In today’s world, data is your most valuable asset, and organizations are constantly collecting, processing, and storing massive amounts of data. Kubernetes is a container orchestration tool that has become increasingly popular for managing and deploying applications in a scalable and innovative way. In a recent survey, we learned that more than 75% of organizations use containers. However, organizations adopting containers and Kubernetes must consider data protection and security concerns.

In this blog, we will explore the various challenges organizations face when protecting data in their Kubernetes environment. Additionally, we will dive into tools and techniques to ensure data protection for your entire Kubernetes environment.

Kubernetes is no longer something that is coming or on the roadmap – it’s here. In fact, among those organizations that have adopted containers, nearly all (94%) use Kubernetes, and most (86%) even find it critical to their operations. This doesn’t come as a surprise since we also learned that Kubernetes is helping drive effective cloud migration and flexibility, container orchestration, and workload mobility. Organizations also see improved scalability, availability, and DevOps processes when implementing Kubernetes.

Now that we know organizations truly embrace Kubernetes and will continue to use it more moving forward let’s look at what they primarily use it for. On average, over half of an organization’s data (59%) is orchestrated with Kubernetes, and nearly all organizations (94%) plan to utilize Kubernetes more in the next five years to protect their data. However, most organizations (89%) also expect to do more work to protect their data in Kubernetes in the next five years.

Assessing your Kubernetes protection needs

As with any change or disruption, organizations face issues with identifying vulnerabilities and fully understanding their systems and needs when using Kubernetes. When moving to cloud-native applications, customers must be aware that backups and data protection are not always guaranteed. Most cloud service providers follow the Shared Responsibility Model, where they are responsible for securing their service infrastructure, and customers are responsible for securing their data and applications within the cloud environment. About half of organizations currently face challenges with identifying vulnerabilities (52%), assessing backups (49%), scaling based on the scope of operations (49%), and understanding system complexity (48%).

The survey also revealed the top features for organizations when implementing Kubernetes.  Two-thirds of organizations (64%) believe ensuring data security is important in a full data protection system for Kubernetes. Additionally, flexible levels of recovery (56%) and ransomware protection (52%) are important features to more than half of organizations. Additionally, nearly all organizations (95%) find it important that they can back-up data in Kubernetes.

So what does this mean for the future of Kubernetes and ensuring you have a robust data protection strategy for your new stateful K8s applications? You need to recover from all challenges you face today and in the future, such as:

• Operator error
• Hardware and software failure
• Targeted ransomware/malware attacks

Commvault and Kubernetes – protect K8s containers without getting boxed in

Commvault provides K8s-native protection for your stateful (and stateless) K8s applications in a convenient SaaS-based backup and recovery solution. Safeguarding K8s applications includes protecting all configuration data (pods, manifests, secrets, CRDs) and the persistent application data (persistent volumes, persistent volume claims). Protection of K8s configuration and data allows granular recovery of application configuration, persistent data, or the entire application to the original or a new cluster. Recovery to on-premises or cloud locations provides your business with application mobility and the agility to adopt the K8s distribution and operational model that works for your developers. Full data protection of your Kubernetes cluster means recovery of any/all applications can be ensured in a data loss event. And with Commvault, you won’t get boxed into using a single-purpose tool. Our K8s protection is part of Commvault’s strategy to secure, defend, and recover all data distributed across the hybrid cloud. Here’s how GigaOm describes this in its recent Kubernetes Data Protection Radar Report:

Read about Commvault’s leadership in Kubernetes data protection http://www.lankewang.com.cn/analyst-reports#gigaom.

Source: Hanover Research, Kubernetes Attributes and Usage, February 2023