Research commissioned by Veritas Technologies has found that businesses are failing to capitalise on the opportunities offered by joined-up strategies for Kubernetes deployments, leaving DevOps and project teams to solve challenges, like data protection, on their own.
Over a third of UAE organisations (32%) have already deployed Kubernetes for mission critical applications but this is often being driven at the project level, with 51% of Kubernetes adoption decisions being made without significant influence from the CIO or IT leadership team.
The 1,100 senior IT decision-makers surveyed for the research revealed that the adoption of Kubernetes is being driven by multiple parties: individual IT project teams (43%), Boards and business leaders (46%), DevOps (26%), and even cloud providers (27%). While IT leaders were identified as a stakeholder in the small majority of decisions, this was not the case 51% of the time.
Ramzi Itani, Regional Director at Veritas Technologies, said: “Containers have become the de facto standard for implementing microservices-based architectures to build web-scale applications with shorter development cycles. Without doubt organisations in the Middle East today are choosing Kubernetes for their open-source container orchestration system. By automating containerized software deployment and management, Kubernetes offers a world of benefits for businesses – it’s affordable, flexible, scalable and really easy to deploy. Development teams in the UAE want to embrace those benefits whole-heartedly. However, making that decision outside of a holistic IT strategy can mean that these projects miss the support of shared IT functions – such as data protection. Although the benefits of Kubernetes are vast, protection measures must keep pace so that Kubernetes doesn’t become the Achilles heel in businesses’ ransomware defense strategies.”
With 85% of organisations concerned about the threat of ransomware attacks on Kubernetes environments, having individual teams look after their data protection can be burdensome. Yet more than half (54%) of UAE organisations said that, where protection exists for their Kubernetes environments, they have standalone solutions that are distinct from their wider data protection infrastructures.
Survey respondents suggested this siloed approach risks complexity, cost and data loss. 50% of organisations believed that siloed data protection leads to the threat of data being missed from protection sets. A similar number, 46%, cited more complex and lengthy data restoration processes and 51% pointed to increased costs.
Ramzi Itani said: “Organisations often discover the pitfalls of siloed data protection when disaster strikes – such as when they’re hit by ransomware. Rather than having a single place to go to restore their data, the IT team is trying to recover from all sorts of platforms with different interfaces and procedures. To ensure they’re not burdened by this challenge, organisations in the UAE should take advantage of the opportunity to consolidate their current data protection platforms to cover their Kubernetes environments today, along with all other data wherever it resides.”
With 92% of organisations expecting to use Kubernetes in their mission-critical infrastructures in the next two to three years, Veritas is urging IT teams to collaborate more closely to ensure that the technology can be deployed with the appropriate protective guardrails around it.
Ramzi Itani added: “As more data continues to move to the cloud, it becomes less visible to centralized data protection owners, who may be unaware that it’s there and needs protecting. Conversely, DevOps and project teams can feel like the easiest option to protect new data types is to deploy the native solutions from their cloud providers. However, they can often find a more robust, less complex and more cost-effective solution by partnering with their data protection team to extend the corporate data protection platform into these new environments.”