Plakar to simplify and boost data protection at any scale

Plakar joined The IT Press Tour last week in Athens, Greece, to introduce its approach of data protection at any scale as it works for any configuration.

Plakar positions itself as a foundational layer for modern data resilience, addressing what it describes as a growing “resilience deadlock” caused by ransomware, cloud complexity, AI-driven attacks, and fragmented backup ecosystems. Founded in France and backed by €3M in funding (Seedcamp and prominent tech founders), Plakar combines an open-source core with an enterprise-grade control plane to redefine how organizations protect, store, and restore data across environments.

The company argues that data loss incidents are accelerating due to a convergence of threats: ransomware, cloud misconfiguration, SaaS and AI sprawl, insider risks, supply-chain attacks, and infrastructure failures. At the same time, security budgets grow far more slowly than attack surfaces, making prevention alone insufficient. In this context, Plakar frames backup and rapid recovery as the “last line of defense” when all other controls fail.

Plakar’s central thesis is that today’s backup market is structurally broken. Proprietary formats, vendor lock-in, and incompatible tools create an illusion of safety, while real recovery often fails after attacks. Existing architectures force trade-offs between encryption and efficiency (deduplication), or between security and interoperability. Plakar proposes solving this through an Open Resilience Standard built on transparency, auditability, and zero-trust principles.

At the technical core is the Plakar agent, which packages data from filesystems, object storage, SaaS platforms, and databases into self-contained, portable units called Klosets. These Klosets are encrypted end-to-end, immutable, verifiable, deduplicated, compressed, and fully browsable and searchable. Plakar likens Klosets to what containers did for compute: a standardized, portable abstraction that decouples data protection from infrastructure. Data can be backed up anywhere, stored anywhere (cloud, NAS, tape), and restored everywhere—without proprietary dependencies.

A key differentiator is the Plakar Vault Storage Protocol, which enables “trustless delegation.” Data is encrypted client-side, and encryption keys never leave the customer’s control. Cloud providers or MSPs can manage storage tiers, replication, and SLAs on opaque data blobs, enabling resilience-as-a-service without exposing sensitive data or creating centralized attack targets. This approach aims to reconcile compliance, sovereignty, and cost optimization.

Plakar recently announced Plakar Enterprise, a unified backup posture management platform delivered as a virtual appliance. It adds role-based access control, multi-user management, secret management integration, orchestration, SLA monitoring, compliance reporting, and centralized visibility across on-prem, cloud, and SaaS assets. The open-source community edition remains free, with guarantees against vendor lock-in: restores are always possible without a license.

Overall, Plakar positions itself not merely as another backup product, but as an open ecosystem and emerging standard for data resilience - designed for an era where recovery certainty, not just protection, determines business survival.

A fresh approach for a domain very often ignored or mis-addressed by companies and we expect a similar trajectory liek with see from famous usual suspects.