Niche Player: Zerto

Brand new to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions this year is Boston-based Zerto. The Zerto platform is a converged backup and DR solution aimed at protecting workloads both on-premises and in the cloud. New features recently released include support for AWS and Microsoft Azure as long-term retention targets, instant file recovery, and improvements in backup performance and capacity monitoring. Zerto ranks among the bottom of the pack for both vision and execution on Gartner’s backup and recovery software Magic Quadrant. In July, Hewlett Packard Enterprise unveiled its plan to acquire Zerto for $374 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of HPE’s fiscal year 2021.

Strength: Zerto provides a single platform that combines backup and DR functionality to simplify data protection architectures. Gartner said customers indicate that the company offers an intuitive UI that facilitates ease of use.

Weakness: Zerto doesn’t support malware detection and relies on third-party storage repositories for providing backup immutability. Gartner says due to architectural limitations, Zerto does not support air-gapping capabilities.