As servers hum steadily in backroom closets and cloud infrastructure stretches unseen across continents, a quiet revolution is unfolding.
The rules that governed how we safeguard our data—once static and predictable—are giving way to an era defined by relentless cyber predators, heightened regulatory compliance action, shrinking IT budgets, and sprawling cloud, edge, and hybrid networks. These tectonic shifts aren’t just IT bullet points; they are battles for digital survival.
Step into this changing world with us, and discover the five megatrends that will dictate data protection’s future—and how Bocada can help.
1. Seismic Shifts in the Data Protection Vendor Landscape
What’s Driving the Trend?
Leading modern data protection platforms such as Cohesity, Veeam, and Rubrik are in an arms race to expand further into security, cover every new and emerging cloud/on-prem/hybrid workflow, and grab market share. In December of 2024, Cohesity officially closed its acquisition of Veritas’ data protection business (NetBackup), becoming the largest data protection provider in the world. Additionally, Cohesity’s management team has set lofty expectations around what the combined entity will be able to achieve in terms of innovation, regarding “AI-powered insights, cloud-scale security, and a comprehensive multicloud portfolio.” Cohesity has adopted the mantra “No Customer Left Behind”, signaling that NetBackup and other acquired Veritas products will persist for “the foreseeable future.”
On the latter point, only time will tell. (In similar acquisitions, the play following an acquisition of a legacy or older software product has often been to sunset that legacy product and migrate customers to the acquirer’s products.)
How Bocada Helps:
Bocada’s vendor-agnostic platform normalizes data across 40+ popular backup solutions, standardizing and automating monitoring, alerting, incident ticketing, compliance reporting, and even remediation. Bocada’s independence from the data protection providers makes it easy to maintain continuity in dynamic vendor landscapes. No matter which tools you’re using today—or which ones you’ll adopt in the future—Bocada ensures that your backup operations and cyber resilience oversight remain consistent and reliable.
2. Escalating Cyberthreats and Ransomware Evolution
What’s Driving the Trend?
Ransomware and other cyberattacks are growing more sophisticated, often employing AI-driven intrusion tactics that target both production and backup data, threatening the prospects of successful and expedient recovery. As we go forward, data protection must evolve past merely taking backups and snapshots—and require the use of immutable storage, anomaly/threat detection (e.g., for ransomware), and zero-trust architecture.
How Bocada Helps:
Bocada is rapidly evolving to help data protection teams maintain oversight of backup-level security and stay ahead of ransomware and other modern cyberthreats. In 2024, Bocada released immutable backup and encryption reporting in Bocada Enterprise, making it easier for enterprise data protection teams to ensure compliance with their mandated backup security policies. Further, Bocada has introduced centralized AI-based backup anomaly detection in Bocada Enterprise, giving summary and detailed views of byte count, duration, and throughput anomalies detected in backup job metadata. This capability will help data protection teams stay ahead of ransomware attacks and other common issues that can affect backup success, such as hardware failure, network congestion, and more.
3. Proliferation of Regulatory Compliance Requirements
What’s Driving the Trend?
Global regulators are expanding their focus beyond data privacy into areas such as cybersecurity and resilience. As more stringent regulations emerge such as the NIS2 Cybersecurity and Resilience Directive in the EU, organizations are under increasing pressure to prove compliant data protection operations with many regulatory compliance frameworks at the same time.
How Bocada Helps:
Bocada’s comprehensive reporting framework makes it easy to demonstrate compliant data protection operations across complex, multi-jurisdictional environments. By configuring and automating different compliance reports for every compliance requirement/level, Bocada customers can simplify the process of demonstrating clear adherence to many regulatory compliance and internal requirements, eliminating disruptive “fire drills” when it comes to responding to auditors.
4. The Need for Automation
What’s Driving the Trend?
IT organizations are feeling the strain as budgets tighten even while data volumes surge, and nowhere is this felt more than in the data protection team. Unlike their information security counterparts – who Gartner says will enjoy 15% budget increases in 2025 – data protection and backup teams often find themselves having to do more with less, all while maintaining an expanding range of backup, archival, and recovery operations.
How Bocada Helps:
Bocada’s automated reporting and monitoring capabilities help data protection teams streamline their workloads. By automatically flagging backup failures and even automating remediation actions across any disparate backup environment, Bocada reduces the manual tasks that drain resources while ensuring critical data is protected. As automation becomes critical to business survival, Bocada empowers IT teams to maintain robust data protection despite fewer resources at their disposal.
5. Multi-Cloud, Hybrid, and Edge Complexity
What’s Driving the Trend?
In the modern era, data no longer lives exclusively in on-premises data centers. It is increasingly distributed across multiple public clouds, on-edge devices, and within IoT infrastructures. Achieving unified visibility and centralized policy enforcement across these hybrid ecosystems will be paramount in 2025 and beyond.
Why Bocada Matters:
Bocada’s unified platform consolidates reporting and analytics across your diverse cloud and on-prem workflows. By normalizing data protection data and providing a single monitoring interface, Bocada enables IT teams to enforce consistent protection policies, regardless of where data resides. Additionally, Bocada provides the insights needed for intelligent orchestration and workload portability, ensuring that your data protection strategies remain robust, flexible, and future-ready.
Stepping Confidently into Tomorrow’s Data Protection Landscape
As these megatrends reshape the data protection landscape, one thing remains constant: the need for a steady, reliable guide. Bocada’s vendor-agnostic, automation-driven platform is built to be future-proof, ensuring that no matter how your IT environment shifts, you’ll always have clear oversight of it. By simplifying oversight, standardizing operations, and adapting to emerging technologies, Bocada helps you remain not just resilient, but ready—prepared to meet tomorrow’s challenges with confidence and clarity. Not yet a Bocada customer? Let’s talk.