Why Gartner’s 2026 Backup Report is 5 Years Behind Modern European Engineering (And Why There’s Still Hope)
By the IssTech Engineering Team
Every year, enterprise IT leaders look to analyst research like the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Backup and Data Protection Platforms to validate their resilience strategies. But if you are running modern, declarative infrastructure in Europe today, reading the 2026 report feels like looking into a rearview mirror with a few glimpses of the future.
Analyst frameworks still evaluate data protection through an outdated lens: monolithic software suites, centralized GUI consoles, and traditional virtual machines. Meanwhile, European platform engineering teams have moved on. Driven by strict regulatory mandates like NIS2 and DORA, alongside a deep commitment to GitOps and Kubernetes, the definition of "baseline data protection" has fundamentally changed.
Here is why standard enterprise analyst reports no longer reflect modern cloud-native operations—and why it’s time for a dedicated Cloud-Native Magic Quadrant.
1. The "Monolithic Backup" Myth: Why One Tool Cannot Protect Everything
Gartner’s entire framework is built on the belief that a single backup platform should protect everything. In fact, Gartner’s inclusion criteria explicitly exclude specialized solutions—disqualifying vendors that focus exclusively on containers or specific SaaS ecosystems.
This creates a massive blind spot. A legacy enterprise backup suite will never properly protect a modern, heterogeneous IT environment. When vendors boast about having the "largest supported platform," test it against modern European reality:
Can it back up a custom cloud-native app like IssAssist? No.
Does it offer native, agentless protection for European sovereign clouds like Safespring? No.
Does it protect critical SaaS platforms like HubSpot CRM? No.
Trying to force a traditional backup engine onto Kubernetes or niche SaaS results in shallow, incomplete protection. Instead of chasing a mythical "single pane of glass," modern IT requires platform-specialized, best-of-breed tools (like Veeam Kasten, AvePoint, or K8up) federated under an overarching control plane—an architectural strategy IBM has rightly embraced.
2. The Outsourcing Shift: European Internal IT Left Legacy Behind a Decade Ago
At IssTech, we’ve observed a fundamental shift over the last ten years: most European enterprises have already outsourced their legacy IT.
Traditional infrastructure—such as on-premises Active Directory, standalone Microsoft SQL Servers, and legacy Linux/Apache stacks—was long ago handed over to outsourced IT partners and Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Today, internal European IT and Platform Engineering teams focus exclusively on modern cloud-native stacks. Their primary mandate is migrating remaining legacy workloads out of outsourcing datacenters and building cloud-native applications on public or European sovereign clouds.
When analyst reports spend significant real estate evaluating legacy VM backups and Active Directory Forest Recovery, they are scoring capabilities that internal engineering teams no longer manage day-to-day. Internal teams need protection for the cloud-native applications they are building now, not the legacy infrastructure their outsourcing partners manage.
3. The Timeline Gap: Infrastructure Recovery is Today’s Reality, Not 2030’s
Gartner predicts that only 35% of enterprises will utilize cloud application infrastructure recovery solutions by 2030, up from less than 5% today.
In Europe, that 5% statistic is wildly out of touch. More than half of modern engineering teams already rely on declarative infrastructure (OpenTofu, Terraform, Helm) and automated Kubernetes state recovery. Restoring a raw database volume without its surrounding Kubernetes manifests, ingress rules, secrets, and API configurations leaves an application completely offline. For European organizations bound by strict regulatory SLAs, recovering application infrastructure alongside data is a day-one operational requirement.
4. Treating Kubernetes and Git Repositories as "Optional" Extras
In Gartner's criteria, protection remains heavily centered on traditional OSs, hypervisors, and VMs. Meanwhile, native support for Kubernetes, Git repositories (GitHub, Azure DevOps, GitLab), and managed PaaS databases are classified merely as Optional Features.
Leaving container orchestration and source control outside mandatory protection baselines exposes the software supply chain. The Git repository is the single source of truth for application code, while Kubernetes orchestrates the live state. Backup frameworks that relegate K8s and Git to optional plugins miss where modern applications actually live.
5. The Shift to Backup-as-Code (BaC)
Analyst evaluations remain locked in an administrative mindset: a central backup team navigating a vendor’s proprietary SaaS or appliance console.
Modern teams manage resilience through Backup-as-Code (BaC). Backup policies, retention rules, and application blueprints (such as Veeam Kasten Blueprints) belong in declarative YAML right alongside application Helm charts. They are version-controlled in Git, tested in pull requests, and automatically deployed via CI/CD pipelines (ArgoCD, Flux). Data protection must be owned directly by platform engineers in code, not bolted on retroactively by central IT.
6. The Security Baseline Failure: NIS2 Makes "Optional" Security Illegal
Gartner categorizes key security mechanisms as "optional" features:
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) & Multi-Person Approval
SIEM / SOAR Integrations for Automated SOC Containment
Isolated Recovery Environments (Cleanrooms) & Real-Time Threat Scanning
Under Europe’s NIS2 Directive (Article 21) and DORA, operating backup infrastructure without zero-trust access controls, automated incident response signals, and isolated cleanrooms violates mandatory legal duties of care. Categorizing baseline identity protection and SOC connectivity as luxury add-ons fails to reflect modern threat landscapes where ransomware actors target backup management planes first.
7. Hyperscaler Lock-In vs. Sovereign Cloud Neutrality
The Gartner report focuses heavily on global US hyperscalers while ignoring European sovereign cloud providers like OVHcloud, Scaleway, Hetzner, Exoscale, and Safespring.
Furthermore, analyst reports frequently penalize products for utilizing workload-native clients or agents inside cloud instances, favoring "agentless" snapshots tied directly to US hyperscaler APIs. For European organizations prioritizing digital sovereignty, relying strictly on US hyperscaler snapshot APIs creates deep vendor lock-in. A universal, workload-native protection layer guarantees portability and encryption boundaries across public, sovereign, and on-premises environments.
8. The Analyst "Questionnaire Bias": Why Innovations Like Veeam Kasten Get Silenced
How a report evaluates a vendor is entirely dictated by the questions it asks. Because Gartner’s vendor survey prioritizes legacy enterprise debt—focusing heavily on hypervisors, Windows/Linux VMs, and standard public cloud storage—it classifies container-native features, vector databases, and modern cloud providers as "Optional".
This creates a bizarre distortion:
Veeam possesses one of the most powerful Kubernetes-native backup engines on the market in Veeam Kasten K10. Kasten utilizes advanced Blueprint technology to protect custom cloud-native apps (like IssAssist), containerized LLM/vector databases, and declarative K8s configurations.
Yet, because Gartner’s survey didn't ask the right questions to score modern container depth, Veeam’s writeup in the report barely mentions Kasten.
9. The Glimmer of Hope: The Analyst World IS Evolving
Despite these structural blind spots, there is reason for optimism. Progress is happening.
Comparing the 2026 report to previous years, we finally see GitHub, Atlassian Jira, Slack, Okta, and Azure DevOps recognized as evaluated SaaS and workload targets. Gartner is beginning to acknowledge that an enterprise's most valuable IP lives inside code repositories, ticketing systems, and identity providers.
We hope that by 2027, this scope expands further to include containerized vector databases, MongoDB Cloud, and European sovereign SaaS platforms. The market is shifting, and analyst frameworks are slowly feeling the pressure of modern IT reality.
The Road Ahead: Time for a "Cloud-Native Magic Quadrant"
Data protection cannot be evaluated through the lens of 20th-century IT. Trying to evaluate Kubernetes, Backup-as-Code, and modern SaaS resilience inside a report dominated by legacy VM backups does a disservice to both legacy vendors and modern innovators.
At IssTech, we look forward to the day Gartner splits this market and introduces a dedicated Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Native Data Protection Platforms—one that places Kubernetes, GitOps, NIS2 compliance, and European sovereignty at the very center.
Until then, European platform teams must look beyond traditional analyst boxes and build resilience strategies designed for where technology is actually going, not where it used to be.
Hear our story: Want to see a better solution?
If you want to hear our story and how we think you should set up your backup strategy, contact us at info@isstech.io and we can set up a 45-minute remote meeting.
