solution when it works. Once it works it tends to stay working. The only issues is if it’s not working, you will have to figure it out on your own, next to no support!”

My personal opinion on Acronis:

Acronis as a company offers backup and recovery software for different use cases, mostly targeting large-scale enterprises. Data security is always its biggest focus, Acronis claims to be able to protect its users against cyber-attacks, hardware failures, software issues, and even the ever-present “human factor” in the form of accidental data deletion. It includes AI-based malware protection, extensive backup encryption, and backup-related features that are really good. However, scalability can be limited, integration with some databases, VM’s and containers is limited, and its interface can be a touch confusing at times, and the solution itself is often described as “very expensive”. Still, plenty of small and medium companies would gladly pay Acronis to safeguard their data.

Cohesity

Cohesity is more of a “all-in-one” solution, capable of working with both regular applications as well as VMs, and its scalability is quite impressive, as well, thanks to their own cluster-like structure with nodes. It can keep backups with app-native formats and use NAS protocols to manipulate a variety of data types. Their data restoration speed is good, as well. Unfortunately, the pricing model isn’t that flexible and some specific objectives, like MS Exchange or SharePoint granular recovery, are only covered by separate modules that you’ll have to pay for first.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.6/5 stars based on 48 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 8.9/10 stars based on 59 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.4/5 stars based on 45 customer reviews

Advantages:

• User-friendly interface
• Simple and fast implementation
• Convenience of seeing all clusters in a single screen

Shortcomings:

• Cannot perform backups on a specific date of the calendar
• Database backup process is inconvenient and needlessly convoluted
• Automation capabilities are very basic

Pricing:

• Cohesity’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a free trial or a guided demo.
• The unofficial information about Cohesity’s pricing states that its hardware appliances alone have a starting price of $110,000 USD

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Justin H. – Capterra – “Backing up entire VM’s through vCenter is a breeze and works well. Application backups (Exchange, SQL, AD) will all require an agent and the agent management is very poor in my opinion. Replication works fine and restore times from locally cached data is quick. There are still a lot of little things that keep this from being a polished solution but the overall product is good.”
• Michael H. – Capterra – “Cohesity has been excellent to work with. The local team is always helpful and responsive, support is excellent, and the product exceeds all expectations. We started small because we were uncertain that they could do all of the things we heard about during the pre-sale process, but we couldn’t be happier with the product. We are currently in the process of tripling our capacity and adding additional features because we were so impressed by every aspect of Cohesity.”

My personal opinion on Cohesity:

Cohesity is a good example of a middle-ground enterprise backup solution in terms of its feature set. It has everything you may expect from a backup solution of this level – support for a variety of data types and storage environments, impressive backup/restoration speed, an impressive list of backup-centric features, and more. What’s interesting about Cohesity specifically is its infrastructure – the entire solution is built using a node-like structure that allows for an impressive scalability that is both fast and relatively simple to use. Cohesity’s interface is rather user-friendly in comparison with other software on the market, but there is also the fact that database backup with Cohesity is not particularly simple or easy, and there are little to no automation capabilities available, as well. Container backup needs much mire work, and Reporting is also limited.

MSP360 (formerly Cloudberry Lab)

MSP360 is a well-known cross-platform backup and recovery solution, offering integrations with most of the big public cloud storage providers, such as AWS, Azure, Google, etc. MSP360’s backup-related capabilities are vast and varied, including both image-based and file-level backups, disaster recovery in the cloud, high-class encryption and data compression. It also works with Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems, providing an unprecedented level of protection and disaster recovery capabilities.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.7/5 stars based on 204 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 8.1/10 stars based on 45 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.5/5 stars based on 403 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Easy initial setup and configuration
• Centralized control over a lot of different information and features from a single page
• Both backup and restore processes are quick and easy

Shortcomings:

• The inconvenience of having to pay an additional price for specific features such as SQL backups
• Higher than average price that may be unsuitable for small businesses
• Customer service receives a lot of polarizing reviews

Pricing:

• MSP360’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a quote. Their special “quote calculator” page allows potential customers to specify what specifically they want to be backed up, be it Windows, Mac, Linux devices, VMware, Hyper-V, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, etc.

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Andrej P. – Capterra – “Very satisfied, have been using many backup products in past 20 years and now I am happy and satisfied user, re-seller and admin of MSP360 for almost 10 years and have no plans to switch to anything else. Quite a lot of times I use it to restore some files, which users deleted accidentally or overwrote unintentionally, and the process of finding the right version of the file is much, much easier than with many other products.”
• Jim S. – Capterra – “I used to like the ticket support of Cloudberry Labs. I have been a paid maintenance customer since 2013. In the maintenance plan they offer upgrades and support. Even though they enjoy my annual maintenance fees on 9 licenses they refuse to honor the upgrade clause in the agreement. I used to recommend the software and praise the support but in the past year it went downhill fast. They don’t even read the issue in the support ticket and respond otherwise. I don’t not recommend them any more now based upon my real life experience now.”

My personal opinion on MSP360:

MSP360 is a product that was originally Cloudberry Labs – a relatively simple backup and recovery solution. Now it has an entire suite of features for all kinds of situations and use cases, be it cloud backups, physical backups, and so on. MSP360 supports a number of different operating systems, can offer both granular and large-scale backup features, and has enough centralization capabilities to offer complete control over the company’s backup and recovery processes. There are not that many positive reviews about MSP360’s customer service as a whole, and the pricing model of the solution also includes quite a lot of different features that are not included in the base package (meaning that users looking for SQL backups, for example, would have to pay extra).

IBM Storage Protect

IBM’s prime goal is to make data protection as simple as it gets, no matter the storage type or data type. IBM Storate Protect (formerly known as Spectrum Protect or Tivoli Storage Manager) is one such solution, offering impressive data protection capabilities at a scale with impressive security capabilities like encryption. There’s also a lot more of the different features, like basic backup and recovery jobs, disaster recovery, bare metal recovery, and so on. The solution itself is based on the agentless virtual environment and it can work well with both VMware and Hyper-V environments. The licensing model is charged per TB spent, no matter the data type, which makes it cheaper for some specific cases with large data processing amounts.

Customer ratings:

• TrustRadius – 8.0/10 stars based on 22 customer reviews
• G2 – 3.9/5 stars based on 60 customer reviews

Advantages:

• The convenience of having a single backup solution for a complex environment with multiple storage types
• A wealth of backup-related options such as granular recovery and integration with third-party tools
• Documentation and logging capabilities are highly regarded

Shortcomings:

• Setting up and configuring the solution properly requires time and resources
• Solution’s GUI is confusing and takes time getting used to
• The complexity of the architecture is significantly higher than average

Pricing:

• IBM Spectrum Protect’s pricing information only includes two pricing plans:
  • A monthly license that starts at $67.70 for either 1 Terabyte or 10 managed VMs
  • A perpetual license that starts at $2,160 per either 1 Terabyte or 10 managed VMs

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Naveen Sharma – TrustRadius – “Tivoli (TSM) software is best for the policy-based management of file-level backups with automatic data migration between storage tiers. It’s the best way to save on the cost of storage and other resources. I really like the deduplication functionality of source and destination data, which helps to save the network bandwidth and storage resources. The administration of Tivoli is still complex, which means you need good skills to manage this product. Although a new version is coming with a better GUI, it will still require good command-line skills to make Tivoli do everything.”
• Gerardo Fernandez Ruiz – TrustRadius – “If you also need to have an air-gapped solution, Spectrum Protect has the option of sending the backup to tape (and it can also replicate the information to another site if needed).”

My personal opinion on IBM Spectrum:

IBM Spectrum is a somewhat unknown backup solution from a well-known technological company. This is the same company that is mostly known for its hardware rather than software. However, IBM Spectrum is still a good backup and recovery solution for large companies – it is simple, feature-rich, agentless, and supports plenty of different storage types. It also excels in the area that is often perceived as the weakest part of enterprise backup solutions – reporting/logging capabilities. The solution in question can be a bit tough in terms of first-time configuration, and the overall interface of the solution can be rather confusing, and the individual elements of the solution can create real difficulty. But the solution is rather impressive as a whole.

Dell Data Protection Suite

Dell Data Protection Suite is a comprehensive data protection solution that should work for the majority of the companies of any size. Data protection levels are variable, user-friendly UI allows for easy data protection visualisation, and built-in continuous data protection technology (CDP) allows for fast recovery times for VM environments. There’s also a number of different applications in the package, as well, like the separate backup in the cloud, the support for more storage types, data isolation/data recovery/data analytics automatization, and so on.

Customer ratings:

• TrustRadius – 7.9/10 stars based on 5 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.1/5 stars based on 20 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Support for plenty of different OS types
• Great for large databases and enterprises
• Interface user-friendliness

Shortcomings:

• Backups could fail if some elements in the system are different from before
• Error reports are somewhat confusing
• A lot of complains about the customer support

Pricing:

• Dell Data Protection Suite’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a quote or a demo.
• The unofficial information suggests that Dell’s pricing starts at $99 per year per single workspace

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Cem Y. – G2 – “I like Dell Data Protection very much because it helps me to protect my personal computers as well as my work computers against malicious attacks. It has a very user friendly interface. You can protect your passwords, personal information perfectly. There are some properties of Dell Data Protection. I don’t understand some reports that it produces. It is hard to figure out what the problem is and which solution I need to apply. Its price could also be much more affordable. There may be some different price policies.”
• Chris T. – G2 – “The compliance reporting dashboard is terrific as it provides a quick overview of endpoint compliance. This tool is very taxing on older systems particularly when it does its initial encryption pass of the entire drive.”

My personal opinion on Dell Data Protection Suite:

Another good example of enterprise backup software from a company that is mostly known for its hardware appliances is Dell. Dell Data Protection Suite is not the first iteration of a backup solution from this company, but it is a decent enterprise backup tool. It can offer a user-friendly interface, plenty of centralization capabilities, a variety of features and functions in the realm of backup operations, and more. It supports plenty of different operating systems and storage types, making it a great fit for large-scale businesses and enterprises. At the same time, the solution has its share of problems, from inconsistent customer support reviews to confusing backup error messages and limitations with certain technologies and reporting capabilities.

Vembu BDR Suite

Data protection complexity is one of the prime points of Vembu’s solution, and they claim to be able to work with companies of any size. Their feature list is quite extensive, as well, having VMware backup, Windows Image backup, app backup, data replication, and so on. Their configuration time is shorter than many of its competitors, and the overall system responsiveness is praised by many users. However, it can get somewhat too complicated at times, and some users find that pretty annoying.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.5/5 stars based on 17 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 8.4/10 stars based on 88 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.2/5 stars based on 130 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Helpful and fast customer support
• Web-based user interface is fairly convenient and user-friendly
• A full-fledged Linux version of the solution

Shortcomings:

• A significant price increase across the board at the end of the previous year
• Steep learning curve
• Most of the customer support’s knowledge is based on Windows version, which may lead to confusion when it comes to Linux versions

Pricing:

• Vembu BDR Suite’s pricing varies quite a lot depending on the target data source:
  • VM Backup – from $18 per year per VM, with support for both Hyper-V and VMware deployments
  • Server Backup – from $60 per year per server, both Linux and Windows servers are supported
  • Application/DB Backup – from $60 per year per application/database, can work with SQL, MySQL, and Exchange
  • SaaS Backup – from $12 per year per user, works for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365
  • Cloud VM Backup – from $30 per year per AWS instance
  • Endpoint Backup – from $15 per year per endpoint, supports Windows and Mac devices
• It is also worth noting that most of the BDR Suite’s backup solutions are also available for free with most of the features and a strict limitation on the number of workstations/VMs/servers it can work with.
• A lot more details about Vembu BDR Suite’s pricing can be obtained at the official pricing page.

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Francesco Z. – Capterra – “Overall, I give BDRSuite 8/10 and would recommend it to anyone wanting to get a reliable backup solutions”
• Daniel E. – Capterra – “Overall the software is great for being free. I wouldn’t be confident or as likely to recommend it as a purchased product at the price point they are asking. Their whole product and documentation need improvement before I would have confidence in recommending it to other companies that would use it in their production environment.”

My personal opinion on Vembu:

Unlike most of the solutions on this list, Vembu focuses all of its software development efforts on just two solutions – BDR Suite and BDR Cloud. Both of these solutions can also be considered one and the same, to a certain degree, since BDR Cloud is just a feature-limited version of BDR Suite that works from the cloud instead of physical deployment. BDR Suite, on the other hand, is an incredible enterprise data backup solution with a truly massive feature set. It supports plenty of storage types and environment variations, while also being a relatively fast solution in terms of recovery times and response speed. However, it is also a rather complex software – one of the most complex data backup solutions for enterprise on this list. As such, any potential user should keep the overall complexity of this software in mind as a possible disadvantage for themselves.

Veritas Backup Exec

If you’re looking for a company that has a long history – Veritas may be the one for you, with its several decades of company success. Its backup and recovery capabilities are quite extensive, with information governance, cloud data management, and other brand-new functions. You can choose from either the deployable version of their solution or the integratable appliance. Veritas is highly favored by older legacy companies that prefer services that have proven themselves with time. However, users report that there are some problems with hardware scaling capacity, as well as other little ’niggles’ here and there.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.0/5 stars based on 7 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 6.8/10 stars based on 150 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.1/5 stars based on 230 customer reviews

Advantages:

• The sheer number of features available to customers
• Praise-worthy GUI
• Excellent customer support

Shortcomings:

• Working with LTO tape libraries is problematic
• Cannot export reports to a PDF file without Adobe Reader installed on that same system
• Automated reports cannot be saved to a different location on a different server

Pricing:

• Veritas’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly.

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Mark McCardell – TrustRadius – “Veritas Backup Exec is best suited for <1PB environments that deal with typical Windows & Linux file storage arrays. Once you delve into more sophisticated storage environments, there are no available agents for those environments.”
• Taryn F. – Capterra – “Veritas Backup Exec is a good choice for small to medium businesses with a relatively simple set up , not requiring many different agents to be backed up, and without excess amounts of data. The licensing model is complicated and can be expensive, but I have seen great changes in the options supplied now – such as the Per VM model”

My personal opinion on Veritas:

Veritas can be considered an average enterprise backup solution, to a certain degree – it offers most of the features that one would expect in a similar solution, be it support for plenty of different environments or a variety of features for data security, data backups, etc. The discerning feature of Veritas is its legacy, to a certain degree. Veritas as a backup software provider is a very old company, even by this market’s standards – and it managed to accumulate a lot of positive reviews over the years. This kind of experience and reputation is what a lot of older and more conservative businesses are looking for – which is why Veritas still has plenty of clients and gets newer ones on a regular basis. Veritas also has a number of very specific shortcomings, such as the lack of proper LTO tape support as backup storage, which can be a massive detriment for specific users.

NAKIVO

Nakivo Backup & Replication is another competitor on the list that is developed by a much larger company in general. Their backup solution is reliable, fast and can work with both cloud and physical environments, offering enterprise-grade data protection and a whole package of other features. Some of these features are: file recovery on-demand, incremental backup for different platforms, low backup size, impressive overall performance – and all of that is packed in a nice and easy-to-use UI.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.8/5 stars based on 305 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 9.2/10 stars based on 142 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.7/5 stars based on 203 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Easy to install and configure
• Simple and clean user interface
• Noteworthy customer support

Shortcomings:

• Error logging is limited and cannot always help with determining the cause of the error
• Limited support for physical servers running on Linux
• Higher than average price tag

Pricing:

• NAKIVO’s pricing can be split into two main groups:
• Subscription-based licenses:
  • “Pro Essentials” – from $1.95 per month per workload, covers most common backup types such as physical, virtual, cloud and NAS, while also offering instant granular recovery, virtual and cloud replication, storage immutability, and more
  • “Enterprise Essentials” – from $2.60 per month per workload, adds native backup to tape, deduplication appliance integration, backup to cloud, as well as 2FA, AD integration, calendar, data protection based on policies, etc.
  • “Enterprise Plus” does not have public pricing available, it adds HTTP API integration, RBAC, Oracle backup, backup from snapshots, and other features
  • There is also a subscription available for Microsoft 365 coverage that costs $0.80 per month per user with an annual billing and can create backups of MS Teams, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and more
  • Another subscription from NAKIVO is its VMware monitoring capabilitiy that comes in three different forms:
    • “Pro Essentials” for $0.90 per month per workload with CPU, RAM, disk usage monitoring and a built-in live chat
    • “Enterprise Essentials” for $1.15 per month per workload that adds AD integration, 2FA capability, multi-tenant deployment, and more
    • “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations
• Perpetual licenses:
  • Virtual environments:
    • “Pro Essentials” for $229 per socket, covers Hyper-V, VMware, Nutanix AHV, and features such as instant granular recovery, immutable storage, cross-platform recovery, etc.
    • “Enterprise Essentials” for $329 per socket, adds native backup to tape, backup to cloud, deduplication, 2FA, AD integration, and more
    • “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations, as well as backup from storage snapshots
  • Servers:
    • “Pro Essentials” for $58 per server, covers Windows and Linux, and features such as immutable storage, instant P2V, instant granular recovery, etc.
    • “Enterprise Essentials” for $329 per server, adds native backup to tape, backup to cloud, deduplication, 2FA, AD integration, and more
    • “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations
  • Workstations:
    • “Pro Essentials” for $19 per workstation, covers Windows and Linux, and features such as immutable storage, instant P2V, instant granular recovery, etc.
    • “Enterprise Essentials” for $25 per workstation, adds native backup to tape, backup to cloud, deduplication, 2FA, AD integration, and more
    • “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations
  • NAS:
    • “Pro Essentials” for $149 per one Terabyte of data, can backup NFS shares, SMB shares, folders on shares, and offer file level recovery
    • “Enterprise Essentials” for $199 per one Terabyte of data, adds AD integration, 2FA support, calendar, multi-tenant deployment, etc.
    • “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations
  • Oracle DB:
    • “Enterprise Plus” is the only option available for Oracle database backups via RMAN, it can offer advanced scheduling, centralized management, and more
  • VMware monitoring:
    • “Pro Essentials” for $100 per socket with CPU, RAM, disk usage monitoring and a built-in live chat
    • “Enterprise Essentials” for $150 per socket that adds AD integration, 2FA capability, multi-tenant deployment, and more
    • “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Ed H. – Capterra – “We got tired of the massive cost of renewals from our past backup software providers and decided to try Nakivo instead. They supported our need for Nutanix AHV, QNAP and Tape backups. I’m looking forward to trying the new PostgreSQL database option soon so that I can build my own reports. Nakivo gets the job done and gets better with each version.”
• Joerg S. – Capterra – “We are using Nakivo B&R for our new server with quite a number of virtual machines (VM Ware). Backup of data is onto a Synology via 10GB/s. The backup makes use of all available network speed. Once you understand how it works, its configuration is straightforward. Whenever we experienced some issues, Nakivo Service was very helpful (GoTo meeting) and pretty fast (next day at the latest). So far no complaints on their response.”

My personal opinion on NAKIVO:

NAKIVO may not have decades of experience behind its shoulders, and it is definitely not the most feature-rich solution on this market. However, none of these factors make NAKIVO a bad enterprise data backup software. Quite the contrary, it is a versatile enterprise backup and recovery system that is fast, responsive, and relatively easy to work with. NAKIVO offers on-demand file recovery, impressive backup performance, easy first-time configuration, and an impressive customer support team. However, it is worth noting that NAKIVO’s services are rather expensive, and it also has the bane of most backup solutions – the lackluster reporting/logging capability. Storage destination are also limited.

NetApp SnapCenter

NetApp’s power is their availability – with over 150 offices all over the world it is capable of providing a lot of local support. There are a range of different backup and recovery-related functions, with the ability to have access to your data via your laptop or even the mobile phone. There’s a centralized interface for your monitoring, scheduling and logging efforts, and there’s a variety of different data types supported, from apps and databases to MS Exchange servers, VMs, and so on. Their response times are good, and according to user reviews, the centralization is quite handy. But there are also problems with customer experience here and there, as well as documentation thoroughness concerns.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.5/5 stars based on 8 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 9.2/10 stars based on 2 customer reviews
• G2 – 3.8/5 stars based on 2 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Significant part of the cloning process is automated
• User-friendly solution with few complex settings or menus
• Remote backup capabilities are praise-worthy

Shortcomings:

• A decent number of bugs throughout the solution
• Limited customer support
• Restoring Linux servers remotely is not allowed

Pricing:

• NetApp’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a free trial or a “test drive”.
• The unofficial information suggests that NetApp SnapCenter’s average subscription fee starts at $1,410 per year

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Jesse S. – Capterra – “SnapCenter was great for a transition to another data center. It was fast and easy for us to transfer all of our data. Our storage filled with change logs and stopped backing up without any notification.”
• Sarthak P. – Capterra – “It is good and easy to deploy and use. Also, does offer quick and easy restoration of VM’s offered by VMWare”

My personal opinion on NetApp:

NetApp SnapCenter is a relatively unknown part in this list of enterprise data backup solutions – even though it is quite competent in its own regard. NetApp can offer backup centralization, a variety of scheduling options, plenty of backup-related features, and support for a number of different storage types. Backups created with the solution can also be accessed by practically any device that has a web browser, including laptops and mobile phones. NetApp is also one of the few solutions that has offices all over the world, providing a lot of local support for companies in specific countries – something that most competitors don’t do at all. It is worth noting that the solution itself has plenty of bugs, and its Linux capabilities are rather limited in comparison with Windows feature set.

Commvault

Commvault is all about applying cutting-edge technologies of their data backup and recovery solution to provide the best experience possible with various file types, data sources, backup types and storage locations. Commvault is known for its pinpoint accuracy backups for VMs, databases or endpoints, VM recovery, unstructured data backup, data transfer, etc. Commvault can integrate with more than a dozen cloud storage providers, including VMware, AWS, Azure, and many more. On the other hand, there are some areas that need to be worked on, according to some customer reviews, like UI friendliness.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.6/5 stars based on 39 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 7.8/10 stars based on 207 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.2/5 stars based on 78 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Easy connection with complex IT infrastructures
• A significant number of integrations to choose from
• Backup configuration is simple

Shortcomings:

• Not the most beginner-friendly solution on the market
• Takes a rather significant amount of time to set up and configure
• Basic logging functions are lacking

Pricing:

• Commvault’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a demo showcase or a free 30-day trial.
• The unofficial information suggests that Commvault’s hardware appliances’ price ranges from $3,400 to $8,781 per month.

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Sean F. – Capterra – “We’ve been using Commvault’s backup product for several years now and although a complex product due to all it can do it is still the best I’ve used in a corporate environment. In my opinion it really is only for larger businesses but I can see how a small business could still get some benefits from the product. We use it to backup our File, Email, Database servers and all of our VMware virtual infrastructure. As everything is located in one console you don’t have to go far to find what you need and there are agents for nearly any operating system or application typically used in an enterprise environment.”
• Doug M. – Capterra – “As the title says “Migrated to Hyperscale and no looking back”. We have great sales people and excellent support from Commvault.”

My personal opinion on Commvault:

Commvault is a relatively standard enterprise-grade backup solution that uses a variety of cutting-edge technologies to provide the best possible user experience to its customers. Commvault works with containers, cloud storage, VMs, databases, endpoints, and more. It delivers a fast and accurate backup and recovery experience, it can be integrated with a variety of cloud storage providers, and it is relatively easy to set up backup tasks with it. However, Commvault can be really expensive. At the same time, Commvault suffers from the lack of logging/reporting data for most of its features, and its first-time setup is notoriously long and complicated.

Asigra

Asigra has been on the market for a while now, earning its reputation over more than thirty years of experience in the field. Now Asigra provides a data recovery solution to its clients from anywhere in the world, taking advantage of a wide partner network with cloud backup and recovery services for different deployment types. Asigra is an agentless enterprise-class recovery software that supports not only servers and databases, but also VMs, endpoint devices, applications, and more. It can also eliminate backup data silos, reduce RTOs and claim a guaranteed recovery assurance in any case.

Customer ratings:

• TrustRadius – 6.7/10 stars based on 38 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.2/5 stars based on 82 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Extremely convenient agentless backups for different storage types
• Restore validation is quick and easy, figuring out the state of any backup in a very short time frame
• Restore process automation is incredibly convenient

Shortcomings:

• Feature implementation speed is slower than most competitors
• Different storage types may not be compatible with each other, such as the S3 storage and the extensible storage
• A limited number of support calls per year

Pricing:

• Asigra’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a demo showcase.

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Neel Shah – TrustRadius – “The majority of the problems that have come up in my use of the software have been resolved by Asigra’s support personnel, who are very knowledgeable, and their help site’s extensive knowledge base.I adore the agentless backup technology from Asigra. In our customer’s setup, I can install the DS-Client on a single machine, and it will backup every system connected to that network. I don’t need to set up the programme on numerous computers.”
• Mauro Carrillo – TrustRadius – “Asigra does a great job at automating efficient backup jobs. We can schedule and automate the backup process, thus reducing the need for manual intervention and freeing up IT resources that allows them to work on other IT projects and activities. The Asigra process is extremely efficient. It’s appropriate for any size business.”

My personal opinion on Asigra:

Asigra has been around for about three decades now, going through several rebrandings, while still managing to provide a respectable level of services in terms of backup and recovery capabilities. To this day Asigra remains a noteworthy backup solution with an agentless structure that supports endpoints, VMs, applications, and regular data storage. It has contracts with a variety of cloud storage providers and plenty of integrations with other services to ensure the safety and accessibility of all client data. Asigra claims to be able to eliminate data backup silos, but its feature implementation speed is slower than with most competitors, and there is also a limit on how many support calls a regular user can get in a year, which is a very unusual approach to customer support.

Carbonite Endpoint

As the name suggests, Carbonite Endpoint is all about protecting the endpoint data – information that resides in users’ smartphones, tablets, computers and laptops. Carbonite uses multiple different technologies such as global deduplication and file-level backup to improve data recovery speed and manage bandwidth of the backup and recovery processes. It can also interact with servers and external hard drives, offering a great deal in terms of security for your data without overpaying for it. The solution itself is fairly easy to use and offers a great deal in terms of price for the feature set.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.3/5 stars based on 165 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 7.3/10 stars based on 61 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Backups are checked regularly for ransomware and other malware types
• Initial setup is quick and easy
• Overall user experience with the solution is praise-worthy

Shortcomings:

• Slow administrative interface
• Difficult to specify which files and folders to back up
• Some of the files are ignored by the solution (for example if the symbol ~ is in the name)

Pricing:

• Carbonite’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website and the only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a consultation.

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Dustin D. – Capterra – “I really liked it until they implemented the HUGE price increase. Perhaps it was a problem with just that one employee but they definitely need to get better at communicating changes to their customers. I’ll be switching to a more cost effective product once our subscription is up.”
• Susan A. – Capterra – “Since it runs in the background and I don’t need to do anything with it – my experience is awesome! I love seeing the reports pop on the screen saying my system just backed up XXXXXXX number of files. And at any time, I can open the software and see the files and view my backup on the Cloud. I am using Carbonite Safe CE 22.2 — I have clients that say they have a backup to Google or other service, and quite frankly they don’t understand the complexity they will go through to try to retrieve their data

My personal opinion on Carbonite Endpoint:

Carbonite Endpoint is a solution that differs quite a lot from most of the examples on this list. Carbonite’s feature set is rather limited, it focuses all of its efforts on one single goal – protecting endpoints. It’s not uncommon for modern companies and enterprises to have hundreds or even thousands of devices connected to the same internal system, and protecting each device in this scenario can be a significant challenge. Carbonite was created to solve this exact issue, offering complete protection of every single endpoint in a system with encryption, granular backups, data deduplication, and more. It is relatively cheap and easy to work with, but it is not a complete backup and recovery by design, so it would need at least one more backup software to achieve full data protection on a company level.

Druva

It is fairly common for any company now to have their data spread across hundreds of different devices due to workforce mobility and the quick rise of various cloud services. Unfortunately, this change also makes it rather difficult to make sure that each and every device with the company’s data is properly protected. Services like Druva Cloud Platform come in handy in these situations, offering a wealth of data management options across different devices and applications. The platform itself works as-a-service and offers easier backup and recovery operations, better data visibility, less complex device management, as well as a range of regulatory and compliance operations.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.7/5 stars based on 17 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 9.3/10 stars based on 419 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.6/5 stars based on 416 customer reviews

Advantages:

• GUI as a whole receives a lot of praise
• Backup immutability and data encryption are just an example of how serious Druva is when it comes to data security
• Customer support is quick and useful

Shortcomings:

• First-time setup is not easy to perform by yourself
• Windows snapshots and SQL cluster backups are simplistic and barely customizable
• Slow restore speed from cloud

Pricing:

• Druva’s pricing is fairly sophisticated and offers different pricing plans depending on the type of device or application that is covered.
• Hybrid workloads:
  • “Hybrid business” – $210 per month per Terabyte of data after deduplication, offering an easy business backup with plenty of features such as global deduplication, VM file level recovery, NAS storage support, etc.
  • “Hybrid enterprise” – $240 per month per Terabyte of data after deduplication, an extension of the previous offering with LTR (long term retention) features, storage insights/recommendations, cloud cache, etc.
  • “Hybrid elite” – $300 per month per Terabyte of data after deduplication, adds cloud disaster recovery to the previous package, creating the ultimate solution for data management and disaster recovery
  • There are also features that Druva sells separately, such as accelerated ransomware recovery, cloud disaster recovery (available to Hybrid elite users), security posture & observability, and deployment for U.S. government cloud
• SaaS applications:
  • “Business” – $2.5 per month per user, the most basic package of SaaS app coverage (Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, the price is calculated per single app), can offer 5 storage regions, 10 GB of storage per user, as well as basic data protection
  • “Enterprise” – $4 per month per user for either/or Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace coverage with features such as groups, public folders, as well as Salesforce.com coverage for $3.5 per month per user (includes metadata restore, automated backups, compare tools, etc.)
  • “Elite” – $7 per month per user for Microsoft 365/Google Workspace, $5.25 for Salesforce, includes GDPR compliance check, eDiscovery enablement, federated search, GCC High support, and many other features
  • Some features here can also be purchased separately, such as Sandbox seeding (Salesforce), Sensitive data governance (Google Workspace & Microsoft 365), GovCloud support (Microsoft 365), etc.
• Endpoints:
  • “Enterprise” – $8 per month per user, can offer SSO support, CloudCache, DLP support, data protection per data source, and 50 Gb of storage per user with delegated administration
  • “Elite” – $10 per month per user, adds features such as federated search, additional data collection, defensible deletion, advanced deployment capabilities, and more
  • There are also plenty of features that could be purchased separately here, including advanced deployment capabilities (available in the Elite subscription tier), ransomware recovery/response, sensitive data governance, and GovCloud support.
• AWS workloads:
  • “Freemium” is a free offering from Druva for AWS workload coverage, it can cover up to 20 AWS resources at once (no more than 2 accounts), while offering features such as VPC cloning, cross-region and cross-account DR, file-level recovery, AWS Organizations integration, API access, etc.
  • “Enterprise” – $7 per month per resource, starting from 20 resources, has an upper limit of 25 accounts and extends upon the previous version’s capabilities with features such as data lock, file-level search, the ability to import existing backups, the ability to prevent manual deletion, 24/7 support with 4 hours of response time at most, etc.
  • “Elite” – $9 per month per resource, has no limitations on managed resources or accounts, adds auto-protection by VPC, AWS account, as well as GovCloud support and less than 1 hour of support response time guaranteed by SLA.
  • Users of Enterprise and Elite pricing plans can also purchase Druva’s capability to save air-gapped EC2 backups to Druva Cloud for an additional price.
• It is easy to see how one can get confused with Druva’s pricing scheme as a whole. Luckily, Druva themselves have a dedicated webpage with the sole purpose of creating a personalized estimate of a company’s TCO with Druva in just a few minutes (a pricing calculator).

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Andy T. – Capterra – “Our original POC when testing this product was very thorough and we were given ample time to test it and make sure it was going to fit how we needed it. Setting it up was incredibly easy and we were able to figure out a lot of the features on our own with minimal help. When we needed help, the team we were working with was great. We also had to work with support and that was great as well.”
• Dinesh Y. – Capterra – “My experience with Druva endpoint is amazing. From the time of onboarding this software I am not worried about data loss of the users. But I think Druva should consider more discount for NGO’s as well as corporate so that everyone can use it extensively.”

My personal opinion on Druva:

Druva’s cloud backup platform was built with the purpose of solving a rather popular problem of managing hundreds of different devices within the same system – which is why it is rather obvious that Druva’s solution mainly targets large businesses and enterprises. The solution itself is provided on a SaaS basis, capable of protecting all kinds of devices, including endpoints, databases, VMs, physical storage, and so on. Druva’s solution offers a wealth of backup and recovery features, impressive data protection capabilities, and compliance with a number of legal and regulatory matters. Druva’s pricing model is rather confusing, and the first-time setup is not an easy process, and it is unlikely to work well for an organization with a lot of data volume. Integration with some VM’s and databases is also very limited.

Zerto

Zerto is a good choice if you’re looking for a multifunctional backup management platform with a variety of features. It offers everything you’d want from a modern backup and restore solution – CDP (continuous data protection), minimal vendor lock-in, and more. It can be used with plenty of different storage types, ensuring complete data coverage from the start.

Zerto also offers data protection as one of the core strategies from day one, offering applications the ability to be generated with protection from the start. Zerto also has many automation capabilities, is capable of providing extensive insights, and can work with different cloud storages at once.

Customer ratings:

• Capterra – 4.8/5 stars based on 25 customer reviews
• TrustRadius – 8.6/10 stars based on 113 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.6/5 stars based on 73 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Management simplicity for disaster recovery tasks
• Ease of integration with existing infrastructures, both on-premise and in the cloud
• Workload migration capabilities and plenty of other features

Shortcomings:

• Can only be deployed on Windows operating systems
• Reporting features are somewhat rigid
• Can be rather expensive for large enterprises and businesses

Pricing:

• The official Zerto website offers three different licensing categories – Zerto for VMs and Zerto for SaaS
• Zerto for VMs includes:
  • “Enterprise Cloud Edition” as a multi-cloud mobility, disaster recovery, and ransomware resilience solution
  • “Migration License” as a dedicated license for data center refreshes, infrastructure modernization, and cloud migration
• Zerto for SaaS, on the other hand, is a single solution that can cover M365, Salesforce, Google Workspace, Zendesk, and more
• There is no official pricing information available for Zerto’s solution, it can only be acquired via a personalized quote or purchased through one of Zerto’s sales partners

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Rick D. – Capterra – “Zerto software and their amazing support team have allowed my company to bring in tens of thousands of dollars in new revenue by making it easy to migrate clients from Hyper-V or VMware to our VMware infrastructure.”
• AMAR M. – Capterra – “It’s a great software for any large organization. We use it both as a backup utility and DR site. Both sites work flawlessly without any issues. Support is a little hard to get but they are quite fast at responding, just not with the correct tech.”

My personal opinion on Zerto:

Zerto is a rather interesting option for large backup and recovery workloads – as a dedicated backup management platform, it was purpose-built to handle such tasks in the first place. Zerto’s main solution offers ransomware resilience, data mobility, and disaster recovery in a single package, while also being capable of working with a variety of different storage options. It is a Windows-exclusive solution, and the price tag tends to scale up quite fast for large companies, but the ability to perform workload migrations and integrate with different systems is usually worth far more than any price tag for large companies. Security and scalability may however, be a significant concern for larger organizations.

Barracuda

Barracuda is a fairly unusual company that offers configurable multifunctional backup appliances as their way to provide backup and recovery features. Barracuda Backup can create backups of applications, emails, and regular data. It offers extensive deduplication, data encryption, centralized data management, and plenty of other features in the backup and recovery department.

Customer ratings:

• TrustRadius – 8.0/10 stars based on 99 customer reviews
• G2 – 4.4/5 stars based on 49 customer reviews

Advantages:

• Barracuda’s user interface is relatively simple and easy to navigate, and creating backup jobs is a rather intuitive process
• Separate schedules could be set up for every single source that is backed up by Barracuda Backup’s appliance
• Data retention is also completely customizable and can be customized for every backup source separately

Shortcomings:

• Barracuda’s pricing policy is not what you would call egregious, but it is high enough for plenty of smaller businesses to not use it purely because they cannot afford it in the long run
• The solution’s reporting capabilities are rather basic and filtering through multiple reports can be a bit of a problem
• Every first-time loading of the solution takes quite a lot of time, no matter how fast the connection or the hardware in question actually is.
• Lacks Kubernetes support
• Disaster Recovery has some strict limitations

Pricing (at time of writing):

• There is no specific public pricing available for Barracuda Backup, the only way to learn this particular information is to request a personalized quote.
• The way Barracuda collects data for such a quote is rather interesting – there is an entire configuration tool available that allows potential customers to choose from a number of options in order for Barracuda to gain a better understanding of the client’s needs.
• There are five different steps that this tool has before dropping the user to the last page with the request to “contact Barracuda to proceed”, including:
  • Physical Locations – offers the ability to show how many different locations the client wants to cover, as well as the amount of raw data necessary (the basic setting is 1 location and 3TB of data)
  • Deployment – the ability to choose between deployment options, there are three options to choose from: physical appliance, virtual appliance, and managed service
  • Offsite Replication – an optional feature to replicate your data somewhere as an offsite storage, there is a choice between Barracuda’s own cloud, AWS, network transfer to another physical location, or no replication at all (this particular option is not recommended)
  • Office 365 Backup – a short and simple choice between choosing to create backups of existing Office 365 data or to decline the option if you do not wish this data to be backed up or there is no data at all
  • Support Options – a choice between three possible options, including the basic update package and the 8-to-5 customer support, an option with instant equipment replacement in case of a hardware failure and the 24/7 customer support, and a separate option for a dedicated team of engineers to be assigned to your specific company’s case

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Amanda Wiens – TrustRadius – “With the Barracuda Backup tool, we have all unified and centralized management. And regardless of location, we have a single console for managing cloud and simplifying everything. In our scenario, it is a large environment, and we recommend using a virtual infrastructure with a great fiber link. Backups and restoration are speedy and secure. It is undoubtedly the best solution in this field.”
• Josh McClelland – TrustRadius – “For larger environments, with virtual infrastructure in place, and the network bandwidth to support it, a Barracuda backup is great. It’s easy to back up an entire cluster, or just a single server. When it comes to restoring or spinning up a downed machine, the Barracuda Backup is second to none in these sort of environments. For the smaller clients, with budget concerns, only a few servers, not having the ability to spin up a failed server on the backup appliance itself is a little painful since we’d have to replace the physical hardware before getting services back online. I think having this ability would make for a great selling point to those smaller to medium size businesses that could benefit from this product.”

My personal opinion on Barracuda Backup:

Barracuda Backup is an interesting take on a hardware-based backup solution, using hardware appliances in order to provide data backups, email backups, application backups, and more. Its interface is easy to work with, and the solution also offers quite a lot of customization at different levels of the backup process. There’s also the fact that Barracuda Backup has a rather basic reporting feature set. As the solution relies a lot on hardware instead of just software, it makes the solution price that much higher, which could be too much for smaller or middle-sized businesses – but that factor is not as important for large-scale enterprises that can afford bigger pricing if it means complete data protection for their information. Overall though, there have been significant questions about its tech support, scheduling manager and user interface.

Arcserve UDP

Arcserve as a software provider is quite an interesting company with a variety of different solutions, and their flagship solution Arcserve UDP is also quite interesting in itself. It is a rather sophisticated cloud data protection solution that offers a variety of very specific high-end features that you would usually only see in an IT-grade environment, it can perform backups and restores in highly distributed environments, replicate virtual infrastructures, perform disaster recovery operations, and so much more.

However, the complexity of this solution is a double-edged sword of sorts, with the feature set itself being a hard sell for most SMBs with the lack of any kind of public pricing available whatsoever.

Customer ratings:

• G2 – 4.3/5 stars based on 15 customer reviews

Advantages:

• As a cloud solution, Arcserve Cloud Direct does not have to be physically attached to a company’s server using some form of hardware appliance, it can provide cloud-native backup and recovery options after virtual deployment
• Arcserve has plenty of different software and solutions to choose from, and Cloud Direct specifically boasts a surprisingly long list of IT-grade features when it comes to its data protection capabilities – including disaster recovery, backup operations, restore tasks, and more
• Despite the fact that Arcserve’s cloud solution boasts a large variety of complex features and capabilities, most of these features are surprisingly easy to work with and should be easy to work with for practically any IT specialist out there

Shortcomings:

• Arcserve’s lack of support for any kind of mobile device may be a dealbreaker for some potential customers, purely because of how many mobile devices are used inside of a single company on a regular basis
• There is no public information about the pricing of Arcserve’s cloud solution, but the variety of different expert-level features make sure that this particular offering would not be suitable for smaller businesses whatsoever, and the lack of any kind of approximate pricing may even turn some of the bigger clients away
• Arcserve Cloud Direct may be a cloud-centric solution, but the fact that it does not have any form of data deduplication to reduce storage requirements is not a good look from the competitive standpoint
• Some of Arcserve’s tools and offerings are not as tightly integrated as they perhaps should be, causing potential pain to the user.
• Dedicated and specialized infrastructure may be needed

Pricing:

• Arcserve does not usually reveal any kind of pricing information about its solutions publicly. As such, the only way to receive such information for a company is for that company to request a personalized quote.

Customer reviews (original spelling):

• Robert G. – G2 – “Cloud Direct is an excellent option for easy and secure off site backups and data storage. Product works great and as long as you have good internet, it has minimal impact on network performance. Cost effective and easy to use. MSP rich features and one console for all customer control makes this product a very useful and profitable software offering in our stack of services. Retention policy is built off calendar days and not backup generation count. So if you have a 7 day retention and you skip Sat and Sun on your backup schedule, then you only have 5 generations as the other 2 days count and will delete your generations.”
• Peter M. – G2 – “Setup is a breeze. Support is very responsive. The interface isn’t exactly intuitive. They tried to make it super intuitive, but in the process, it’s hard to know if you’re doing the right things for actually backing all your drives or setting up for disaster recovery.”

My personal opinion on Arcserve:

Arcserve as a software provider is not exactly the most popular company on this market, but it would not be true to call it completely unknown, either. Arcserve offers a variety of different solutions and software to choose from, one of which being their UDP solution – a comprehensive cloud-oriented data protection platform with a lot of features that are usually only present in very complex enterprise-level backup software. Unfortunately, this kind of complexity is also one of the biggest detriments of Arcserve’s popularity, leading to both small and large companies not picking it for one reason or another – but it still has its audience, and can work for middle-sized IT teams that know what they’re doing. There are also reports that can be very heavy on network bandwidth and needs specialized equipment.

Enterprise backup software comparison

The amount of information presented above can be somewhat overwhelming at first, especially when it comes to comparing specific solutions with one another. To try and mitigate that issue, we have also created a comparison table of all software we went over above using several different parameters:

• Deduplication support.
• Container (OpenStack, Docker, etc.) support.
• Mobile app support.
• CDP (Continuous Data Protection) support.
• Immutable backup support.

The reason why these specific solutions are chosen for this comparison is simple. Most of these backup solutions are well-known and respected in the enterprise software field, which makes it difficult to find basic features and functions that some solutions might not have. For example, parameters such as cloud support, disaster recovery, and data encryption were excluded purely because every single solution on the list already has these – completely invalidating the whole point of comparing software with one another.

As such, we have chosen five different parameters that can actually be compared across multiple software examples.

This table is also separated into two halves to simplify its navigation for the end user.

It should be noted that all software is being improved and expanding on a regular basis, which is why it would also be a good idea to double-check the software’s capabilities at the time of choosing one of the options above.

How to choose an enterprise backup solution?

Picking a single backup solution from a long list of competitors can be extremely hard due to the many factors the potential customer must consider. In order to make the process easier, we have made a checklist that any customer can rely on when attempting to choose a backup solution for their enterprise organization.

1. Figure out your backup strategy

A detailed backup strategy is practically required for large-scale businesses and enterprises, making it easier to plan ahead and figure out appropriate action for specific situations – user errors, system failures, cyberattacks, etc.

Some of the most common topics that should be addressed in a backup strategy are:

• High availability. Different companies have their own preferences when it comes to backup storage locations. One company might want to store backups in cloud storage, while another favors on-premise storage within its infrastructure. Determining the storage locations for future backups is an essential first step. In the context of 3-2-1 rule there needs to be several locations, both on- and offsite.

Example high availability infrastructure for enterprise: 

2 backup servers: primary one in the main data center, while the second one in another data center or in the cloud. A combination of storage systems following 3-2-1 rule: on-premise NAS or SAN via RAID, cloud and tape for resiliency. Real-time block-level replication between both servers. Automated failover and load balancers for backup servers to minimize load. High-performance network switches and paths, fibre channel. All of the above with the monitoring system and automated alerts.

• Backup scheduling. Understanding what time frame would be best to perform a system backup is key to making sure that there are no interruptions or slow-downs caused by a sudden backup process. Plenty of backup solutions prefer to create full backups outside of business hours to avoid interruptions to businesses themselves. However, enterprises may have so much data that creating fulls takes even longer than night, and in such situations synthetic fulls may be a better option.

Example backup schedule for enterprise: 

Create full backup during weekends (for example, Sunday midnight) to minimize impact on applications’ performance. Perform incrementals at the end of each workday (for example, 11:30 PM Monday to Saturday). A single differential backup on Wednesday night. Of course, for systems with critical importance (high-transactional DBs, for example) execute more incremental backups, probably several times per day.

• Backup policies. Determining backup policies wisely allows storage space and network bandwidth. A full backup would be best performed every once in a while (week or month, depending on your situation), and an incremental backup would have to happen on a regular basis (daily, for example) to ensure data consistency. Differential backups are in between full and incrementals because they require more storage space than incrementals, but are faster to restore. Choosing the proper mix of backup policies depends on data size, data type, data change frequency, RTO & RPO and network and storage resources.

Example enterprise backup policy: 

Perform a full backup once a month during the weekend when the network usage is at a minimum. Add 2-4 differential backups during the month to track changes since the last full. On top of that – add daily incrementals to track day-to-day differences. Use all incrementals once a month to create synthetic full backup, in case new full backup is not possible.

• Backup targets. An average company may have multiple storage types as a part of its infrastructure. The main goal is determining the specific storage types for a backup solution while also keeping the potential backup size in mind (since backups tend to grow in size as time goes on, and knowing when it is time to expand the existing storage or purchase a new one is important). Implementing tiered storage is also a good tactic, when essential datasets are stored in an expensive storage with rapid recovery capabilities, while older or less critical datasets may be placed into slower cloud storages like Amazon Deep Archive or to tape media.
• Audit requirements. There can be plenty of industry-specific requirements and standards that the company has to adhere to when it comes to data storage. Having a complete understanding of what regulations your company has to adhere to is a great advantage when it comes to choosing a backup solution. For example, organizations will almost certainly have to comply with GDPR and CCPA, PCI DSS if you’re accepting online payments, HIPAA if you’re a medical organization, SOX if you’re publicly traded, CMMC if you’re working with US DoD, and others.
• RTOs and RPOs. These parameters are some of the most important for any backup strategy. As their names suggest, RTO represents the time frame that would have to pass before the company’s operational status is restored. Conversely, RPO shows how much data the company is willing to lose without significant damage to its regular operations. Understanding your needs in terms of RPO and RTO also makes it easier to figure out parameters such as recoverability, backup frequency, recovery feature set, and backup software SLAs.

Example RTO & RPO requirements for enterprise:

• Critical apps & high-transactional databases
  • 1-2 hours RTO, 10 minutes RPO
• Regular work apps (CRM, ERP, etc)
  •  4-6 hours RTO, RPO 1 hour
• Email, messenger and other communication apps
  • 2-4 hours RTO, 30 minutes RPO
• File shares
  • 24 hours RTO, 4 hours RPO
• Other non-critical and demo systems
  • RTO 24-72 hours, 12-24 hours RPO

The process of finalizing the backup strategy as a single document has to be a collaboration between multiple departments to ensure the strategy’s adherence to the company’s objectives and business goals. Creating a concrete backup strategy is an excellent first step toward understanding what your company needs from an enterprise backup solution.

2. Research backup solutions for enterprises

This entire step revolves around collecting information about backup solutions. A significant part of this step has already been done in this exact article, with our long and detailed list of enterprise backup software tools. Of course, the analysis can go much deeper by calculating business-critical parameters and comparing different features based on the results of specific tests.

3. Calculate TCO

Enterprise backup solutions are considered long-term investments, and performing a cost-benefit analysis and calculation TCO makes it much easier to evaluate the software. Here is what needs to be taken into account during calculations:

• Cost of license (perpetual or subscription-based model);
• Cost of hardware;
• Implementation fees (in case you plan to use outsourced integration);
• Cost of ongoing support and updates;
• Cost of power, cooling and other utilities to run the backup system;
• Cost of additional bandwidth and network;
• Cost of storage (disks, tape, cloud, as well as storage management software costs);
• Cost of training personnel.

4. Perform “Proof-of-Concept” (PoC) tests

When you have identified a relatively small list of potential backup solutions, it is time to move on to the testing phase to ensure that the solution meets all your designated objectives. This is also where a more detailed evaluation of features has to happen. The idea is to ensure that more essential capabilities are included in the backup solution so that you don’t trade “easy data recovery” for “easy first-time setup”, for example. A good PoC should be working within your IT environment and not on a demo stand, to make sure the system behaves as expected when moved in production. The testing itself involves not only feature testing, but also stress testing the whole system under a significant load. You should also test the vendor’s support team, their responsiveness and effectiveness as well as their documentation. To succeed, clearly define your objectives and success metrics, and set a realistic timeline for all tests in order for the PoC to be time-efficient.

5. Finalize your choice & update DR procedures

At this point, there should be little or no doubt about choosing your specific enterprise backup solution. Creating your disaster recovery and business continuity plans around your new backup solution and its capabilities is essential. This is the final step of the process – ensuring that you have a detailed rulebook that specifies what actions are taken to protect each and every part of your system and what needs to be done if your system suffers some sort of data breach.

Who are the most frequent enterprise backup solutions users?

• Government and military organizations. Both military and government organizations work with information just as much as any other commercial company, if not more often. However, the requirements for data security and backup capabilities in these cases are much more strict and extensive, meaning that most backup solutions could not operate within these boundaries without completely changing their entire backup process. Thus such organizations require true enterprise-grade solutions for backup.
• HPC data centers. HPC data centers are created to analyze large data masses for analytical or AI-oriented purposes, and big data in large-scale, high-transactional databases is how these data masses are stored for further analysis or processing. However, protecting massive data volumes is not something that every backup solution can – and in addition, this information needs to be as secure as every other data type. Enterprise backup software is the only obvious choice for such organizations, but beware -there are barely a handful of solutions that can meet the typical needs of a true HPC environment.
• Research organizations. Many organizations in the R&D field are generating massive data amounts regularly. The data in question is necessary for various processes, and protecting such data is paramount for any business. The data in question can include datasets for analysis tasks, data for complex simulations, personal medical information, experiment results, etc. Many of these organizations are running IT environments that are getting close to HPC specifications.
• Fintech field. Plenty of financial tech businesses are obligated to interact with massive data volumes regularly – be it banks, investment firms, insurance businesses, etc. Much of this involves processing data in real time. Extensive data protection solutions are necessary for all this data to be protected while remaining compliant with PCI DSS, SOX, and other regulations.
• Healthcare field. There is an entirely separate field of work with its own set of regulations regarding sensitive data storage, and that is the healthcare field. Businesses dealing with protected health information must comply with regulatory frameworks such as HIPAA. Introducing an enterprise backup solution in this sphere is nearly always necessary in order to correctly protect its data, ensuring fast data recovery in case of a disaster and providing data continuity for a very demanding industry.
• E-commerce and retail. Customer data that retailers collect regularly involves a lot of different information – from transaction records and payment data to inventory information and so on. A lot of this data must be protected per one or several regulatory frameworks. Enterprise backup solutions exist to protect and safeguard information like this, combining compliance with protection in a single package.
• Universities and Education. Universities and other educational organizations typically produce and store significant data volume, whether students data, administrative personnel data, research data and science projects. Because of the sheer amount of data, the educational sector typically requires enterprise-level backup solutions to mitigate risks, and to manage and protect its data.

The future of enterprise backup and recovery

The entire enterprise-grade backup and recovery industry has been going through a metamorphosis of sorts, adapting to the new situations. The average IT environment is far more complex and data-rich than ever before, and legacy data protection methods are increasingly struggling to protect large volumes of complex information.

Enterprise backup solutions must now change to a proactive approach, moving far beyond reacting to existing issues and preventing potential problems before they manifest. The ability to monitor sensitive data at all times is far more resource-demanding than regular data protection methods. Still, it also provides better protection, lower downtime, and fewer chances of data loss.

Implementation of ML and AI features are also increasing in this industry, elevating the potential of existing tools to a new level regarding task optimization and process automation. The same could be said for application-aware backups, granular recovery, higher security and many other relatively new requirements in the industry.

There is a lot more emphasis on data security now than ever before. Data breaches are extremely common these days, and features such as access control, encryption, and immutability are becoming borderline mandatory for any enterprise-grade backup solution. Unfortunately, this trend is set to continue. The best enterprise backup solutions work constantly to try and keep ahead of constantly developing data breach methods and approaches by threat actors.

The future of this industry as a whole is moving towards backup solutions being faster, more secure, and more versatile at the same time. Expanding upon new advancements and functions in the field is how modern enterprises can ensure the safety of their information at all times.

The impact of enterprise backup solutions on environmental sustainability

There are multiple key values that enterprise backup solutions try to strive towards, including customer success, trust, innovation, and so on. Other, less-known values also exist, although they don’t get as much recognition in comparison. Sustainability is a good example of such a key value – even if it is as important as the rest. The idea of sustainability as a key value of a backup solution implies that there are multiple long-term values being created between different stakeholders to cover social, ethical, economic, and cultural dimensions.

Environmental concerns have been at the top of global discussion in many different industries and specialty fields, and the importance of the environment as a part of sustainability is at its highest right now. It would be wrong to assume that an industry as software-defined as backup solution software cannot contribute to this in any way. On the contrary, there are solutions such as Bacula Enterprise that can offer many different examples of how they attempt to reduce the environmental impact of their work while also promoting sustainability.

Bacula utilizes a variety of different green practices to reduce the overall environmental impact of its work, including both energy consumption and carbon footprint. The computing resources of the software are optimized to reduce energy consumption, and server virtualization reduces the requirement in terms of physical servers, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint and energy reduction once again.

Bacula’s software attempts to support and extend the hardware’s lifespan as much as possible while utilizing the available resources with maximum efficiency. The inherent customization allows for only necessary functions to be used regularly, resulting in generally better user experience and the ability to adapt to various sustainability goals from many sectors and industries.

Conclusion

Enterprise backup solution market is vast and highly competitive, which is both a positive and a negative factor for all customers. The positive factor is that the competition is at an all-time high and companies strive to implement new features and improve existing ones to stay ahead of their competitors, offering their customers an experience that is constantly evolving and improving.

The negative factor, on the other hand, is that the wealth of options makes it extremely difficult to choose one single solution for your company. There are so many different factors that go into choosing an enterprise backup solution that the process itself can become really tough.

In this article, we have attempted to present a long list of different enterprise backup solutions with all of their unique features, positive and negative sides, user reviews, etc. An enterprise-grade backup solution is a sophisticated combination of features and frameworks with the goal of providing a multitude of advantages to end users in the form of large-scale enterprises.

There are many different elements that an enterprise-level backup solution consists of, including flexibility, mobility, security, feature variety, and many others. Choosing the appropriate backup solution for a specific company is a long and arduous process that can be made slightly less complicated using a sequence of different steps presented in this article. As for the specific solution recommendations – our list included a variety of interesting enterprise backup software examples for all kinds of clientele.

Commvault might be an option for a large enterprise that is not shy of spending extra to receive one of the best feature sets on the market. Acronis Cyber Backup is a great choice for larger companies that are dealing with a lot of sensitive data, as it can offer one of the most sophisticated data security feature sets on the market. Veeam is another highly regarded player in the enterprise backup and disaster recovery market, known for its robust solutions that cater to a wide range of environments, including premium capabilities in virtual environments.

Alternatively, there are also backup solutions such as Bacula Enterprise that can offer especially high security, flexibility and scalability. It offers coverage to companies with many different storage types in place – from physical drives to virtual machines, databases, containers and clusters, with up to 10,000 endpoints covered at the same time.

Bacula works with both enterprise-grade commercial infrastructures and government entities. The Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate uses Bacula Enterprise for its live media broadcast environment, reporting exceptional results with a reasonable price tag and impressive customer support.

One of the most unconventional examples of Bacula Enterprise’s versatility is the fact that NASA chose Bacula’s solution. The next quote belongs to Gustaf J. Barkstrom, Systems Administrator at SSAI, NASA Langley contractor.

«Of those evaluated, Bacula Enterprise was the only product that worked with HPSS out -of-the-box without vendor development, provided multi-user access (BWeb), had encryption compliant with Federal Information Processing Standards, did not have a capacity-based licensing model, and was available within budget»

All in all, figuring out a specific solution for your company is no easy task, and we hope that this article was helpful to you in providing as much information about a number of different offerings as possible.

Why you can trust us

Bacula Systems is all about accuracy and consistency, our materials always try to provide the most objective point of view on different technologies, products, and companies. In our reviews, we use many different methods such as product info and expert insights to generate the most informative content possible.

Our materials offer all kinds of factors about every single solution presented, be it feature sets, pricing, customer reviews, etc.  Bacula’s product strategy is overlooked and controlled by Jorge Gea – the CTO at Bacula Systems of Bacula Systems, and Rob Morrison – the Marketing Director of Bacula Systems.

Before joining Bacula Systems, Jorge was for many years the CTO of Whitebearsolutions SL, where he led the Backup and Storage area and the WBSAirback solution. Jorge now provides leadership and guidance in current technological trends, technical skills, processes, methodologies and tools for the rapid and exciting development of Bacula products. Responsible for the product roadmap, Jorge is actively involved in the architecture, engineering and development process of Bacula components. Jorge holds a Bachelor degree in computer science engineering from the University of Alicante, a Doctorate in computation technologies and a Master Degree in network administration.

Rob started his IT marketing career with Silicon Graphics in Switzerland, performing strongly in various marketing management roles for almost 10 years. In the next 10 years, Rob also held various marketing management positions in JBoss, Red Hat, and Pentaho ensuring market share growth for these well-known companies. He is a graduate of Plymouth University and holds an Honours Digital Media and Communications degree.