In July 2024, we asked a provocative question: Will AI replace the backup administrator? Read the original blog here.
At the time, Predatar had just released R16 Orca, and “Generative AI” was the phrase on everyone’s lips. “Agentic AI”– systems capable of autonomous, goal-driven action – was not yet part of mainstream thinking, at least not in the wider public domain. It wasn’t until later in 2024 that agentic AI began to enter the broader discourse. Since then, the conversation, and the tech, has moved at a blistering pace.
Our original conclusion still stands: the backup administrator is here to stay. But the nature of the role is changing far more dramatically than we anticipated. With the emergence of agentic AI, we are moving beyond assistance into true autonomy in backup and recovery operations.
So, what’s now possible? Agentic AI opens the door to capabilities such as automatically scheduling and optimizing backups based on real-time conditions, dynamically building and fine-tuning recovery plans, and intelligently orchestrating the order of restores to achieve the fastest recovery outcomes. It can also respond in real time to AI-driven anomaly detection, adjusting protection strategies or initiating defensive actions as threats emerge.
While it is possible to build these capabilities into operational management platforms, it’s still early days. The industry is just beginning to explore what fully autonomous data protection looks like, and it will be some time before these systems reach full maturity. We predict that until 2028, the model will be “human-on-the-loop”. The backup administrator role will remain as important as ever, perhaps even more so. From 2028 onwards, the role will evolve. The human backup administrator will take on more of an AI governance role. This is often described as “human-before-the-loop”, where the backup admin provides the initial guardrails that allow AI to act independently.
The threat landscape is accelerating. Backup vendors know this and are scrambling to catch up. They face a new kind of arms race against AI-enabled threat actors who are actively disrupting the ability to recover. This is no longer just about encryption or threat detection. It’s about proving resilience.
The response is clear: we must fight fire with fire. Embracing agentic AI within cyber resilience platforms is the only viable path to keep pace.
At Predatar, this shift is already well underway. We have made a decisive, seismic move to re-engineer our entire platform – spanning monitoring, automation, recovery assurance, and CleanRoom capabilities – around agentic AI. This is not a feature enhancement; it is a fundamental redesign.
Will we see a day when agents are truly autonomous, and the backup admin is fully “human-out-of-the-loop”? We’re not prepared to say. We are good, but not that good.
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