Why do companies use so many backup vendors?

Who’d a thunk it? Most businesses have two or three backup suppliers and some businesses  have four or more.

This was revealed by an Enterprise Strategy Group report; “2018 Data Protection Landscape Survey.” It’s a paid-for report but Actifio revealed some findings.

Some 59 per cent of the 300 IT professionals surveyed said their organisations used two or three backup vendors and were going to carry on doing so.

Almost a third, 30 per cent, used a single vendor and half of these expectto use more than one in the future. 

ESG chart of backup vendor numbers

A few respondents used four backup vendors (6 per cent), and some even more (4 per cent). 

But 16 per cent expect to use four backup vendors within two years and 12 per cent expect to use more than four.

It seems, well, rather odd that companies should use so many suppliers.  As Jay Livens, Actifio’s senior director for product marketing, notes in a comment on the report, “the more backup applications you support, the higher the cost and the greater the risk of data loss!”

But its seems the need for specialists to overcome the limitations of traditional data protection suppliers has been great enough to overcome these disadvantages.

The report authors speculate that organisations are choosing best-of breed backups for different workloads, such as databases or SaaS. However, traditional backup vendors have been unable to develop their products fast enough, and so leaving space for  a new wave best-of-breeders to invade  and prosper. Examples include  Veeam, (virtual servers), Datto  (cloud) and  Druva (endpoint).