The author of this Pathfinder report is Mike Fratto, a Senior Research Analyst on the Applied Infrastructure & DevOps team at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Pathfinder reports navigate decision-makers through the issues surrounding a specific technology or business case, explore the business value of adoption, and recommend the range of considerations and concrete next steps in the decision-making process.

This report explores the following topics:

• the growth of already commonplace cloud usage for mission-critical applications
• the importance of cloud governance
• the top cloud security concerns for enterprises
• the adoption of third-party tools for cloud management
• the steps IT teams should take to make their cloud environments more secure and reliable

Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for container orchestration, and it’s being used by born-in-the-cloud startups and cloud-native enterprises alike. In 2021, Kubernetes was in production on-premises, in the cloud, and even at the edge for many different types of applications, including those that Kubernetes wasn’t initially built for.

Kubernetes was never really built for stateful applications and, by default, lacks features for data protection. However, we see many organizations building and running their stateful applications on top of Kubernetes, indicating there’s a gap in functionality between what Kubernetes offers and what the (enterprise) market wants.

Unfortunately, existing data protection tools, mostly built for legacy technologies such as virtual machines, do not fit well into the container paradigm. Vendors are adapting existing solutions or creating new products from scratch that are often better aligned with the cloud-native and container paradigms.

The market for cloud-native data protection is growing rapidly, with both incumbent vendors and challengers competing for completeness of features, and differences can be observed between those targeting more traditional infrastructure alignment and those aimed at fully cloud-native environments.

In any case, we see a growing need for flexible, adaptive solutions that can meet the changing requirements of their customers. Multi-platform, multi-cloud, multi-environment (including edge), multi-team, and self-service capabilities are quickly becoming differentiating features that ensure successful adoption, not for just one use case but for continuously changing use cases across the entire enterprise.

CloudCasa is the perfect example of this type of modern solution that can adapt quickly to changing business and technical needs. Designed to be Kubernetes native, it is a SaaS offering with a friendly licensing model that significantly eases the initial testing and adoption of the solution.