Creating vendor-neutral data protection operations for vendors' application resources is described. Capabilities specified for data protection operations by a vendor of an application are input from a host of the application. Any capabilities specified for the data protection operations are used to create a vendor-neutral version of a data protection operation for a resource of the application. The vendor-neutral version of the data protection operation for the application resource is output to the host. A result of performing the vendor-neutral version of the data protection operation on the application resource is input from the host.