Scattergun Kubernetes deployments risking complexity, cost and data loss

Research commissioned by Veritas Technologies has found that Australian 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 local organisations (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 team

The 1,100 senior IT decision-makers surveyed for the research revealed that the adoption of Kubernetes is being driven by multiple parties, with Australian leaders citing: individual IT project teams (48%), boards and business leaders (39%), DevOps (40%) and even cloud providers (25%). While IT leaders were identified as a stakeholder in the small majority of decisions, this was not the case 41% of the time.

With 94% 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 (50%) of Australian 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. Nearly half (45%) of organisations believed that siloed data protection leads to the threat of data being missed from protection sets. A similar number (55%) cited more complex and lengthy data restoration processes and 53% pointed to increased costs.

“It’s often not until disaster strikes — such as a ransomware attack — that organisations 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,” said Pete Murray, Managing Director, ANZ at Veritas.

Not only that, without the opportunity to lean on the experience of data protection leaders, project teams restrict themselves from understanding best practices and increase their risk of losing critical data.”

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