Veritas Technologies, a multi-cloud data management company, commissioned research that found businesses are failing to capitalize on the opportunities offered by joined-up strategies for Kubernetes deployments, leaving DevOps and project teams to solve challenges such as data protection on their own.
More than a third of UAE organizations (32%) have already deployed Kubernetes for mission-critical applications, but this is frequently driven at the project level, with 51% of Kubernetes adoption decisions made without significant influence from the CIO or IT leadership team.
Individual IT project teams (43%), Boards and business leaders (46%), DevOps (26%), and even cloud providers (27%), according to the 1,100 senior IT decision-makers polled for the study, are driving Kubernetes adoption. While IT leaders were identified as a stakeholder in 51% of decisions, this was not the case in the other 49%.
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 organizations concerned about the threat of ransomware attacks on Kubernetes environments, entrusting data protection to individual teams can be time-consuming. Nonetheless, more than half (54%) of UAE organizations stated that, where protection for their Kubernetes environments exists, they have standalone solutions that are separate from their larger data protection infrastructures.
According to survey respondents, this siloed approach increases complexity, costs, and data loss. Siloed data protection, according to 50% of organizations, increases the risk of data being missed from protection sets. A similar proportion, 46%, cited more complex and time-consuming data restoration processes, while 51% cited 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 organizations expecting to use Kubernetes in their mission-critical infrastructures within the next two to three years, Veritas is urging IT teams to work more closely together to ensure that the technology can be deployed with the necessary protective guardrails in place.
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.”
