Posted by In just over a year, the COVID-19 pandemic brought about years of change in the way all companies do business. As per McKinsey, companies have accelerated the digitalization of their customer and supply chain interactions and internal operations by three to four years. But with this rapid rate of digitalization, businesses – including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – are now more susceptible to cybercrimes such as phishing attacks and malware.
In fact, the Asia Pacific region has seen an increased number of cyberattacks in the past year. Check Point research discovered a staggering 168% year-on-year increase in the number of cyberattacks in the region in May 2021. Currently, an organisation in the Asia Pacific suffers from 1,245 weekly attacks.
Now more than ever, today’s complex enterprise IT workloads require the scale and flexibility that only Kubernetes can deliver. As a result, Kubernetes has revolutionized IT by enabling enterprises to deploy a common cloud platform for their business applications across multiple clouds, delivering agility, consistency, and reductions in costs and complexity.
There are three fundamental business capabilities that Kubernetes can drive in SMEs and become significant cost-savings components of their business while ensuring the company remains competitive.
Protecting SMEs from Ransomware
With ransomware attacks on the rise and rapidly increasing business stakes, data protection, particularly backup and disaster recovery, is more critical than ever. But ransomware is not only the catalyst. At the same time ransomware attacks have increased, the adoption of Kubernetes and containers saw significant acceleration. As per Gartner, 75% of large enterprises in mature economies will have adopted containers by 2024.
These trends have brought us to where we are today with a modern computing paradigm driven by Kubernetes and containers. In Kubernetes deployments, the proper tooling for successful data management might make the difference between a thriving corporation and a complete organizational shutdown. Unfortunately, ransomware attack vectors in Kubernetes applications and environments are numerous and appealing to hackers.
Implementing the necessary procedures to prevent and overcome ransomware attacks is crucial to any business, especially SMEs. Kubernetes is the unifying fabric of modern computing. Using it to mitigate the most pressing data threats in today’s risk landscape is one of the best defences yet.
Furthermore, tools for backup and recovery functions should also promote automation and integrate seamlessly into existing workflows. Enabling immutability, creating backups with unique code paths, protecting backups for maximum effectiveness, and enabling seamless restores are part of a robust ransomware data protection strategy.
Eliminating manual processes
The second fundamental business capability of Kubernetes is its ability to allow businesses to eliminate tedious, time-consuming manual processes and, in turn, freeing up time for the company to focus on growth and innovation.
As Kubernetes and its ecosystem have evolved, automating specific workloads and processes has become much more achievable, such as setting up and installing applications, pod and node scaling, ongoing storage management, and automating security workflows.
It also allows you to schedule and run containers on clusters of physical and virtual machines while automating many operational tasks, enabling enterprises to tap into the potential of containers in day-to-day work via an automated fashion.
Kubernetes natively provides a rich set of capabilities to allow traditional and modern workload types to scale dynamically, based on a consistent and declarative deployment model. This allows application developers and operators to define a profile for each workload that’s equipped to scale based on demand and recover automatically, ensuring the integrity of the application and guaranteeing the highest levels of performance and reliability.
Overall, Kubernetes can help businesses cut infrastructure costs. It makes a container-based architecture feasible across a portfolio of large enterprise apps, which means businesses can pack together apps using minimal resources to get the most out of their cloud and hardware investments. Meanwhile, apps that need to expand can be placed across pods where they have room to grow.
Enabling Agility Across the IT Ecosystem
As our world becomes increasingly more connected, organizations must consider how business agility can be extended to capitalize on the opportunity to deploy applications and services closer to customer needs.
SMEs must empower their teams of developers, platform operators, and security professionals with a framework that unites many technological platforms spanning private cloud, public cloud, and edge-based computing environments to create an environment of sustained agility.
Organisations can ubiquitously enable critical controls in a frictionless manner, empowering development teams to move quickly and safely, thanks to the Kubernetes API’s consistent availability across any infrastructure and its ability to bring security, compliance, and architecture guardrails to life through software.
Kubernetes is evolving to extend the same consistent API that many enterprises use today in their data centres or public cloud settings to new distributed and hyper-connected computing environments. This enables enterprises to extend their applications in a unified manner, leveraging the tech foundation Kubernetes has created.
Given the rising need for better ransomware practices, streamlined business processes, and business agility, SMEs and their IT personnel are increasingly favouring Kubernetes. It is clear how efficient and effective Kubernetes provides a plethora of time-saving, productive options to small and medium-sized organisations for data storage and management.
(This article is written by Anthony Spiteri, Senior Global Technologist – Veeam Software. The views expressed in this article are of the author.)