When Gartner renamed their Magic Quadrant from "Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions" to "Backup and Data Protection Platforms" this year, it wasn't just a terminology shift—we felt it was a validation of the fundamental transformation we've been driving for nearly a decade.
I'm thrilled to share that Rubrik has been positioned as a Leader and furthest to the right in vision for the sixth consecutive year in this evolved Magic Quadrant. However, what excites me most is that Gartner's name change reflects exactly what we predicted when we founded Rubrik—that traditional backup would evolve into comprehensive data protection platforms designed for today's cyber threat landscape.
This recognition comes at a pivotal moment. As I reflect on our recent Forward 2025 conference, where we celebrated customers like Domino's Pizza, Zurich North America, and Arm for their cyber resilience leadership, one thing is crystal clear: the organizations thriving today aren't those with the best prevention strategies—they're the ones who've embraced the "assume breach" mindset and built recovery capabilities that work before attacks happen.
The Market Has Fundamentally Changed—And So Have the Stakes
The shift from "backup and recovery" to "data protection platforms" represents more than semantic evolution. It acknowledges that today's data protection must be fundamentally architected for adversarial threats, not just operational failures.
Our latest Rubrik Zero Labs research reveals the stark reality: 90% of organizations experienced a cyberattack last year, with nearly one in five facing more than 25 attacks. Even more concerning, 74% reported that attackers successfully compromised their backup systems—the very foundation of traditional recovery strategies.
When I speak with CISOs and CIOs across Fortune 500 companies, I hear the same fundamental shift in thinking. As one global financial institution CISO told me recently, "Prevention will always have gaps. My board doesn't ask if we'll be attacked anymore—they ask how quickly we can recover."
This is exactly why we built Rubrik differently from day one.
Why Our Preemptive Recovery Architecture Sets Us Apart
Traditional backup solutions were designed to address environmental disasters, such as fires, floods, and hardware failures. But ransomware isn't a flood. It's an intelligent adversary that studies your environment, identifies your backup systems, and specifically targets your recovery capabilities.
This is where Rubrik's architectural advantage becomes critical. Our Preemptive Recovery Engine doesn't wait for an attack to begin the hard work of threat analysis. Instead, it continuously performs the heavy lifting of identifying clean recovery points, scanning for threats, and pre-computing the metadata intelligence needed for rapid recovery—all before you need it.
Here's what makes this approach transformational:
Continuous inline scanning across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments with integrated Mandiant threat intelligence
Pre-computed hashing techniques that enable the identification of clean recovery points without time-consuming rehydration
Turbo Threat Hunting capability that can scan 75,000 backups in 60 seconds—versus 50+ days with legacy approaches
When PACCAR, one of our Cyber Resilience Award winners, needs to protect 3PB of data across 12 global data centers, they can't afford to spend weeks analyzing backup integrity during a crisis. They need answers immediately—and that's exactly what our platform delivers.
Identity + Data: The New Recovery Reality
Gartner's analysis highlighted one of our key differentiators: comprehensive data and identity resilience within a unified platform. This resonates because we recognize that 80% of cyberattacks now involve compromised credentials, according to Verizon's 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report.
When attackers compromise your Active Directory or Entra ID, every subsequent recovery effort becomes exponentially more complex. Traditional AD recovery can involve up to 22 manual steps—a nightmare during a crisis. Our Identity Recovery solution streamlines this process to a simple, 5-step wizard-driven approach.
Zurich North America, another of our award winners, exemplifies this approach. Responding to NYDFS Cybersecurity Regulations, they transformed their legacy systems using our unified platform, which orchestrates both identity and data recovery. They didn't want separate tools that require manual correlation during their worst day—they needed an integrated solution that understands the relationships between identities, data, and applications.
Code-to-Cloud: Where Modern Businesses Operate
Gartner specifically recognized our cloud innovation, and for good reason. Our research indicates that 92% of organizations currently utilize between 2 and 5 cloud and SaaS platforms for data storage. This complexity creates both opportunities and risks.
Consider the recent CodeFinger attack that targeted AWS S3 buckets across thousands of organizations, or the Scattered Spider attack that brought major retailers' operations to a halt for a full week. These weren't hypotheticals—they were business-threatening realities for organizations that didn't have comprehensive cloud cyber resilience.
Our code-to-cloud approach delivers integrated protection across the entire software development lifecycle. We provide full-stack data protection for Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud with cost-optimized, immutable backups that reduce cloud storage costs by 20-30% while maintaining enterprise-grade security.
For our customers like Arm, protecting intellectual property across hybrid environments isn't just about compliance—it's about safeguarding the innovations that power billions of devices worldwide.
AI That Actually Accelerates Business Outcomes
Perhaps most exciting is how we're transforming enterprise AI deployment through Annapurna by Rubrik. While 88% of AI pilots never make it to production, we're helping organizations break through this barrier by turning their backup data—their most complete, least disrupted system of record—into an AI-ready foundation.
Annapurna solves the fundamental challenge of enterprise AI: How do you securely, confidently connect your most important data to GenAI at scale? With governed data access, sensitive data suppression, and pre-built integrations across LLMs and applications, organizations can confidently transition from AI experimentation to production deployment.
Furthermore, we recently entered into an agreement to acquire Predibase to accelerate agentic AI adoption from pilot to production at scale. Together, Predibase and Rubrik will deliver radical simplicity in models and data, resulting in improved accuracy, lower costs, better performance, and automated data governance.
What This Recognition Really Means
Being named a Leader and furthest in vision for six consecutive years isn't just about market position—it's validation that we correctly anticipated where the industry needed to go. When we founded Rubrik, we bet that data protection would need to evolve from reactive backup to proactive cyber resilience. Gartner's market evolution confirms that bet.
But what I'm most proud of is how our customers are using these capabilities to transform their businesses. Domino's Pizza relies on our platform to ensure that millions of customers can order pizza at any time. Avolta protects over 5,100 outlets across 70 countries, ensuring 2.5 billion travelers have seamless experiences. These aren't just technology deployments—they're business enablement stories.
The Road Ahead
As I look toward the future, I'm more convinced than ever that we're climbing the right mountain together. The threats will continue to evolve, but so will our capabilities. Whether it's expanding our database protection across relational and NoSQL platforms, deepening our multi-cloud orchestration, or advancing our AI-powered analytics, we're committed to staying ahead of both your business needs and the threat landscape.
The question isn't whether your organization will face a cyberattack—it's whether you'll be ready to recover quickly when it happens. With Rubrik's platform, you can confidently answer your board's most important question: "When we're breached, how fast can we recover?"
The answer: Faster than you ever thought possible.
Download your copy of the 2025 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Backup and Data Protection Platforms to learn why Rubrik is the market leader in data security with the most complete vision for the sixth consecutive year.
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Gartner disclaimer
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Backup and Data Protection Platforms, Michael Hoeck, Jason Donham, Rene Rodriguez, Rizvan Hussain, Sankalp Rastogi, 24 June 2025.
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Sources:
¹ Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Backup and Data Protection Platforms, Michael Hoeck, Jason Donham, Rene Rodriguez, Rizvan Hussain, Sankalp Rastogi, 24 June 2025
² Rubrik Zero Labs. (2024). The State of Data Security: Measuring Your Data's Risk.