Intelligent CIO North America Issue 19 | Page 76

t cht lk mutually inclusive component that cannot be overlooked : data protection .

t cht lk mutually inclusive component that cannot be overlooked : data protection .

This is where businesses looking to reap the benefits of Kubernetes and containers require education – and herein lies the purpose of this article . Below , I explore the pressing need for data protection to keep pace with the maturation of containers and how businesses can accelerate their modern data protection strategy .
Understanding the container data protection landscape
In today ’ s increasingly digital world , as computing and storage rapidly move to the cloud , containers will likely become a vital technology for every modern organization . However , while container orchestration tools , such as Kubernetes , are convenient for their scalability and portability , they can fall short when it comes to data protection .
Reasons for this vary . But a major challenge lies in the fact that because containers by their very nature are designed to be temporary , organizations are realizing their lifespans are often shorter than the data they create . So , for reasons of compliance , cybersecurity , or protection against system outages , data must be backed up and stored .
Similarly , replication is required for migrating entire clusters between testing , development and protection environments , to be able to return to previous states quickly if you don ’ t get the result you ’ re hoping for . But across the board , more organizations are discovering unexpected things can happen during migration , only strengthening the case for data protection and backup .
It ’ s therefore promising to see that of those organizations deploying containers , 46 % back up in some capacity , while 8 % are actively seeking a solution , according to the Cloud Protection Trends
Report . Perhaps highlighting how organizations understand that Kubernetes is not immune to data protection failures .
For the minority who for whatever reason do not back up , however , 26 % believe their container architecture is natively durable and 17 % don ’ t believe they store stateful data . Unfortunately , both of these statements are untrue – regardless of platform , data loss scenarios still take place in Kubernetes which are not addressed by storage availability or replication .
In response , Kubernetes environments require an application-centric approach over an infrastructure focus – and organizations need a backup solution that works against a wide range of Kubernetes application
76 INTELLIGENTCIO NORTH AMERICA www . intelligentcio . com