Veritas Technologies, a multi-cloud data management firm, found that businesses aren’t capitalising 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.
What were the findings of the survey?
Over a third of local firms (35%) have already deployed Kubernetes for mission critical applications but this is often being driven at the project level, with 41% of Kubernetes adoption decisions being made without significant influence from the CIO or IT leadership.
The 1,100 senior IT decision-makers surveyed revealed that the adoption of Kubernetes is being driven by multiple parties, with leaders citing: IT project teams (48%), Boards and leaders (39%), DevOps (40%), and cloud providers (25%). While IT leaders were identified as a stakeholder in the small majority of decisions, this wasn’t the case 41% of the time.
With 94% concerned about the threat of ransomware attacks on Kubernetes environments, having individual teams look after their data protection can be burdensome. Yet nearly half (50%) of Aussie firms said that, where protection exists for their Kubernetes environments, they have standalone solutions distinct from their wider data protection infrastructures.
Survey respondents suggested this siloed approach risks complexity, cost and data loss. 45% of organisations surveyed believed that siloed data protection leads to the threat of data being missed from protection sets. A similar number, 55% of respondents, cited more complex and lengthy data restoration processes and 53% pointed to increased costs.
With 85% of Aussie firms expecting to use Kubernetes in their mission-critical infrastructures in the next two to three years, Veritas is urging local IT teams to collaborate more closely to ensure that the tech can be deployed with the appropriate protective guardrails around it.
What were the executive’s thoughts on the findings?
Commenting on the Veritas’ research findings, Pete Murray, Managing Director for Australia New Zealand at Veritas said: “It’s no wonder we’re seeing deployment teams increasingly embracing Kubernetes, recognising the real advantage it can deliver to key projects.”
“However, when integrated too quickly without consideration of a holistic IT strategy, critical functions such as data protection can be restricted in supporting these projects. Ongoing responsibility for these activities would then fall on the DevOps or project teams.”
Murray furher said: “It’s often not until disaster strikes – such as a ransomware attack – that firms discover gaps in their siloed data protection strategy. This is realised when IT teams waste time trying to recover business-critical data across multiple platforms, each with varying interfaces and procedures, rather than restoring the data via one central location.”
“Without the opportunity to lean on the experience of data protection leaders, project teams restrict themselves from understanding best practices and increase risk of losing critical data.”
Murray further said: “With more data moving to the cloud, centralised owners would increasingly lack visibility on the data estate and what data needs protecting.”
“At the same time, leaning on cloud providers to deploy native solutions that protect new data types can often feel like the easiest solution for DevOps and project teams. Partnering with their data protection team can often provide a more robust, less complex and more cost-effective solution that extends corporate data protection into these new environments.”
To find out more, please visit the Kubernetes solutions page of the Veritas website.
