Veeam, Rubrik or Cohesity backup as a service for UK enterprise ransomware protection

There is no single winner. Rubrik publishes the largest fixed ransomware warranty, $10 million, gated by edition and a Customer Resilience Manager relationship. Veeam sells a comparable warranty, up to $5 million, as a paid Cyber Secure Premium add-on. Cohesity publishes no fixed figure, offering instead to double whatever a rival's warranty pays. None publish a per-TB price for UK backup as a service, so the choice turns on your estate and appetite for warranty size against list price.

Key pointers

• None of the three vendors publish enterprise or UK backup-as-a-service pricing. Get quotes from at least two, including one non-incumbent, before renewal.
• Rubrik's $10 million warranty needs Enterprise or Enterprise Proactive Edition plus an active Customer Resilience Manager relationship. Confirm this is included in your quote, not a paid extra.
• Veeam's warranty (up to $5 million) is a Cyber Secure Premium add-on, sold on top of Data Platform Advanced or Premium. It is not automatic with basic Veeam backup.
• Cohesity's warranty is not a fixed number. It matches and doubles whatever a competitor's published warranty offers, under equivalent conditions.
• Ask every vendor explicitly whether the off-site vault (Cloud Vault, Data Cloud Vault or FortKnox) is included in the headline quote or billed as a separate line item.
• Ask whether the quote is for software only, appliance hardware, or a fully managed as-a-service deployment through an accredited partner. These are three different commercial models.
• Any warranty payout depends on you following the vendor's security and reporting conditions to the letter, including notifying the vendor within a set number of hours of an incident.
• Keep at least one backup copy genuinely offline, per NCSC guidance, whichever platform you choose.

What backup as a service actually buys a UK enterprise

Backup as a service, in Veeam's, Rubrik's and Cohesity's usage, means the vendor (or an accredited partner) runs the storage layer that holds your immutable, air-gapped copies, so your IT operations team is not managing the underlying infrastructure. Rubrik describes its warranty as covering data protected "on premises and in Rubrik managed cloud environments," which is how Rubrik Cloud Vault, its off-site vault, fits into the platform. Veeam Data Cloud Vault is pitched the same way: always immutable, encrypted and logically air-gapped from production by default, across its Foundation and Advanced editions. Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service protects AWS EC2, RDS and S3 alongside SaaS and on-premises applications from a single managed platform.

For a UK enterprise IT operations director, the practical question is rarely "which software is best" in the abstract. It is which combination of existing estate (VMware-heavy, cloud-native, mixed), in-house skills, and appetite for a fixed financial warranty against a lower headline price suits your risk position. A smaller UK business with a lean IT team gets more value from a fully managed, partner-delivered service; a larger enterprise with its own backup engineers may prefer software-only licensing on its own infrastructure and negotiate its own Cloud Vault or off-site tier separately.

How each ransomware recovery guarantee actually works

All three warranty figures below are published by the vendors in US dollars, with no separate GBP figure stated for UK customers; treat them as the vendor's global cap, not a UK-specific sum.

Rubrik's ransomware recovery warranty pays up to $10 million towards the cost of recovering and restoring data that cannot be recovered following a ransomware attack. It is available only to customers running Enterprise Edition or Enterprise Proactive Edition who are working with an assigned Rubrik Customer Resilience Manager to keep security best practice in place, and the maximum payout depends on the volume of data protected. Rubrik's own case study features Langs Building Supplies, which it says recovered fully using the platform.

Veeam's equivalent is sold as part of Veeam Cyber Secure Premium, an add-on service that also bundles a Coveware cyber extortion readiness retainer, quarterly security assessments and incident response support. The "up to $5 million Ransomware Expenses Warranty" line only applies to Veeam Data Platform Advanced or Premium editions and Veeam Kasten, and only when customers buy the Premium tier, not the base Foundation service. Dan Middleton, Veeam's UK and Ireland vice-president, told Computer Weekly that Veeam's warranty depends on the software being "installed correctly, the customer has gone via an accredited service provider and the correct level of protection is in place."

Cohesity has taken a different commercial position. Rather than publish a fixed dollar figure, Cohesity has said since April 2024 that it will match and double the payout of any competitor's published warranty, under equivalent conditions. Cohesity's own blog is unusually blunt about the category as a whole, arguing that these warranties are "intentionally designed to never pay out" and listing common exclusion clauses across the industry, such as requiring the customer to notify the vendor of an incident within 12 hours, to have followed every vendor security recommendation, and to have obtained written vendor approval for each recovery expense before it is incurred. Cohesity backs this with three of its own case studies (Emerge IT Solutions, California Department of Finance and Sky Lakes Medical Center) where it says customers recovered without needing to claim on any warranty at all.

The practical takeaway for an IT operations director is the same regardless of vendor: read the exclusion clauses before you count a warranty as part of your risk transfer plan, and treat it as a marketing signal of the vendor's confidence in its own product, not a substitute for cyber insurance or a tested recovery runbook.

Pricing and cost model

Rubrik publishes no per-TB or subscription rate anywhere on its own website, and Cohesity's own product listing is explicit that "pricing may vary based on customer requirements. Please contact your Cohesity representative to request a custom proposal." Veeam is the exception among the three: Veeam Vault, its off-site backup storage tier, is listed at $14 USD per TB per month for the Foundation edition and $24 USD per TB per month for the Advanced edition, billed annually upfront and inclusive of API calls, reads and fair-use egress. A third Archive edition, for long-term retention with a 180-day minimum, is listed at $4.50 USD per TB per month. Even with a published rate, the page's own "how to buy" button says "Contact sales" rather than offering self-service checkout, so treat the headline figure as a strong starting point for negotiation rather than a fixed enterprise price.

The one place a real UK list price surfaces is through resellers selling Veeam software licences directly, ahead of any cloud vault or managed-service premium. UK reseller Senetic lists Veeam's Premium Capacity Pack, sold in 1TB increments for installations under 250TB on a one-year term, at £187.69 per TB per year excluding VAT (this is the public sector rate; standard commercial rates are typically quoted separately and are not published). Adding UK VAT at the standard 20% rate brings that to £225.23 per TB per year. The same reseller's Veeam Backup & Replication Universal licence, sold per Universal Licence unit rather than per TB, lists at £1,066.69 excluding VAT for a one-year, 24x7-support subscription. Cohesity, by contrast, has no equivalent published rate anywhere checked for this article; its own DataProtect-as-a-service listing directs buyers to "request a private offer" for a custom quote.

Assumptions. These are list prices for standalone software licences, not for a managed backup-as-a-service contract, and exclude the vendor's own off-site vault storage (Cloud Vault, Data Cloud Vault or FortKnox), which each vendor's own product pages confirm is a distinct product or SKU rather than an automatic inclusion. A genuine UK enterprise quote at, say, 50TB to 500TB of protected capacity, spanning software licence, off-site vault storage, support tier and any warranty add-on, requires a named proposal from each vendor or their partner; publishing an estimated total here would not reflect what any of the three actually charge.

Cost drivers to put in front of every supplier. Ask for: the licensing unit (per socket, per workload, per TB front-end capacity, or per user for SaaS backup); whether Cloud Vault, Data Cloud Vault or an equivalent off-site tier is included or a separate line item; the immutability and air-gap configuration included at that tier; support level and response time; contract length and any multi-year discount; the cost and process of a data restore, including egress; and whether any ransomware warranty is included or sold as a paid add-on.

Recovery objectives and what to check before you sign

All three platforms lead on similar technical claims: immutable snapshots that cannot be altered from outside the platform, logical or physical air-gapping, rapid recovery point objectives, and instant or near-instant mass restore. Cohesity DataProtect's own product page describes "rapid recovery points" with "unlimited and fully hydrated snapshots" and instant mass restore of VMs, files and application objects. Veeam and Rubrik make equivalent claims about their own platforms. None of this is independently benchmarked in a way this article can cite, so treat recovery time and recovery point figures in any vendor pitch as a target to test in your own environment, not an independently verified number.

What is checkable now: Veeam Data Cloud Vault is available in the UK, with a choice of the Azure UK South region for both its Foundation and Advanced editions, alongside North and West Europe. Rubrik has made London its EMEA headquarters as part of a £375 million UK investment announced in July 2026, and named Manchester City Council and the Scottish Government among recent UK customers, alongside a claimed 2,000 EMEA customers.

Vendor and option comparison

No platform is a universal winner. A UK enterprise already standardised on VMware with an existing Veeam estate has a real switching cost against moving to Rubrik or Cohesity purely for a bigger warranty figure. An enterprise starting from a clean slate, or migrating off a legacy Veritas NetBackup estate, has a genuinely open choice between the three, and should let recovery testing results and total contract cost, not the warranty headline, decide it.

Editorial analysis

A published ransomware warranty is a useful signal of vendor confidence, but it should sit near the bottom of a UK enterprise's evaluation criteria, not the top. Cohesity's own blog post about its warranty sets out, in its own words, why warranty claims in this category are hard to bring: strict incident-notification windows, a requirement to have followed every vendor security recommendation, and vendor pre-approval of each recovery expense. Cohesity presents this as a general industry observation rather than a claim about a specific rival, and it is worth reading in full before treating any vendor's warranty, including Cohesity's own match-and-double offer, as a substitute for cyber insurance. The more useful questions for an IT operations director are whether the vendor's immutable copy can actually survive a credential-based attack on the backup console itself, how quickly a full-scale restore has been tested in an environment your size, and what the fully loaded annual cost per TB looks like once Cloud Vault, support and any warranty add-on are included, not left as a surprise at contract review.

Sources

• Rubrik Ransomware Recovery Warranty
• Rubrik Announces £375 Million UK Investment and Names London as EMEA Headquarters
• Cohesity: New Ransomware Warranty Offer
• Cohesity DataProtect product page
• Veeam Cyber Secure
• Why Veeam thinks ransomware warranty payouts are unlikely, Computer Weekly
• Veeam Data Cloud Vault edition comparison
• Veeam Vault pricing
• Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service, vendor product listing
• Veeam Backup & Replication Universal 1 Year Subscription, Senetic UK
• Veeam Premium Capacity Pack (1TB increments), UK reseller price list
• Offline backups in an online world, NCSC
• Assured Data Protection