GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Data Protectionv5.0

1. Executive Summary

Kubernetes has become the standard for cloud-native applications, including those with stateful data. It is also gaining a foothold as the platform for traditional enterprise applications running both in the cloud and on-premises.

Given that applications and their stateful data are inseparable, organizations must implement data protection solutions for applications running on Kubernetes to safeguard against losing that data. These solutions go beyond traditional backup and recovery, leveraging incremental snapshot technologies and policy-based management. They also support disaster recovery workflows, ransomware and other cyberthreat protection, data integrity features, and–increasingly–data copy and migration management to aid in copying data across a multicloud landscape.

Data protection solutions for Kubernetes-based workloads are essential for any organization running applications with valuable stateful data on Kubernetes-based platforms. These solutions are typically deployed and managed by central IT teams responsible for an application’s RTO and RPO. However, some solutions take a more distributed approach, with developers and application operators as their target audience.

As Kubernetes matures as a platform to run applications, so too do data protection solutions. In years past, many solutions focused on supporting just Kubernetes. Today, Kubernetes is just one of many source platforms that modern data protection solutions support. Customers now expect solutions to provide comprehensive protection regardless of where or how applications are run, or the cause of data loss.

This shift has driven data protection solutions to support a broad range of environments, including bare metal, virtualization, and Kubernetes on both on-premises infrastructure and cloud platforms. They also extend support to specific SaaS services, databases, and other critical workloads. These solutions have a mature feature set that offers some combination of backup/recovery, disaster recovery, data copy management, ransomware, and other cyberthreat protection, and enterprise features for compliance and auditing. In fact, as the market and its solutions mature, the distinctions between data protection, cybersecurity, business continuity, and data copy and migration management are becoming increasingly blurred.

This is our fifth year evaluating the Kubernetes data protection space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines five of the top Kubernetes data protection solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading Kubernetes data protection offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.