Ian Engelbrecht, System Engineering Manager at Veeam Africa

The 2022 Veeam Data Protection Trends Report has found that 97% of South African companies have experienced unexpected outages within the last 12 months.

This has spurred 84% of local businesses to indicate that they will increase their data protection budgets this year by an average of more than 6% over 2021. It suggests that digital transformation has become a case of risk reduction as well as investing in technologies to unlock future business capabilities. Not only have cloud and data management platforms grown in both importance and size as a result, but they have also become more complex.

It is not uncommon for businesses to mix and match between on-premises data centres, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Navigating the cloud with confidence requires building in a Modern Data Protection strategy to secure the resilience and recoverability of the vital business data that ensures it is protected and always available.

Through a single backup and data management platform capable of supporting cloud, virtual, physical, software-as-a-service, and Kubernetes environments, Modern Data Protection enables companies to modernise backup and recovery, secure data against ransomware, and improve application performance. When it comes to migrating to the cloud, many decision-makers might ask whether they are still in control of their own destiny like they may have been when it came to on-premises infrastructure and services. Effective Modern Data Protection delivers that control.

Free for all

For example, imagine if every team at a business gets to decide which workloads they get to move and services they can adopt. Because of the sheer variety of cloud offerings available, things could quickly spiral out of control.

One team might choose something like ECS (Elastic Container Service) which is proprietary to AWS. Once apps are deployed on that platform, they cannot move to a different environment. However, other teams might opt for a Kubernetes-based option like the Kasten K10 by Veeam® cloud native data management platform that provides mobility across different cloud instances. One is inherently mobile, flexible and avoids vendor lock-in, the other does not.

An SQL team might turn to AWS when it comes to maintaining the database in the cloud. But which services do they select? Is it a case of running the entire workload in AWS or only choosing specific relational database services?

Organisations must therefore look towards involving their IT experts and standardising on-cloud services that deliver for the common business good. Without a centralised strategy when it comes to cloud deployments, avoidable overspend, technology or process incompatibilities, security exposures, data availability, and protection gaps might emerge.

Already, 78% of South African companies have a protection gap between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage and how frequently data is backed up. With 86% of local businesses suffering ransomware attacks in 2021, cyber-attacks are the single biggest causes of downtime for the second consecutive year. Per attack, these companies were unable to recover 31% of their lost data on average.

Defined view

Not only can having well-defined (and communicated) cloud policies in place mitigates against the above, the risk of data sprawl, over consumption, and misconfigurations of cloud services can be averted by involving the experts in IT and data protection from the outset, departmental decision-makers can be protected from adding unnecessary features to the services they select. Hyperscalers may have a richness of offering, however, organisations must look at what is not only cost-effective, manageable, and realistic for daily needs, but for data management, protection, and availability too.

A methodical approach to cloud consumption on a service by service basis is therefore critical.

Kubernetes for all

As cloud-native adoption continues to explode, Kubernetes has become the fastest-growing infrastructure platform, and with 46% of containers in production in South Africa, it is well on track to be the next enterprise platform of choice. Kubernetes brings flexibility and mobility into the process. As a technology, Kubernetes helps organisations modernise their existing infrastructure by allowing them to abstract the application away from the operating system. Effectively, they can pull the application out of the environment, and orchestrate, move, and digitise it. So, what could be five instances of an app today, could easily be 100 tomorrow.

But while Kubernetes provides high availability and scalability of application services, the same is not true for the data, so the need to protect it is fundamental. Solutions, such as Kasten K10 makes it simple as it provides the business an easy-to-use, scalable, and secure system for backup and restore, disaster recovery and application mobility, making it seamless for developer and infrastructure teams to maintain and protect.

As with all aspects of cloud adoption, containerisation can accelerate things but still requires the business to carefully define its cloud approach and the services it will use. 

Wherever an organisation sits on its journey to or through the cloud, the adoption of any service is to enjoy such benefits as business agility, improved productivity, reduced costs, greater data availability, workforce optimization and more. Without Modern Data Protection for every aspect of the adopted cloud platform, successful and efficient business operations could be compromised, disrupted and vital data lost. That is why confident navigation of the cloud needs firms to map out the backup, recovery, and management of their data too.