Veritas Technologies’ new study reveals that many UAE enterprises are racing ahead with the adoption of Kubernetes into mission-critical environments.
According to the research, 88 per cent of UAE businesses are expecting to deploy the technology in the next two to three years, and a third are already relying on it today.
However, the majority are underprepared to face the threat against their Kubernetes environments: just 35 per cent of UAE 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 UAE and around the world, found that 67 per cent of UAE organisations that had deployed Kubernetes had already experienced a ransomware attack on their containerised environments, while a staggering 85 per cent of UAE respondents said that ransomware attacks on Kubernetes environments are an issue for their businesses today.
Almost all (99 per cent) UAE respondents believe that there are benefits to taking an integrated approach to protecting their at-risk data sets by extending their existing data protection from their traditional workloads out across their containerised environments. Yet, just 29 per cent of UAE 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. This could be because nearly half (47 per cent) 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 ‘higher costs of deploying multiple solutions’ and ‘an increased likelihood of data being missed from protection sets’. Meanwhile the most compelling reasons amongst respondents for adopting a single solution to protect data against data loss and ransomware attacks were ‘cost savings over deploying multiple solutions’ and ‘reduced likelihood of data being missed from protection sets’.
More protection in the future
The research shows that UAE businesses expect to be able to achieve better protection of their Kubernetes environments over time, with 36 per cent of organisations believing that ransomware will not be an issue here five years on. This aligns with increased spending on protection for containerised data. UAE companies expect to be spending an average of 62 per cent more in this area in five years’ time than they do today, which will leave less than 6 per cent of them without data protection in place for their mission-critical Kubernetes environments. 66 per cent of UAE 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.
