Buyer’s guide: Data protection for hybrid clouds

Performance and scalability: This makes sure that data protection mechanisms don’t create bottlenecks that slow down business processes. The data protection platform must be built with scalability and resilience.

Automation: This reduces manual intervention, eliminates mistakes, frees staffers to tackle higher level tasks, and speeds processes, such as recovery time from an outage.

Major trends in data protection for hybrid clouds

Data protection can be performed with on-premises appliances or in the cloud. And organizations can manage their data protection functionality themselves or turn to a managed service.

The trend lines are clear: Just as applications and data are moving to the cloud, data protection is moving to the cloud as well, due to the scalability, flexibility, and accessibility that the cloud provides.

The total global data protection market was valued at $136 billion in 2023 and is expected to hit $610 billion by 2022, according to Spherical Insights and Consulting. Data protection as a service (DPaaS) is a fast-growing segment within the overall data protection market, driven by organizations that have adopted hybrid clouds and need to protect data hosted by hyperscalers and SaaS providers, on top of data stored locally. The DPaaS market was estimated at $25 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow 33% a year, hitting $100 billion by 2029, according to research firm Mordor Intelligence.

Phil Goodwin, research vice president for the Infrastructure Systems, Platforms, and Technologies Group at IDC, says, “Data protection as a service remains a very important route to market for data protection software vendors. In some cases, this is data protection software vendors selling directly using DPaaS solutions, and in other cases is it via cloud services providers. Either way, [DPaaS] represents the fastest-growing consumption model and opportunity in the data protection market.”