IT and DevOps teams need to collaborate more to address concerns over cyber risks, cost impacts and delayed crisis response: survey

In a February 2022 global survey of 1,100 senior IT decision-makers in organizations with over 1,000 employees in three regions (the Americas; the UK, France, Germany, the UAE; the Asia Pacific region and Japan; China, Singapore and South Korea) on Kubernetes deployment trends, respondents were found to be working in silos.

According to the survey report, “failing to capitalize on the opportunities offered by joined-up strategies for Kubernetes deployments, leaving DevOps and project teams to solve challenges, like data protection, on their own.”

Other global findings include:

    • 58% of IT leaders were identified as a stakeholder in the small majority of decisions.
    • 45% of Kubernetes adoption initiatives were being driven by individual IT project teams, followed by management boards and business leaders (40%), DevOps (36%), and cloud providers (24% globally).
    • 34% of respondents indicated they had already deployed Kubernetes for mission critical applications but this was increasingly being driven at the project level, with 42% of Kubernetes adoption decisions being made without significant influence from the CIO or IT leadership team.
    • 87% of respondents indicated they were expecting to use Kubernetes in their mission-critical infrastructures in the next two to three years.
    • 89% of respondents indicated concerns about the threat of ransomware attacks on Kubernetes environments, with 47% indicating that, where protection existed for their Kubernetes environments, they were standalone solutions that were distinct from the wider data protection infrastructures.
    • 42% of respondents suggested that a siloed approach to adoption risked complexity, cost and data loss; 44% cited “more complex and lengthy data restoration processes”; and 43% pointed to “increased costs”.

According to Andy Ng, Vice President and Managing Director (Asia South and Pacific Region), Veritas Technologies, which commissioned the survey: ““Deploying Kubernetes… without a holistic IT strategy can mean that projects miss the support of shared IT functions such as data protection. This can leave the DevOps or project teams with ongoing responsibility for these activities. When disaster strikes— such as when they are hit by ransomware, without a single location to restore their data, the IT team is trying to recover from all sorts of platforms with different interfaces and procedures. Worse still, if project teams have missed the opportunity to draw on the experience of the data protection team, they may not have known the best practices to follow—and risk losing critical data.”

Conversely, Ng said, DevOps and project teams can feel that the easiest option to protect new data types is to deploy the native solutions from their cloud providers, suggesting that an alternative could be to partner with their data protection team to extend the corporate data protection platform into these new environments.