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Taking the best approach to Kubernetes deployment

Kubernetes adoption continues to see an increase as businesses look to advance their mission-critical applications. Globally, 34% of organizations have deployed Kubernetes with 32% in Singapore also using it. Over the next two to three years, 87% of organizations globally are expecting to use Kubernetes for their mission-critical infrastructures.

While Kubernetes has been a game changer, research has shown that there are still complexities with its deployment and security. For example in Singapore, Kubernetes is used only at the project level with 38% of Kubernetes adoption decisions being made without significant influence from the CIO or IT leadership team, according to research by Veritas.

Veritas research also showed that businesses are failing to capitalize on the opportunities offered by joined-up strategies for Kubernetes deployments. This has led DevOps and project teams to solve challenges, like data protection, on their own.

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% globally and 56% in Singapore), Boards, and business leaders (40% globally and 35% in Singapore), DevOps (36% globally and 47% in Singapore), and even cloud providers (24% globally and 26% in Singapore). While IT leaders were identified as a stakeholder in the small majority of decisions, this was not the case for 38% of Singaporean businesses.

For Andy Ng, Vice President and Managing Director, Asia South and Pacific Region at Veritas, deploying Kubernetes on projects can deliver real advantages, so it’s little wonder that development teams want to embrace them quickly.

“However, making that decision without 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,” commented Ng.

As such, with 96% of organizations in Singapore concerned about ransomware attacks on Kubernetes environments, having individual teams look after their data protection can be burdensome.

So is the siloed approach the best for securing Kubernetes?

44% of businesses in Singapore believe that where protection exists for their Kubernetes environments, they have standalone solutions that are distinct from their wider data protection infrastructures.

For 52% of Singaporean businesses (and 42% globally), siloed data protection leads to the threat of data being missed from protection sets. 60% in Singapore also cited more complex and lengthy data restoration processes and 50% in Singapore pointed to increased costs.

“Organizations often discover the pitfalls of siloed data protection when disaster strikes – such as when they’re hit by ransomware. Without a single location 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,” added Ng.

With that said, Veritas is urging IT teams to collaborate more closely to ensure that the technology can be deployed with the appropriate protective guardrails around it.

As Ng puts it, with more data moving to the cloud, centralized data protection owners may have less visibility of the data estate.

“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, a more robust, less complex, and more cost-effective solution is often available by partnering with their data protection team to extend the corporate data protection platform into these new environments,” concluded Ng.