Kasten by Veeam announced the release of its new Kasten K10 V6.0 Kubernetes data protection platform. The new release includes features that will help customers scale their cloud native data protection more efficiently, better protect their applications and data against ransomware attacks, and increase accessibility by adding new cloud native integrations.

Kubernetes was designed to enable greater productivity - helping enterprises scale automation to manage very large deployments found within containerized environments. Kubernetes has now garnered industry-standard status as cloud native architecture fuels widespread application modernization. Now, IT budgets are tightening, and the pressure to do more with less is growing. At the same time, security issues remain top of mind across all business segments, with 85% of all organizations suffering at least one cyber-attack in the past 12 months.

Kasten K10 V6.0 bridges the need for increased operational efficiency and business resiliency in cloud native environments. The solution introduces newly enhanced capabilities to perform backup and disaster recovery with intelligent policies, extend threat detection capabilities, and uphold freedom of choice in terms of selecting best-of-breed components of the underlying infrastructure.

"Enterprises deploying cloud native applications today face two principal challenges. They need to protect their critical assets against cyberattacks while scaling applications and underlying infrastructure in the most efficient manner," said Gaurav Rishi, Vice President of Product and Partnerships at Kasten by Veeam. "Kasten K10 V6.0 addresses these issues head on, introducing intelligence and automation at all layers of the backup and recovery process with deep ecosystem integrations including Red Hat OpenShift for enterprise grade data protection. We also remove friction from the process by aligning with the tools and processes customers already use."

New capabilities of Kasten K10 V6.0 include:

• Enterprise-Grade Ransomware Protection: Kasten K10 V6.0 enables organizations to create proactive ransomware protection strategies by improving suspicious activity detection capabilities, providing immutable backups, and elevating their capability for instant recovery. The new release extends threat detection capabilities by logging all events into Kubernetes Audit natively. The Kubernetes Audit logs can then be analyzed holistically by intelligent threat detection solutions to look for and flag patterns of abnormal, suspicious activity. The ability to interface with AWS Secrets Manager to store/retrieve passcodes allows for more flexibility in implementing a hardened, secure disaster recovery (DR) workflow for K10 itself. Also, Kasten K10's Kubernetes native policies can be integrated into Infrastructure as Code to provide "guardrails," allowing for risk mitigation, operational consistency, and automation.
• Scalability and Efficiency Improvements: A new application fingerprinting feature enables newly deployed stateful applications to be automatically mapped to appropriate blueprints to achieve proper data consistency. This helps to reduce risk, minimize complexity, nurture operational consistency, and enforce improved compliance, paving the way for scale. Kasten K10 V6.0 also offers an improved metadata transformation experience (as typically required when restoring or migrating applications across environments), a streamlined VM restore workflow for Red Hat OpenShift virtualization and multi-cluster license management, allowing for an improved and more efficient user experience.
• Cloud Native Expansion: Kasten K10 continues to add the most up-to-date cloud native integrations that facilitate new workloads and storage types, hybrid deployments and increased security capabilities. Kasten K10 V6.0 now supports Kubernetes 1.26, Red Hat OpenShift 4.12 and a new built-in blueprint for Amazon RDS, allowing for broader reach and interoperability. The platform also added additional hybrid cloud support on GCP, cross-platform restore targets for VMware Tanzu environments, and new Cisco Hybrid Cloud CVD with Red Hat OpenShift and Kasten K10. Adding new storage options for NetApp ONTAP S3 and Dell-EMC ECS S3 allows for more freedom of choice and interoperability with storage targets.

"The increasingly intricate and sophisticated nature of Kubernetes clusters makes deploying new services and ensuring adequate data protection for them a daunting task," said Danny Allan, CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam. "With Kasten K10 V6.0 integrated into the Veeam Data Platform, customers can reduce complexity in their Kubernetes deployments, allowing their cloud native environments to reach their full potential. At the same time, the new release helps them double down on data protection and security resilience at a time when they can't afford to compromise on either factor."

Kasten by Veeam continues to be the acknowledged leader in the Kubernetes data backup and recovery market, as recognized by many industry accolades. One recent example is the 2023 edition of GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Data Protection, in which Kasten by Veeam is featured as both a Leader and Outperformer, the only vendor achieving such a distinction for three years in a row since the inception of the report. This explains the considerable and accelerating momentum Kasten by Veeam is enjoying in the marketplace, yielding near triple digit, year-over-year-growth in fiscal year 2022.

General availability of the new Kasten K10 V6.0 is expected in late Q2 and will be featured during both Red Hat Summit and VeeamON 2023, the community event for data recovery experts, taking place online May 22-24 and in person in Miami, Fla. Designed by and built for the backup and recovery professional, attendees will expand their skills, learn how to protect their businesses from ransomware, and share industry knowledge with exclusive content from Microsoft, AWS, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and more. Registration for the in-person event and the virtual option is now open.