Acronis, a leading provider of backup and disaster recovery solutions today announced that it has been included in the Gartner Enterprise Backup & Recovery Magic Quadrant for 2012.

Acronis has been positioned in the Niche Players quadrant with its unified platform that supports backup and recovery tasks for physical Windows or Linux machines, all major hypervisors (VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and Red Hat) and data within Cloud environments from one management console and one solution. Acronis is the only vendor to provide a solution that can restore a virtual machine to any hypervisor. Initially targeted at businesses with limited or no IT function, Acronis is expanding application and Cloud support to broaden the scope of this highly scalable product for data protection and disaster recovery for organizations of all sizes.

The report highlights that the industry is about to undergo a period of change citing:

• By 2016, one-third of organizations will change backup vendors due to frustration over cost, complexity and/or capability; and
• By 2015, at least 25% of large enterprises will have given up on conventional backup/recovery software, and will employ snapshot and replication techniques instead.

"There are three major challenges facing data management strategies today," commented Alex Pinchev, president & CEO of Acronis. "The explosion of data creation, the widespread adoption of virtual environments and the introduction of unstructured cloud storage options are driving new and very real complexity into the traditional backup and recovery market. With the maturity of disk imaging, snapshot and replication technology, the challenge is not within the backup, but the speed at which data can be found or machines restored with near-zero downtime. The next generation of backup and recovery technology must recognize and respond to these challenges."

This latest report highlights the challenges facing enterprise buyers by only including vendors with a broad-based and heterogeneous backup application, although in reference to the expectation that by the "end of 2016, 45% of large enterprises will have eliminated tape for operational recovery," tape capabilities were no longer a necessity for inclusion.