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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — A new survey shows that the majority of companies are “underprepared” for threats against their Kubernetes environments.
The survey by the data storage company Veritas is on how companies are protecting their open-source Kubernetes, according to the company this month.
Kubernetes is being rapidly deployed into “mission-critical environments,” with one-third of companies relying on it and 86% of them expecting to deploy the technology in the next two to three years.
Despite the growth of Kubernetes, 33% of companies that have deployed Kubernetes have tools in place to protect against data loss incidents, such as ransomware.
Ransomware is an issue for Kubernets users: 48% of companies that have deployed Kubernetes have experienced a ransomware attack; 89% of companies consider ransomware attacks on Kubernetes environments “an issue.”
“Because deployment is so simple, organizations can easily surge ahead faster with their Kubernetes implementation than their Kubernetes protection,” said Anthony Cusimano, solutions evangelist, Veritas.
“Kubernetes has become the Achilles heel in organizations’ ransomware defense strategies.
Other key findings
Siloed protection
Companies are failing to extend their existing data protection from their traditional workloads out across their containerized environments.
- 40% of organizations are following an integrated protection model, while the rest are using stand-alone products for some or all of their Kubernetes protection
- 99% of respondents believe there would be benefits to taking an integrated approach
- 44% of respondents said that they know little or nothing about solutions that could protect data across traditional, virtual, and Kubernetes environments.
The main reasons respondents would adopt a single solution to protect data against loss and ransomware attacks were “a simplified restore process” and “a single place to manage protection data.”
“Too many organizations are missing the simple solution to extend their current data protection platforms to their Kubernetes environments today, leaving them in an unenviably vulnerable position,” Cusimano said.
More Protection in the Future
- 29% of organizations believe that ransomware will not be an issue five years from now
- Organizations expect to spend an average of 49% more in this area in five years than they do today
- 61% of organizations expect that future investment in their protection infrastructures will leave them “very well prepared” for ransomware attacks on Kubernetes environments in the next five years
“Five years is a very long time in data protection, and we expect to see more and more ransomware variants emerge over that time that target Kubernetes and take advantage of this Achilles heel,” Cusimano said.
Survey methodology
The survey was conducted by Opinium Research between February 7-20, 2022 in 11 markets across three regions: the Americas (the U.S. and Brazil); Asia-Pacific (Australia, China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea); and EMEA (France, Germany, UAE, and the U.K.), with questionnaires submitted by 1,100 IT decision makers in organizations with over 1,000 employees.
