Scattergun Kubernetes deployments are risking complexity, cost and data loss

Research commissioned by Veritas Technologies, a leader in multi-cloud data management, 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 organisations (34%) have already deployed Kubernetes for mission critical applications but this is often being driven at the project level, with 42% 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 (45%), Boards and business leaders (40%), DevOps (36%), and even cloud providers (24%). While IT leaders were identified as a stakeholder in the small majority of decisions, this was not the case 42% of the time. 

Sonya Duffin, Director and Solutions Evangelist at Veritas said: “Kubernetes can deliver real advantages on the projects where they’re deployed, so it’s little wonder that development teams want to embrace them quickly. 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. This can leave the DevOps or project teams with ongoing responsibility for these activities.” 

With 89% of organisations concerned about the threat of ransomware attacks on Kubernetes environments, having individual teams look after their data protection can be burdensome. Yet nearly half (47%) of 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. 42% of organisations believed that siloed data protection leads to the threat of data being missed from protection sets. A similar number, 44%, cited more complex and lengthy data restoration processes and 50% pointed to increased costs. 

Duffin 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 in order to restore their data, the IT team is trying to recover from all sorts of platforms with different interfaces and procedures. Worse still, if project teams have missed the opportunity to draw on the experience of the data protection team, they may not have known the best practices to follow and risk losing critical data.” 

With 91% 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.  

Duffin said: “As more data continues to move to the cloud, it becomes less visible to centralised 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. But, 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.”