Containers are well on their way to becoming strategic mainstays in modern enterprise IT environments. As customers turn to DevOps and agile development processes in support of digital transformation initiatives, and as they adopt hybrid and multi-cloud environments, the usage of containers is also rapidly growing. In fact, Evaluator Group primary research indicates that over 60% of IT infrastructure clients were considering or using containers in production in 2020.
With proliferation of containers at scale comes the need for automated orchestration. Customers are embracing Kubernetes as the de-facto standard container orchestration platform. While adoption has initially been driven by developers to support agile development practices, Kubernetes workloads are steadily moving into production, providing stateful environments serving business-critical workloads like Microsoft SQL. Data protection is now a requirement for Kubernetes workloads, for the purposes of business continuity, security, and compliance. This paper will explore in more detail why data protection is needed for Kubernetes environments, it will outline key approaches available in the market for protecting Kubernetes environments and data, and it will assess those approaches per common, key customer requirements.
