Niche Player: Micro Focus

Micro Focus is a new player on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions. The U.K.-based company’s Data Protector platform primarily protects workloads in physical and virtual environments. New capabilities recently announced include support for Microsoft 365 Exchange Online, improved Hyper-V backup, and integration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Primera storage array snapshots. Micro Focus ranks in last place on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for both vision and execution.

Strength: Data Protector Express edition for virtual environments offers one of the lowest price-per-socket licensing among all the vendors in the market, Gartner said. Data Protector supports a broad range of purpose-built deduplication appliance vendors.

Weakness: Gartner said Micro Focus trails the competition in its ability to provide data protection capabilities for public cloud IaaS, SaaS and hyperconverged infrastructure. It also lacks critical anti-ransomware functionality such as detection of anomalous conditions, isolated recovery orchestration and integration with third-party malware scanners.