Reading, UK – 16 March, 2022 – Veritas Technologies, a leader in multi-cloud data management, today announced the results of a new study revealing that the majority of UK enterprises are underprepared to face threats against their Kubernetes environments. Kubernetes is being rapidly deployed into mission-critical environments in enterprises across the UK, the research showed, with 91% of businesses expecting to deploy the technology in the next two to three years, and almost a third already relying on it today. However, just 32% of UK businesses who have deployed Kubernetes so far have tools in place to protect against data-loss incidents such as ransomware.
The research, which gathered the opinions of 1,100 senior IT decision makers from the UK and around the world, found that 53% of UK organisations that had deployed Kubernetes had already experienced a ransomware attack on their containerised environments, while a staggering 91% of UK respondents said that ransomware attacks on Kubernetes environments are an issue for their businesses today.
Ian Wood, Head of Technology for UK & Ireland at Veritas, said: “Kubernetes offers a world of benefits for businesses – it’s affordable, flexible, scalable and really easy to deploy. So, embracing containerisation is a no-brainer for UK enterprises. Unfortunately, this often means that it’s really easy for organisations to surge ahead faster with their Kubernetes implementation than their Kubernetes protection. With applications in containerised environments shifting more and more to having stateful data, suddenly, they’ve found themselves with over two-thirds of their mission-critical Kubernetes environments completely unprotected from data loss. While the benefits of Kubernetes are vast, businesses need to ensure their protection measures keep pace so that Kubernetes doesn’t become the Achilles heel in their ransomware defence strategy.”
Siloed solutions
UK businesses are missing the opportunity to deliver rapid protection to these at-risk data sets by failing to extend their existing data protection from their traditional workloads out across their containerised environments. Just 37% of organisations are currently following this model while the rest are complicating their protection environments with stand-alone products for some, or all, of their Kubernetes protection. They are doing this even though 99% of UK respondents believe that there would be benefits to taking an integrated approach. This could be because nearly half (44%) of respondents said that they know little or nothing about solutions that could protect data across traditional, virtual and Kubernetes environments.
The biggest risks associated with siloed data protection solutions were identified by the research as ‘an increased likelihood of data being missed from protection sets’ and ‘the increased time required to manage multiple solutions’. Meanwhile the most compelling reasons amongst UK respondents for adopting a single solution to protect data against data loss and ransomware attacks were ‘cost savings over deploying multiple solutions’ and ‘a single place to manage data protection’.
More protection in the future
The research shows that UK businesses expect to be able to achieve better protection of their Kubernetes environments over time, with 19% of organisations believing that ransomware will not be an issue here five years on. This aligns with increased spending on protection for containerised data. UK companies expect to be spending an average of 40% more in this area in five years’ time than they do today, which, according to the respondents of our research, means that all of them will have data protection in place for their mission-critical Kubernetes environments. 59% of UK organisations 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.
Wood continued: “It’s reassuring to see that UK businesses understand the value of protecting the mission-critical data that they’re using in their Kubernetes environments. And it’s great that it seems they’ll eventually get the protection that they need. However, a lot can happen in five years, especially in a fast-moving industry like cybercrime, where we’d expect to see sophisticated ransomware variants emerge over that time to target Kubernetes and take advantage of this chink in a business’ armour. Too many organisations are missing the really easy opportunity to extend their current data protection platforms to their Kubernetes environments today and are leaving themselves open to attack.”
To find out more, please visit the Kubernetes solutions page of our website.
About the research
The study was conducted by Opinium Research between 7-20 February 2022 in 11 key markets across three regions – the Americas (the USA and Brazil), Asia-Pacific and Japan (Australia, China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea) and EMEA (France, Germany, UAE and the UK) – using questionnaires submitted by 1,100 IT decision makers in organisations with over 1,000 employees.
About Veritas
Veritas Technologies is a leader in multi-cloud data management. Over 80,000 customers—including 87% of the Fortune Global 500–rely on us to help ensure the protection, recoverability, and compliance of their data. Veritas has a reputation for reliability at scale, which delivers the resilience its customers need against the disruptions threatened by cyberattacks, like ransomware. No other vendor is able to match Veritas’ ability to execute, with support for 800+ data sources, 100+ operating systems, 1,400+ storage targets, and 60+ clouds through a single, unified approach. Powered by our Cloud Scale Technology, Veritas is delivering today on its strategy for autonomous data management that reduces operational overhead while delivering greater value. Learn more at www.veritas.com. Follow us on Twitter at @veritastechllc.
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PR Contact
Meera Lakhani-Patel
meera.lakhanipatel@veritas.com