In a world where so much critical business data is digitized and accessed via global IT infrastructure, many regulatory compliance standards such as NIS2, GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2 require businesses to ensure that their data is not only backed up but is also recoverable.
These regulations are not merely bureaucratic hurdles; they exist because data loss can have devastating consequences.
Just look at the impact of the 2024 ransomware attack against UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Change Healthcare. When Change Healthcare, the largest clearinghouse for insurance billing and payments in the U.S., was targeted, the ransomware crippled healthcare operations and severely disrupted patient care for months. Events like this highlight how data loss doesn’t just risk consumer privacy—it can also jeopardize business continuity, harm consumers, and result in catastrophic monetary and reputational damage to the victimized organization. In this case, UnitedHealth Group estimates that the total damages will exceed $2.3 billion.
The difference between an organization that has prioritized cyber resilience through backup excellence and one that hasn’t is night and day. As technology continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, the question organizations must ask themselves is this: Is our data protection oversight future-proof?
What Organizations Must be Future-Proof Against:
Ransomware
Ransomware has become a pervasive threat that looms over data protection teams, largely because of the stark contrast between (a), a smooth recovery thanks to a well-managed backup environment (i.e., full recovery in days or weeks) and (b), a plodding recovery with poor or compromised backups (i.e., months of business disruption and hundreds of millions in consulting fees, ransom payments, customer compensation, and financial penalties).
Ransomware has grown more sophisticated, with attackers increasingly targeting backup files to prevent recovery from backups and drive up willingness to pay ransoms. In response, modern data protection tools such as Veeam, Cohesity, Commvault, and Rubrik have been racing to add ransomware resilience tools to their offerings, for example with immutable backups (to prevent backup files from being compromised) and anomaly/threat detection (to help early detection of a ransomware attack).
The “3-2-1-1-0” backup rule has emerged as a modern version of the 3-2-1 backup rule: keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media types, with 1 offsite copy, 1 offline, and 0 errors during recovery verification.
Bocada is stepping up to meet the threat of ransomware head-on by adding immutable and encrypted backup reporting solutions and centralized backup anomaly detection. These new capabilities enable Bocada customers to ensure their backups will remain secure and resilient against ransomware attacks, even when attackers have already gotten past cybersecurity defenses such as MFA, firewalls, and antivirus/scanners.
Infrastructure Trends
With so many organizations moving their IT operations to one or more public cloud platforms, data protection strategies must evolve to accommodate this transition. It’s not enough to rely on providers offering support for cloud-based workloads; organizations need partners who align with their broader cloud-first initiatives and help future-proof their infrastructure.
Bocada has developed solutions designed to keep pace with these trends. Offering both on-premises and cloud-based SaaS editions of its award-winning backup monitoring software, Bocada ensures enterprises have the flexibility to support their infrastructure, whether it’s on-prem, hybrid, or fully cloud-based. On top of this, the company has introduced cloud and on-prem storage monitoring and alerting, enabling backup & storage professionals to stay ahead of their organization’s storage needs while reducing storage-related costs.
Market Changes
As rapidly as new IT workloads emerge and existing ones shift or disappear, the commercial data protection market is in a state of constant flux. A leading backup tool can quickly become legacy/obsolete if it fails to keep up with modern demands such as ransomware protection and support for multi-cloud computing.
For illustration purposes, comparing Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions from 2016 to 2024 reveals a sea of changes. From 2016 to 2024, IBM has dropped out of the leaders quadrant while Veeam has grown from an emerging leader to the #1 leadership spot (also #1 in market share according to IDG). Rubrik and Cohesity have emerged as strong leaders in 2024 despite not even being represented in any quadrant of the 2016 edition.
Furthermore, large shifts in demand or adoption of a data protection solution can often catalyze market consolidation, as it has in the case of Cohesity acquiring NetBackup from Veritas in 2024. This acquisition is seen by many to be driven by the future opportunity to migrate NetBackup’s large enterprise installed base to Cohesity’s modern data protection solutions.
In the monitoring space, one key factor that keeps Bocada ahead of the curve is its vendor-agnostic approach.
Unlike other backup monitoring or analytics products offered by vendors whose primary business is to sell their own backup products, Bocada operates independently. This means two things for Bocada customers: (1) Bocada offers its customers an optimal user experience across backup applications regardless of the vendor offering each application, and (2), regardless of how the backup market shifts over time, Bocada will continue to support the most relevant products.
Preparing Today for Tomorrow’s Data Protection Challenges
For any business looking to future-proof its data protection operations, one thing is clear: it’s not enough to rely on legacy solutions or outdated methods. Organizations need to partner with solution providers that invest in staying ahead of key threats and technological trends. Data protection products must be future-proof, but so too must your backup monitoring strategies. As data protection evolves, so should your oversight—ensuring that when the future arrives, your data will be safe, secure, and easily recoverable.
Is your organization missing future-proof data protection oversight? Request a demo today to learn how Bocada’s automated monitoring platform ensures future-proof cyber resilience and makes it easy to meet data protection obligations.