Kubernetes possesses clear security advantages that bolster resilience and help keep the lid on containers against the most dangerous cyberattacks.
In the last few years, we’ve seen Kubernetes become businesses’ default container orchestration tool, and, in many ways, it’s easy to understand why. With IT teams’ reliance on containers growing as they increasingly prioritize agile development and rapid innovation, they’re finding enormous value in Kubernetes’ portability, flexibility, and multi-cloud capabilities when it comes to managing their containers. A draw that’s led to 70% of global IT leaders surveyed by Red Hat at the end of last year saying that they use Kubernetes.
One of the biggest reasons so many organizations are flocking to Kubernetes is to boost resilience. Indeed, this is top of mind for almost every IT leader this year as downtime incidents continue to make headlines and cost businesses their money and their reputation. Kubernetes’ high availability, reliability, and scalability – as well as how it can tolerate faults and control spiraling costs – crucially mitigates these risks. With the value of this technology highlighted, here’s how Kubernetes helps organizations foster resilience.
See also: Kubernetes Security Issues Delaying Application Deployment
The role of Kubernetes in unlocking IT automation for digital transformation
As organizations continue to scale their digital transformations, there’s an urgent need to bolster the adaptability of their IT infrastructure in order to ensure innovation can happen from anywhere and from anyone. To do this, numerous enterprises are turning to containerization, which makes applications portable across IT environments, thus, enabling a high level of consistency across applications and the prevention of errors in transferring data and information.
In fact, Gartner recently reported that by 2026, 20% of all enterprise applications will run in containers — up from fewer than 10% in 2020. However, the more containers an organization uses, the more challenging it becomes to manage them. Fortunately, Kubernetes helps solve this problem by automating deployment for containerized applications.
Orchestrators like Kubernetes have built-in features such as auto-scaling that enable users to automatically respond based on the needs of their applications and the incoming traffic and load processed by your applications. Overall, this leads to greater efficiency in responding to changes in environmental demands and prevents organizations from paying for resources that are not necessary, which is especially important in the current macroeconomic climate.
See also: Implementing Zero Trust for Kubernetes
Keeping the lid on ‘containers’
Ransomware remains the most significant cybersecurity risk to businesses today. In fact, roughly 1,981 schools, 290 hospitals, 105 local governments, and 44 universities and colleges were hit with ransomware in the US alone last year.
Unfortunately, what makes organizations vulnerable to ransomware attacks is what makes containers and clusters vulnerable, too. These risks include misconfigurations, missing container replacements, and gaps with backing up.
As a result, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recently updated its security guidelines for Kubernetes, allowing organizations to take full advantage of industry best practices that help protect their workloads and vital information on clusters. As such, IT teams must continue to use best practices with security, disaster recovery, migrations, and backups to ensure zero downtime and keep their teams thriving within agile environments.
Fortunately, Kubernetes also possesses clear security advantages that bolster resilience and help keep the lid on containers against the most dangerous cyberattacks. For example, the technology’s distributed framework and encryption support are significant advantages that make it difficult to penetrate.
Other security features include network policies that protect internal application components and self-healing attributes. For example, when containers fail, Kubernetes automatically restarts them and replaces them with an alternative container. Furthermore, if a container is unresponsive, Kubernetes eliminates the use of that container and only alerts users of its ability when it is back online. In many ways, this shows that Kubernetes can be a helpful set of eyes when it comes to the cybersecurity front.
Kubernetes + Multi-cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service = Business continuity
Backup and disaster recovery are key pieces of ensuring business continuity within IT environments, and the same is true when working with Kubernetes. However, the reality is legacy DR is far too expensive, limited in scope, and unpredictable for containers. This is because it works by creating a parallel production setup which may not even be required in every case, or by only backing up specific resources or objects, resulting in long recovery times during disaster situations.
Furthermore, the distributed architecture that makes Kubernetes ideal for agile development also makes it difficult to implement backup and restore. All the cluster and container components make it a very complex and time-consuming process that necessitates clear DR, backup, and restore plans.
As a result, Kubernetes has propelled many organizations to look towards a cloud-native strategy to make backups and DR automated and proactive to address the rising security threat. Many companies are even turning to cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for its simplicity, flexibility, broad coverage of resources, including virtual machines, cloud configurations, and how it reduces the financial investment companies need to make. Analysts predict that the global market for DRaaS will grow by 35% over the next five years.
With that said, it’s clear why organizations utilizing Kubernetes are developing plans to focus on cloud-native backups and restore options that won’t lock them into a specific infrastructure or vendor to maintain the ability to migrate in the future in hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environments. And with the right disaster recovery solutions in place, IT teams can proactively detect their systems for any integrity violations, leading to improved response time, reduction of data loss, improved business continuity, and more resilient IT environments.
