Veeam, Rubrik and Commvault are the three platforms UK IT leaders most often shortlist when modernising backup. They overlap heavily on paper. In practice they make sharply different trade-offs — and most of the regret we hear about backup investments comes from picking the wrong one for the team that has to run it, not the wrong one for the workload.
The short answer first
Veeam is the safe default. Broadest workload coverage, the deepest pool of trained engineers in the UK market, the most flexible licensing (Veeam Universal Licence — per workload, any combination), and a 25-year track record. If you don't have a strong reason to do something different, Veeam is the answer.
Rubrik is the right call when cyber resilience is your number-one driver. The platform is immutable-by-default, includes anomaly detection across the backup data plane, provides sensitive-data discovery (PII / PCI / GDPR), and the $10M Ransomware Recovery Warranty is real (we've seen it paid out). If your CISO is the budget holder, this is usually the answer.
Commvault is the right call when you have an existing Commvault estate worth preserving, or when you're running a complex mix of workloads (SAP HANA, Oracle, Kubernetes, multi-cloud) where the management plane breadth matters more than any single feature.
Where Veeam wins
Veeam's VUL (Veeam Universal Licence) is the cleanest licensing model in the market — one licence covers any combination of VM, physical, cloud, Kubernetes and SaaS. You pre-buy a quantity, deploy where it makes sense, and rebalance later. No vendor "uplift" when you move VMs to AWS.
The Veeam ecosystem (VMCE certifications, MSP partner depth, third-party integrations like Wasabi / Object First / Hardened Repository) is denser than any competitor. If you're hiring or contracting backup engineers in the UK, the talent pool is overwhelmingly Veeam-trained.
Veeam Data Platform Advanced and Premium editions include Veeam Recovery Orchestrator (formerly Availability Orchestrator), which is the strongest tested-recovery + DR runbook tooling in the market. For DORA / Operational Resilience evidence, Recovery Orchestrator gives you the testable runbook your CRO will accept.
Where Rubrik wins
Rubrik is built on a zero-trust architecture from the chassis up. Backups are immutable by default — there is no "make it immutable" checkbox you can forget to tick. This sounds like a small thing until your ops team forgets to tick it.
Anomaly detection runs across the backup data set, not just at the agent level. Mass file encryption shows up as a backup data delta anomaly within hours, often before the production EDR has caught up. We've had two customer incidents where Rubrik anomaly detection flagged ransomware before the customer's SOC.
Sensitive-data discovery (Rubrik Polaris) tells you where your PII / PCI / GDPR data actually lives — and where copies of it exist. For GDPR Article 30 records of processing and for the next ICO breach you have to scope, this is invaluable.
The Ransomware Recovery Warranty (up to $10M) is uniquely Rubrik — and unlike most vendor warranties, the small print is reasonable. We've seen it pay out in real engagements.
Where Commvault wins
Commvault's workload breadth is unmatched. SAP HANA (BACKINT-certified), Oracle (RMAN-integrated), Sybase, DB2, MongoDB, MariaDB, AS/400 — all under one console. If you're a complex enterprise with a long tail of legacy database platforms, Commvault is often the only platform that natively handles all of them.
Commvault Cloud (the new SaaS-managed control plane, launched 2024) lifts a meaningful portion of operational burden off the customer team. For organisations without a dedicated backup engineer, this can be the deciding factor.
Metallic — Commvault's SaaS backup-as-a-service line for SaaS workloads (M365, Salesforce, etc.) — is the most mature single-vendor SaaS-only backup play in the market. If your scope is exclusively SaaS, Metallic alone is worth a look.
The dimensions that actually decide it
These are the questions we ask in every backup-modernisation engagement. The answers, more than any feature checklist, determine the right platform.
- •Who runs the platform day-to-day? If it's a small generalist team, Rubrik or Commvault Cloud reduce operational burden more than Veeam.
- •Is your CISO driving the budget? If yes, Rubrik's zero-trust posture and warranty win the room.
- •How many "exotic" workloads do you have? If you have SAP HANA, Oracle, Sybase, AS/400 — Commvault.
- •How important is licensing flexibility 3 years out? Veeam VUL flexes; Rubrik and Commvault are stickier.
- •Do you have an existing Veeam estate? If yes, switching costs are real — the right comparison is "is the new option meaningfully better" not "is the new option marginally better".
A note on Microsoft 365 Backup
All three vendors offer Microsoft 365 protection. Microsoft itself launched Microsoft 365 Backup in 2024 as a paid add-on to E3/E5. For pure M365-only customers, Microsoft 365 Backup is now a credible default — but you give up the granular search / point-in-time / cross-tenant capabilities that Veeam, Rubrik or Commvault provide. Most of our customers still run a third-party platform alongside or instead of Microsoft 365 Backup for these reasons.
What Servnet does
We are an authorised UK partner of Veeam, Rubrik and Commvault. We sell, deploy, manage and migrate between all three — and because we're vendor-neutral, we genuinely recommend the one that fits, not the one with the best margin that quarter.
A typical backup-modernisation engagement runs: 1) scoping workshop with the IT and security teams (2 weeks), 2) a 1-2 page recommendation with sized commercials and migration plan, 3) phased deployment alongside legacy until cutover, 4) tested-recovery sign-off and DR runbook documentation. End-to-end is typically 8–14 weeks.