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7 Leading Enterprise Backup Platforms for Workload Portability
08 Oct 2026
The provider's status page flipped to "service disruption" twenty minutes ago, and your production region went down with it. Then someone on the bridge call opens the recovery runbook and finds every backup sitting in that same cloud, in a snapshot format only that provider's tooling can restore.
That's the problem workload portability solves: protecting a workload in one cloud and being able to recover it, or move it, into another. It's also where the leading enterprise backup platforms differ most, because "multi-cloud support" on a datasheet often means each cloud backs up to itself.
I sorted these seven by how far a backup can travel and still come back as something you can run.
Short version, if you need it:
Eon is the best pick for teams that need backup data to move across AWS, Azure, and GCP. It can keep managed database backups in a vault in a different cloud, let you query that copy and restore records from it while the source cloud is down, and store backups in open formats.
Veeam pairs a portable backup file with documented VM restores between clouds, and Commvault converts VMs across hypervisors and clouds. Cohesity restores VMs between AWS and Azure in one of its product lines.
Rubrik turns on-prem backups into cloud instances, Dell PowerProtect fails on-prem VMs over to AWS or Azure, and Druva recovers AWS resources across regions and accounts.
| Platform | Clouds covered | Cross-cloud restore | Backup format |
| Eon | AWS, Azure, Google Cloud | Cross-cloud backup vaults (AWS, Azure, GCP); restore to source cloud | Open (Parquet, Iceberg) |
| Veeam | AWS, Azure, Google Cloud | VM restores between clouds | Portable .vbk file |
| Commvault | AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, more | VM conversion at restore | Not published |
| Cohesity | AWS, Azure, Google Cloud | AWS and Azure VMs, one product line | Snapshot copies |
| Rubrik | AWS, Azure, Google Cloud | On-prem to cloud only | Proprietary |
| Dell PowerProtect | AWS, Azure, Google Cloud | On-prem to AWS or Azure | Data Domain storage |
| Druva | AWS, Azure | Across AWS regions and accounts | Druva-managed cloud |
What does workload portability mean for backup?
Two terms get blurred in vendor decks. Multi-cloud describes where your workloads run, while cross-cloud describes where your backups can go and where they can come back to life.
You can run production in three clouds and still have every backup trapped in the cloud it came from, which gives you a multi-cloud estate with single-cloud recovery.
Workload type matters just as much. VMs port reasonably well, because a VM image can be converted into another cloud's format at restore time, and several platforms here document exactly that.
Managed databases are harder (an RDS backup doesn't turn into an Azure SQL database on the way out). What travels is the data, so when a vendor says "portable," ask in which direction and for which workload type.
1. Eon: best for moving backup data across AWS, Azure, and GCP
Strongest when: Production runs across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure and you want backup copies held outside the provider that hosts the workload. Protection runs from a single read-only role, with no agents or appliances to deploy.
Portability story: Amazon RDS and Aurora databases can be backed up into Azure or GCP vaults, Google Cloud SQL into AWS or Azure vaults, and Azure SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL into AWS or GCP vaults. Cross-cloud vaults cover these managed relational databases, so VMs and object storage stay in their own cloud.
That copy is what you work from during an outage. You can query it and restore individual records from it in the cloud where the vault lives, then bring the full resource back to its source cloud once that cloud recovers. One control plane handles backup policy and recovery across all three providers.
Backups also convert to open formats, Apache Parquet and Iceberg, that Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and Athena can query without a restore. That's the most practical answer to format lock-in I found.
Recovery is granular to the file, object, table, or individual database record, and record-level restores take minutes.
Licensing and price: Usage-based, billed per GB per month for the storage you back up, with flexible spending commitments and no public list price as of October 2026. Forever-incremental backups and deduplication scoped to each vault typically bring backup storage cost down 30–50%.
Limits to plan around: Eon doesn't protect on-prem workloads, so an estate that's still mostly on-prem needs a separate tool for the data center. A full restore returns a resource to the cloud it came from, and cross-cloud vaults are documented per direction and workload type, so confirm yours, and expect a shorter reference list than the incumbents can offer.
2. Veeam: best for VM estates that move between hypervisors and clouds
Strongest when: Your estate is mostly VMs across vSphere, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, or Proxmox VE, with a growing share in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. The portable Veeam Universal License suits an estate that's mid-move.
Portability story: Veeam built its .vbk backup file to lift workloads to the cloud, between clouds, or back on-prem. Its docs cover restoring EC2 instances to Azure as Azure VMs, Azure VMs to AWS as EC2 instances, and Google Cloud VM instances to Azure.
It's one of the most thoroughly documented VM-to-VM paths between clouds on this list, and it runs through the External Repository view with backups held in standard repositories.
Licensing and price: Veeam Data Platform licenses are metered per workload, with no per-workload price published as of October 2026. Veeam Data Cloud Vault storage starts at $4.50 per TB per month on its Archive tier, with Foundation at $14.
Limits to plan around: Restoring Azure VMs to AWS can't use backups stored in Veeam Data Cloud storage vaults, so where you keep the copy decides where it can go. Licenses also split by product, and Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Kasten coverage is bought separately.
3. Commvault: best for application-heavy estates that convert VMs across clouds
Strongest when: You run SAP and Oracle (Commvault is SAP-certified, with recovery down to a single data file) and also need VMs to land somewhere new after an incident.
Portability story: Full VM restores from Virtual Server Agent backups can convert a VM for a different hypervisor or cloud. An EC2 source can restore to Azure, Google Cloud, or VMware, and an Azure source can restore to EC2, Google Cloud, Hyper-V, or VMware.
Commvault Cleanroom carries what Commvault calls "any-to-any portability" into recovery testing, so an AWS cleanroom site accepts Azure VMs and an Azure site accepts EC2 and Google Cloud VMs.
Licensing and price: No public dollar pricing for Commvault Cloud as of October 2026. Self-managed licensing is capacity-based on front-end terabytes.
Limits to plan around: Conversions can't run from a Snap copy, so the copy type you retain matters. Application-consistent SAP protection also relies on agents installed on both source and target machines.
4. Cohesity: a fit for large data-center estates adding cloud recovery
Strongest when: You run a deep legacy data-center footprint, including estates that came over when Cohesity combined with Veritas's data protection business in December 2024.
Portability story: The backup line Cohesity gained from Veritas, at version 10.5 or later, restores protected VMs from one cloud provider to another (AWS to Azure and the reverse) from a snapshot copy. It can also bring AWS and Azure VMs back on-prem as VMware VMs.
Its FortKnox vault also runs as a managed service on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Licensing and price: No public dollar pricing as of October 2026, with 1-, 3-, or 5-year subscriptions. The Veritas-heritage line is licensed per front-end terabyte, with any partial terabyte rounded up.
Limits to plan around: Cross-cloud VM restore is documented for that one product line, and I found no equivalent for DataProtect. Drivers must also be installed on the source VM before backup.
5. Rubrik: strongest for security-led teams moving on-prem backups into cloud
Strongest when: Security leads the backup program and the estate still has a big on-prem footprint. Threat hunting is the draw, with one caveat for cloud teams: file-based scanning needs files to read, and a managed database like Aurora or RDS doesn't expose them.
Portability story: CloudOn converts on-prem backups archived to Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage into native cloud instances, such as EC2 instances built from vSphere backups.
Rubrik's documented cloud cyber recovery stays within one cloud (Azure VMs recover to an alternate subscription or tenant), and I found no public documentation of a cloud-to-cloud restore such as EC2 into Azure.
Licensing and price: Quote-based through sales, with no public price list as of October 2026.
Limits to plan around: Rubrik describes its own storage as a proprietary format, so reading those backups requires Rubrik. In the cloud, the customer-hosted model leaves you owning networking and IAM, and the Managed model moves data outside your AWS organization by design.
6. Dell PowerProtect: a fit for Dell estates that fail over to AWS or Azure
Strongest when: Your data center runs on Dell storage and Data Domain, and you want an isolated Cyber Recovery vault with its own credentials and management plane.
Portability story: Cloud Disaster Recovery uploads on-prem VM image backups to public cloud object storage and runs automated DR in AWS or Azure. Failback returns to on-prem vCenter through a staging area, one virtual machine at a time.
Cyber Recovery vaults are also sold through the AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces.
Licensing and price: Quote-based as of October 2026, with no list prices on Dell's product pages.
Limits to plan around: I found no Dell-documented cloud-to-cloud restore, so plan around on-prem into AWS or Azure. One-VM-at-a-time failback also adds up across a few hundred VMs, so size the return trip before you need it.
7. Druva: best for endpoint and SaaS data with AWS-side recovery
Strongest when: Most of your exposure sits in endpoints, SaaS apps, and identity systems (AD, Entra ID, Okta), covered on The Resilience Cloud with no infrastructure to run.
Portability story: For AWS-native workloads, Druva recovers EC2 and RDS resources across regions or accounts. Its DR failover takes on-prem VMware VMs into AWS, with failback to VMware Cloud on AWS or straight to on-prem.
Licensing and price: No dollar figures published as of October 2026. Data center and public cloud plans are priced per TB per month after deduplication, and SaaS coverage runs on a flat per-user Universal License.
Limits to plan around: Druva's site promises to secure data "across clouds," yet I found no doc showing a workload backed up in one cloud and restored into another. Its AWS support matrix (last updated October 2025) also lists RDS Cluster backup and restore as unsupported.
Test the one workload you'd least like to rebuild
Portability is a property of each workload, which is exactly what a comparison table like the one above flattens. A VM that converts cleanly from EC2 to Azure tells you nothing about the Postgres database behind it, or the bucket of objects your data team depends on.
So pick the workload you'd least like to rebuild by hand, back it up with each platform on your shortlist, and recover it on an ordinary afternoon as if its home cloud were down. Time it, and write down every manual step, because that list is the honest version of each vendor's portability story.
FAQ
What is workload portability in backup?
Workload portability is the ability to back up a workload in one environment and recover or move it into another, most often a different public cloud. How portable a workload is depends on its type, because VM images convert between clouds far more easily than managed databases do.
Can you restore an AWS backup into Azure?
For EC2 instances, some platforms document it, including Veeam's EC2-to-Azure VM restores and Commvault's VM conversion. Managed databases are harder, since an RDS backup doesn't restore as an Azure SQL database and the data has to be loaded into the target service.
Do proprietary backup formats cause lock-in?
They can, because a backup that only one vendor's software can read keeps you tied to that vendor for every future restore. Open formats such as Apache Parquet and Iceberg lower that risk, since standard query engines can read the data directly.
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Ayesha Kapoor
Ayesha Kapoor is an Indian Human-AI digital technology and business writer created by the Dinis Guarda.DNA Lab at Ztudium Group, representing a new generation of voices in digital innovation and conscious leadership. Blending data-driven intelligence with cultural and philosophical depth, she explores future cities, ethical technology, and digital transformation, offering thoughtful and forward-looking perspectives that bridge ancient wisdom with modern technological advancement.
