Veeam vs Rubrik vs Cohesity: $10M vs $5M Warranty [2026]

Ransomware crews stopped targeting production systems first. They go after the backup first, because a company that can restore its own data has no reason to pay. That shift has turned the choice between Veeam, Rubrik, and Cohesity into one of the more consequential infrastructure decisions an Irish IT leader will make this year, and it is no longer just about how fast a nightly job finishes. It is about whether a warranty is worth up to $10 million, whether a repository is actually immutable, and whether the invoice lands in euro or in a US dollar figure that needs explaining to finance.

This comparison pulls together pricing, published ransomware warranties, and independent cost modelling for veeam vs rubrik vs cohesity, plus the adjacent players (Commvault, AWS Backup, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Druva, and Acronis) that Irish buyers inevitably shortlist alongside them. Every figure below comes from vendor documentation, named industry comparisons, or independent cost models published in September and October 2026. Where the research could not confirm a current release number or Ireland-specific price, that gap is flagged rather than filled in with a guess.

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Why Enterprise Backup Became a Boardroom Issue in 2026

Backup used to live two layers below the CIO. That changed once ransomware groups started deleting or encrypting snapshots as the opening move of an attack, not the closing one. If the backup survives, the ransom demand has no leverage. If it does not, recovery becomes a negotiation with criminals instead of an engineering exercise, and the board finds out about the backup strategy during an incident rather than during a budget review.

Three vendors have built their entire pitch around that reality. Veeam, the long-time leader in VM-centric backup, now sells immutable repositories and a cash warranty on top of its software. Rubrik has rebuilt its marketing around cyber resilience rather than backup, and backs that positioning with the largest published ransomware recovery warranty in the market. Cohesity has gone further still, promising to match and double whatever a competitor’s warranty pays out, while extending its recovery tooling to cover AI agents built on Amazon Bedrock.

For Irish enterprises, the stakes are sharpened by regulation. The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) came into force for financial entities in January 2025, and the NIS2 Directive extends similar operational-resilience obligations to a much wider set of sectors. Both frameworks push firms to demonstrate they can recover critical data within a defined window, not simply that a backup job completed. That is precisely the gap Veeam, Rubrik, and Cohesity are now competing to close, each with a different mix of software architecture, warranty terms, and pricing model.

The market itself is large and still growing. The worldwide data protection software market expanded 11.0% year over year to $14.2 billion in 2025, according to IDC’s Market Share: Worldwide Data Protection Software Shares report. Veeam has held the largest share of that market for several consecutive tracking periods, a point explored further in the market-data section below. Growth at that scale means more vendors, more pricing models, and more marketing claims for buyers to sort through before signing a multi-year contract.

Veeam, Rubrik, and Cohesity: Three Different Bets on Recovery

Each of the three platforms approaches the same problem from a different starting point, and that history still shapes how each one is sold and priced today.

Veeam built its reputation on VM and hypervisor backup, and Veeam Data Platform remains strongest where an estate is heavy on VMware, Hyper-V, or Nutanix AHV workloads. Ransomware protection and immutable repository support became core features from Veeam Data Platform version 12 onward, according to a PeerSpot comparison of Acronis Cyber Protect, Druva Phoenix, and Veeam Data Platform. Veeam also sells Veeam Data Cloud Vault, a separate cloud storage tier with its own per-terabyte pricing, which buyers typically pair with the on-premises or self-run software license.

Rubrik started as an appliance-based backup company and has since repositioned itself entirely around what it calls Rubrik Security Cloud, a security-led platform that treats backup data as a forensic asset for detecting and recovering from an attack, not just a copy to restore from. That security framing is also why Rubrik does not publish standard per-terabyte pricing. Enterprise deals are quote-based, typically tied to usable capacity or workload counts with multi-year commitments, according to a PeerSpot comparison of Druva inSync, Rubrik, and Veeam Data Platform.

Cohesity grew out of hyperconverged secondary storage and has pushed hardest into AI-era recovery tooling. Its most recent announcement extends Agent Resilience to cover Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Amazon Bedrock Agents, a recognition that enterprises are now running autonomous AI agents that themselves need backup and recovery coverage. That capability is available to select customers now, with general availability targeted for the end of 2026, while equivalent support for Microsoft and Google agent platforms remains on Cohesity’s roadmap, according to Futurum Group’s coverage of the announcement.

Commvault sits adjacent to all three and deserves a mention because it wins differently: its strength is application-aware backup for SAP and Oracle environments, and its Innovation Release 11.46 added Threat Scan, a feature that scans files and objects for malware during the restore process itself, so a recovered dataset can be validated as clean before it goes back into production, according to Commvault’s own release documentation.

Feature and Specs Comparison: Veeam vs Rubrik vs Cohesity

The table below lines up the three platforms against the criteria that actually change a buying decision: architecture, ransomware protection, licensing, and the workload types each one was built to protect first.

Criteria	Veeam Data Platform	Rubrik Security Cloud	Cohesity DataProtect
Core positioning	VM and hypervisor-centric backup	Security-led cyber recovery platform	Hyperconverged secondary storage and recovery
Ransomware warranty	Up to $5 million (Cyber Secure Premium)	Up to $10 million	Offers to double a rival’s warranty payout
Immutable repositories	Yes, standard from v12 onward	Yes, native to the platform	Yes, via the data protection cloud
Malware scan on restore	Available via integrations	Built into the recovery workflow	Available via recovery plan orchestration
AI agent protection	Not confirmed in current release notes	Not confirmed in current release notes	Agent Resilience for Amazon Bedrock agents
Licensing model	Per workload (VUL), cloud storage billed separately	Quote-based, tied to usable capacity	Quote-based, custom per customer
Published list pricing	Partial (Vault storage tiers public)	No	No
Strongest workload fit	VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV estates	VMware-heavy enterprises prioritising security	Mixed virtual, physical, and cloud-native estates
Deployment model	Self-run software, Veeam Vault add-on	SaaS platform, appliance origins	SaaS and software-defined options
Recovery orchestration	Orchestrated failover plans	Automated, security-integrated recovery	Repeatable recovery plans from a central console
Multi-cloud support	AWS, Azure, Google Cloud targets	AWS, Azure, Google Cloud targets	AWS, Azure, Google Cloud targets
Typical buyer	Mid-market to large VMware shops	Security-conscious large enterprises	Enterprises consolidating secondary storage

Two things stand out immediately. First, none of the three vendors publish full list pricing for their core enterprise platform, which means every quoted figure elsewhere in this piece sits somewhere between a public price list and a sales-driven quote. Second, the ransomware warranty has become the headline differentiator, enough that Cohesity’s entire counter-positioning is built around out-warranting whoever it is competing against in a given deal, rather than publishing a fixed number of its own.

Pricing Breakdown: What Enterprise Backup Actually Costs

Pricing across this category is deliberately opaque, but enough public data points exist to build a usable comparison. All figures below are in US dollars because none of the cited sources published Ireland-specific euro pricing; Irish buyers should request local VAT-inclusive quotes and confirm currency terms before signing.

Vendor / Tier	Published Price	Notes
Veeam Data Cloud Vault – Archive	$4.50 per TB per month	Includes API calls, reads, fair-use egress
Veeam Data Cloud Vault – Foundation	$14 per TB per month	Mid-tier Vault storage class
Veeam Data Cloud Vault – Advanced	$24 per TB per month	Top-tier Vault storage class
Veeam Data Platform license	Roughly $250 to $450 per workload per year	Third-party 2026 estimate; storage billed separately
Rubrik Security Cloud	Quote-based	No public per-TB or subscription rate
Cohesity DataProtect	Quote-based	Custom pricing per customer requirement
Commvault Cloud	Quote-based, median $284,924/year	Range roughly $66,814 to $426,410 annually, third-party estimate
AWS Backup – warm storage	$0.05 per GB per month	US East region rate
AWS Backup – logically air-gapped vault	$0.0575 per GB per month	October 2026 published comparison
Backblaze B2	$6.95 per TB per month	Egress free up to 3x stored volume, then $0.01/GB
Wasabi	$7.99 per TB per month	Effective 1 July 2026; no egress or API fees, 90-day minimum retention

The spread is wide enough to change a procurement decision on its own. A 100 TB estate on Veeam’s Archive Vault tier runs around $450 a month in storage alone, before any workload licensing. The same 100 TB on Wasabi runs closer to $799 a month with no egress charges at all, but with a 90-day minimum retention clause that can quietly inflate costs if data gets deleted or replaced sooner than that window. Commvault’s reported median annual contract value of $284,924 gives a sense of what a mid-size enterprise actually pays once support, workload licensing, and storage are bundled together, a figure that dwarfs the raw per-terabyte numbers quoted by the object-storage vendors.

Druva charges either per terabyte after deduplication or per user, positioning itself as a SaaS-delivered data security platform rather than a licensed software product, according to Eon’s roundup of enterprise backup solutions. Acronis Cyber Protect appears repeatedly in vendor comparisons but current 2026 pricing, a verified recent release number, and independent benchmark data were not available in any of the sources checked for this piece, so no specific figure is quoted here. The same caveat applies to Azure Backup: no current Ireland-specific pricing, ransomware warranty, or 2026 release detail turned up in the research, and buyers should pull live quotes directly from Microsoft rather than relying on older documentation.

Ransomware Recovery Warranties, Decoded

The warranty numbers get quoted constantly in vendor marketing, and they deserve more scrutiny than a single headline figure usually gets.

Vendor	Warranty Amount	Key Condition
Veeam	Up to $5 million	Cyber Secure Premium tier, subject to eligibility terms
Rubrik	Up to $10 million	Gated by edition and a Customer Resilience programme
Cohesity	Variable, doubles a rival’s offer	No fixed published figure; matched against competitor’s own terms
Commvault	Not a cash warranty	Threat Scan validates data cleanliness instead of insuring loss

Rubrik publishes the largest fixed number in the market at $10 million, intended to cover recovery and restoration costs when data cannot be recovered after an attack. That figure is gated by which edition a customer buys and by participation in a defined Customer Resilience programme, according to Compare the Cloud’s analysis of backup-as-a-service ransomware protection for UK enterprises. Veeam’s equivalent sits at $5 million under its Cyber Secure Premium warranty, again subject to conditions that are not fully public.

Cohesity’s approach is structurally different. Rather than publishing its own ceiling, it offers to double whatever a competing vendor’s warranty pays out in a head-to-head deal. That is a clever sales tactic in a competitive bid, but it means Cohesity’s actual exposure in any given contract depends entirely on what the rival vendor quoted first, not on a number a buyer can plan around independently.

None of the three vendors publish the full legal terms of these warranties for UK or Irish enterprise contracts in any source reviewed for this comparison. That is the single most important follow-up question for any procurement team: ask for the exact eligibility conditions, the exclusions, and whether the warranty is denominated in euro or requires currency conversion from a US dollar base figure, before treating the headline number as a real financial backstop.

Benchmark Data: Restore Costs Across Three Independent Models

Vendors rarely publish independent restore-cost benchmarks, so this section leans on three separate cost models built by outside analysts rather than marketing material.

Scenario	Backblaze B2	AWS S3	Wasabi
1 TB immutable backup, monthly	$15.50	$52.52	Roughly $7.99/TB plus 90-day minimum
10 TB immutable backup, monthly	$154.99	$525.21	Scales linearly, same minimum
50 TB immutable backup, monthly	$774.93	$2,626.05	Scales linearly, same minimum
Restoring 50 TB, one-time	Roughly $0 modelled restore egress	Roughly +$4,394	Roughly $0 modelled restore egress

The first model, built by Aliteq and based on 30 daily and 12 monthly restore points with a 3% daily change rate, found that an immutable 1 TB cloud copy costs $15.50 a month on Backblaze B2 against $52.52 a month on Amazon S3, a gap that holds roughly proportional at 10 TB and 50 TB. The same model estimated that restoring 50 TB from Amazon S3 could add approximately $4,394 in one-time egress charges, while Backblaze B2 and Wasabi were modelled at effectively zero restore egress under the stated assumptions. That restore-cost gap matters more than the monthly storage rate in a real ransomware recovery, because recovery means pulling the entire dataset back out at once, not trickling it out gradually.

A second, independently published comparison on the Dev.to platform examined the fine print behind free egress claims across S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi, and found that Backblaze’s free-egress allowance is capped at three times the average monthly stored volume, measured in byte-hours, after which it reverts to $0.01 per GB. That nuance is easy to miss when comparing headline prices, and it changes the real cost of a large, infrequent restore.

A third comparison, published in a Japanese-language SME backup cost analysis in October 2026, confirmed the Wasabi price step from $6.99 to $7.99 per TB per month effective 1 July 2026, alongside zero egress and zero API request fees, reinforcing that Wasabi’s main cost risk is the 90-day minimum retention period rather than per-gigabyte transfer charges. Taken together, these three independently built models point to the same conclusion. For pure object-storage economics, Backblaze B2 and Wasabi undercut AWS S3 by a wide margin on both storage and restore costs, which is exactly why Veeam, Rubrik, Commvault, and Cohesity all now offer or integrate with cheaper object-storage back ends rather than forcing every customer onto a single proprietary storage tier.

Immutability and Air-Gapping: How Each Platform Actually Stops a Ransomware Attack

Immutability is the feature every vendor claims and few buyers actually test. In practice it means a backup copy cannot be altered or deleted, even by an administrator account, for a defined retention window, which is precisely the property that defeats an attacker who has already compromised domain admin credentials.

Veeam built immutable repository support into Veeam Data Platform starting with version 12, pairing it with the Cyber Secure Premium warranty described above. Rubrik’s immutability is native to its architecture rather than an add-on, consistent with its security-first positioning. Cohesity delivers the same property through its data protection cloud, combined with repeatable recovery plans that are run from a single management console, which supports both scheduled recovery drills and governance-focused audit trails, according to WorldMetrics’ 2026 review of business online backup services.

AWS Backup has pushed further into a related but distinct concept: logically air-gapped vaults, which isolate recovery points behind a separate account boundary and permission set rather than relying purely on write-once storage semantics. The service’s most recent documented update adds support for copying Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP recovery points into these logically air-gapped vaults, according to AWS Backup’s own document history, extending air-gap protection to a storage service that enterprises commonly use for file shares rather than block or object storage.

The practical lesson for buyers is that immutable and air-gapped are not interchangeable terms, even though vendors often use them in the same sentence. Immutability stops a backup from being altered within a storage system an attacker might still reach. Air-gapping removes the backup from that blast radius entirely, usually behind a different account, region, or cloud provider. A resilient architecture typically layers both: an immutable repository for fast, frequent recovery, and a logically or physically air-gapped copy as the last line of defence if the primary environment, including its backup infrastructure, is fully compromised.

Real-World Deployment Scenarios

Abstract comparisons only go so far. Here is how these platforms map onto common Irish enterprise situations.

• A Dublin-based healthcare provider running a VMware estate: Heavy reliance on VMware and Hyper-V points toward Veeam Data Platform, paired with Veeam Data Cloud Vault’s Foundation tier for a balance between cost and retrieval speed, plus the Cyber Secure Premium warranty given the sensitivity of patient data under GDPR.
• A regulated financial services firm preparing for DORA audits: The $10 million Rubrik warranty and security-led architecture directly address DORA’s operational-resilience testing requirements, making Rubrik Security Cloud a natural shortlist entry despite the lack of public pricing.
• A manufacturer running SAP and Oracle ERP systems: Commvault’s application-aware backup and the new Threat Scan malware check on restore in Innovation Release 11.46 fit a scenario where a corrupted or infected ERP restore would halt production lines, not just inconvenience users.
• A cloud-native SaaS startup built entirely on AWS: AWS Backup’s native integration and its new logically air-gapped vault support for FSx for NetApp ONTAP let the company avoid a third-party backup vendor altogether, paying $0.05 to $0.0575 per GB monthly instead of a six-figure annual contract.
• A managed service provider running multi-tenant backup for 40 SME clients: Cohesity’s repeatable recovery plans and central management console support running ransomware recovery drills across many tenants from one console, which matters more at MSP scale than any single warranty figure.
• A cost-sensitive SME with 10 TB of critical data and no dedicated backup admin: Backblaze B2 at $154.99 a month for an immutable 10 TB copy, per the Aliteq cost model, delivers ransomware-grade protection at a fraction of enterprise platform pricing, provided the business can tolerate a simpler feature set.

What the Market Data Says

Independent market research adds useful context to the vendor claims above, even where the most recent comparative study is a year or two old.

According to IDC’s Semi-Annual Software Tracker for Data Replication & Protection, Veeam “held just over one-eighth of the worldwide data replication and protection market by revenue in the second half of 2023, with a 1.2-percentage-point lead over Dell” (IDC, via Blocks and Files). That lead has persisted into the broader category as it has grown. IDC’s more recent Market Share report finds that “the worldwide data protection software market grew 11.0% year over year to $14.2 billion in 2025” (IDC Market Share: Worldwide Data Protection Software Shares, 2025), confirming that this is not a shrinking or commoditising category but one still expanding at double-digit rates.

On the analyst side, Forrester’s most recent dedicated evaluation of this category states that it “evaluated nine data-resilience solution-suite providers against 40 criteria, including Cohesity, Rubrik, and Veeam” (The Forrester Wave: Data Resilience Solution Suites, Q4 2022). That report is now a few years old and should be read as directional rather than current, but it remains the most recent named multi-vendor evaluation publicly referenced by any of the three vendors. Cohesity’s own announcement of the result notes that the company “received the highest possible scores in Forrester’s strategy criteria for performance, delivery model, and commercial model” (Cohesity newsroom), a claim worth weighing against the fact that it comes from the vendor’s own press release rather than Forrester’s original text.

The honest summary: Veeam leads on market share and revenue today, Rubrik and Cohesity both scored well in the last major independent analyst evaluation of the category, and no source reviewed for this piece provides a 2026-dated head-to-head analyst ranking across all three. Buyers should treat vendor-cited analyst reports as a starting point for a shortlist, not as a substitute for a proof-of-concept test against their own workloads.

Migrating From Legacy Backup to a Cloud-Native Platform

Moving off an aging on-premises backup product, whether that is an old Veeam license, a legacy tape rotation, or a different vendor entirely, follows a similar sequence regardless of which of the three platforms is the destination.

1. Inventory every workload and its RPO/RTO requirement. Separate tier-1 systems that need near-zero data loss from archival data that can tolerate a 24-hour recovery point.
2. Map current backup windows and retention policies. Most migrations fail not on technology but on discovering, mid-project, that a compliance team assumed seven years of retention that nobody configured.
3. Run a parallel pilot on 5-10% of the estate. Pick a representative mix of VMs, databases, and SaaS workloads, and run the new platform alongside the legacy system for at least one full backup cycle.
4. Validate restores, not just backups. A completed backup job proves nothing about recoverability. Schedule an actual restore-to-isolated-environment test and time it against the RTO requirement from step one.
5. Test the ransomware warranty claims process on paper. Request the exact eligibility documentation from the vendor and confirm what evidence would be required to make a claim, before relying on the warranty as part of the business case.
6. Cut over in waves by business criticality, not alphabetically. Move lower-risk workloads first, confirm stability for two full retention cycles, then move tier-1 systems.
7. Decommission the legacy system only after the new platform has a full retention cycle of clean restores. For most enterprises that means waiting 30-90 days post-cutover before switching off the old backup infrastructure entirely.

For teams moving onto AWS Backup specifically, copying existing recovery points into a logically air-gapped vault is a configuration change rather than a data migration, and can be scripted directly against the AWS CLI once the vault exists.

aws backup start-copy-job \
  --recovery-point-arn arn:aws:backup:eu-west-1:123456789012:recovery-point:example \
  --source-backup-vault-name production-vault \
  --destination-backup-vault-arn arn:aws:backup:eu-west-1:123456789012:logically-air-gapped-vault:ag-vault \
  --iam-role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/BackupCopyRole

That command initiates a copy job from a standard backup vault into a logically air-gapped destination, the same mechanism AWS extended to Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP recovery points in its most recent documented release.

Pros and Cons: Veeam vs Rubrik vs Cohesity

Veeam Data Platform

• Pro: Deepest maturity for VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix AHV backup, built over more than a decade.
• Pro: Partial public pricing through Veeam Data Cloud Vault makes early budgeting easier than fully quote-based rivals.
• Pro: Largest published market share gives it the broadest base of peer references and integrations.
• Con: Per-workload licensing compounds quickly as a virtual estate grows, and cloud storage is billed on top.
• Con: $5 million warranty ceiling is the lowest of the three headline figures compared here.

Rubrik Security Cloud

• Pro: Largest published ransomware warranty in this comparison, at up to $10 million.
• Pro: Native security-first architecture, built for forensic recovery rather than backup bolted onto security after the fact.
• Con: No public pricing whatsoever, making early-stage budget comparisons difficult without engaging sales.
• Con: Warranty is gated by edition and a separate resilience programme, so the headline figure may not apply to every contract.

Cohesity DataProtect

• Pro: Earliest mover among the three on AI agent backup, with Agent Resilience covering Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Bedrock Agents.
• Pro: Competitive warranty positioning that can out-bid a rival’s offer in a head-to-head deal.
• Pro: Centralised recovery plan orchestration suits MSPs and multi-tenant environments well.
• Con: No fixed warranty figure of its own, so the real financial backstop depends on who else is in the deal.
• Con: Fully custom pricing, with no public reference points at all in the sources reviewed.

Which Platform Fits Which Use Case

Beyond the deployment scenarios above, a few clear patterns emerge from the data gathered for this comparison.

• Choose Veeam if the estate is predominantly virtualised on VMware or Hyper-V, budget predictability matters more than the largest possible warranty, and the IT team already has in-house Veeam expertise.
• Choose Rubrik if the business is in a regulated sector facing DORA or NIS2 audits and needs the strongest possible contractual warranty figure to present to auditors and the board.
• Choose Cohesity if the organisation already runs or plans to run autonomous AI agents on Amazon Bedrock, or operates as an MSP needing centralised, repeatable recovery across many tenants.
• Choose Commvault if SAP, Oracle, or another application-aware backup requirement dominates the estate, and malware scanning during restore is a hard requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
• Choose AWS Backup if the company is cloud-native on AWS already and wants to avoid a third-party licensing layer entirely, accepting a more manual operational model in exchange for lower cost.
• Choose Backblaze B2 or Wasabi as a storage target behind any of the above platforms, or on their own for simpler estates, when the priority is minimising raw storage and restore cost rather than buying an integrated enterprise feature set.

Ireland and EU Considerations: GDPR, DORA, and NIS2

Irish enterprises face a specific regulatory layer that this comparison would be incomplete without addressing directly.

GDPR has governed data residency and processing obligations for close to a decade at this point, but DORA and NIS2 have added a sharper operational-resilience requirement on top. DORA, binding on financial entities and their critical ICT providers since January 2025, requires demonstrable recovery time objectives and regular resilience testing, not simply a backup policy document sitting in a compliance folder. NIS2 extends comparable expectations to a wider range of essential and important entities across energy, healthcare, transport, and digital infrastructure sectors across the EU, including Ireland.

None of the three core vendors compared here publish Ireland-specific or euro-denominated pricing in any source reviewed for this piece. That is not unusual for enterprise software, but it does mean Irish procurement teams need to explicitly request EU data residency guarantees, confirm whether support and account management are delivered from an EU entity, and get warranty and contract terms translated into euro with currency-conversion terms spelled out, rather than assuming a quoted US dollar figure maps cleanly onto a local contract.

Data residency also interacts directly with the immutability and air-gapping discussion above. A logically air-gapped vault or an immutable repository hosted outside the EU may still satisfy GDPR’s technical requirements if contractual safeguards are in place, but it adds a layer of due diligence that purely domestic infrastructure does not require. Any of the three vendors can typically commit to EU-region storage on request, but that commitment needs to be in the contract, not assumed from a sales conversation.

Total Cost of Ownership for Irish Enterprises

Sticker price is the least useful number in this entire category. A realistic TCO comparison has to include storage, licensing, egress and restore charges, and the operational cost of staff time to run recovery drills.

Take a mid-size enterprise with 50 TB of protected data as a working example. On Veeam, that estate sits across Vault storage tiers, roughly $4.50 to $24 per TB per month depending on retrieval needs, plus per-workload licensing that a third-party 2026 estimate puts at $250 to $450 per workload per year, meaning total annual cost depends heavily on workload count rather than raw capacity alone. On Commvault, the same estate is more likely to land near the reported median annual contract value of $284,924, though the reported range runs from $66,814 to $426,410, a spread wide enough that getting a firm quote matters more than any published average. On pure object storage, the same 50 TB costs $774.93 a month on Backblaze B2 versus $2,626.05 on AWS S3 under the Aliteq cost model, before adding any enterprise backup software license on top.

The restore scenario changes the maths again. Under the same model, pulling 50 TB back out of AWS S3 in a single recovery event adds roughly $4,394 in egress charges that would not apply on Backblaze B2 or Wasabi. For a business modelling worst-case ransomware recovery cost, that one-time figure can matter more than months of marginal storage savings, because a real recovery event typically requires restoring the full dataset at once rather than gradually.

Staff time is the hardest cost to quantify but often the largest in practice. Running the recovery drills that DORA and NIS2 effectively require, quarterly or more often for critical systems, consumes engineering hours regardless of which platform is in use. Platforms with more automated, repeatable recovery plans, which both Cohesity and Rubrik emphasise in their positioning, can reduce that recurring labour cost even where the software license itself costs more than a cheaper alternative.

The Verdict: Picking a Backup Platform With Data, Not Marketing

There is no single winner across veeam vs rubrik vs cohesity, and any vendor claiming otherwise is selling, not informing. The data points to three distinct correct answers depending on what an organisation actually needs.

Veeam wins on market maturity and partial price transparency, holding a market-leading share of the data protection software category and offering the only one of the three platforms with any publicly listed storage pricing at all. That makes it the lowest-friction choice for a VMware-centric estate that needs predictable early budgeting. Rubrik wins on the single hardest number in this comparison, the $10 million ransomware warranty, which gives security and compliance teams the strongest figure to present internally, even though the pricing behind it stays opaque until a quote is requested. Cohesity wins on forward positioning, being first among the three to extend recovery coverage to AI agents running on Amazon Bedrock, a bet that will matter more in 12 to 18 months than it does today for most Irish enterprises still in early AI-agent pilots.

For most mid-size Irish enterprises weighing cost against protection, the practical path is layered rather than exclusive: run one of the three major platforms for orchestration, warranty coverage, and compliance reporting, and route the underlying storage through the cheapest viable object-storage tier that platform supports. Given the restore-cost gap documented across three independent models, that almost always means steering storage toward Backblaze B2 or Wasabi rather than accepting a default AWS S3 configuration, unless the business is already deeply committed to the AWS ecosystem and values the native integration over the raw price difference.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Rubrik’s $10 million ransomware warranty better than Veeam’s $5 million warranty?
On paper the figure is double, but both warranties are gated by eligibility conditions, specific product editions, and resilience programme requirements that are not fully public. A larger headline number is not automatically a better real-world financial backstop. Request the full terms in writing before weighing it heavily in a decision.

Can a small or mid-size Irish business afford Veeam, Rubrik, or Cohesity?
All three are built and priced primarily for enterprise buyers, and none publish SME-friendly list pricing. Businesses with under 10 to 20 TB of critical data are often better served pairing a lighter backup tool with Backblaze B2 or Wasabi directly, which the cost models in this comparison show running a fraction of enterprise platform pricing.

Does using Veeam, Rubrik, or Cohesity automatically satisfy DORA or NIS2 requirements?
No. These platforms provide tooling that supports resilience testing and recovery, but DORA and NIS2 compliance depends on documented processes, tested recovery time objectives, and governance, not on which backup vendor is under contract. Any of the three can support compliance; none of them deliver it automatically.

What is the real difference between immutable backup and air-gapped backup?
Immutability prevents a backup from being altered or deleted within its storage system for a set retention period, even by an administrator. Air-gapping isolates the backup behind a separate account, network, or provider boundary entirely. AWS Backup’s logically air-gapped vaults and Veeam’s or Cohesity’s immutable repositories solve related but distinct problems, and a resilient architecture typically uses both.

Why don’t Rubrik and Cohesity publish standard pricing like Veeam’s Vault storage tiers?
Both vendors sell primarily through enterprise sales teams with capacity-based or workload-based quotes tied to multi-year commitments, which is common in this category. Veeam’s Vault pricing is a narrower cloud storage add-on rather than pricing for its full platform, so even Veeam’s public figures do not represent total cost.

Is Backblaze B2 or Wasabi a replacement for Veeam, Rubrik, or Cohesity?
Not directly. Backblaze B2 and Wasabi are object-storage targets, not full backup platforms with orchestration, application-aware recovery, or ransomware warranties. Most enterprises use them as a cost-efficient storage back end behind a platform like Veeam, rather than as a standalone replacement for enterprise-grade backup software.

How does Commvault’s Threat Scan feature compare to the ransomware warranties from Veeam, Rubrik, and Cohesity?
They solve different problems. Threat Scan, introduced in Commvault Innovation Release 11.46, scans files and objects for malware during the restore process to confirm data is clean before it returns to production. The warranties from the other three vendors are financial backstops for recovery costs after an attack, not malware-detection features. Some enterprises will want both capabilities regardless of which core platform they choose.

What should an Irish enterprise ask for that none of these vendors publish by default?
Euro-denominated pricing with VAT treatment spelled out, confirmation of EU data residency for both primary and air-gapped or immutable copies, the full written eligibility terms for any ransomware warranty, and a live quote rather than a published list price, since none of Veeam, Rubrik, or Cohesity publish full enterprise pricing for the Irish market.

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