Catalogic Software Secures Data Protection for Kubernetes
Catalogic Software today announced general availability of an update to its CloudCasa data protection service that adds the ability to scan for misconfigurations in both Kubernetes environments and cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Sathya Sankaran, Catalogic Software COO, says CloudCasa is now the first Kubernetes data protection platform to allow IT teams to automatically spin up a new, identical cluster on the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) during recovery. That approach eliminates the need to maintain a stand-by cluster for the sole purpose of restoring a Kubernetes environment when required.
In general, Sankaran said this also enhances a team’s ability to review security posture and enables IT teams to protect against intrusions and exfiltration of data that can result from Kubernetes misconfigurations in production environments. In fact, most cybersecurity issues involving cloud services or Kubernetes clusters can be traced back to misconfigurations, notes Sankaran.
Additionally, Catalogic Software has added a remapping capability that makes it simpler to migrate and recover data across clusters, regions, cloud accounts and cloud providers. The goal is to make it easier to not only recover from a disaster but also migrate clusters and replicate data between application development and production environments, Sankaran says.
As a cloud service, the CloudCasa platform eliminates the need to acquire software and infrastructure to back up any distribution of Kubernetes running at the edge, in a local data center or on a public cloud. In addition to Amazon EKS, it supports DigitalOcean, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher and VMware Tanzu along with a variety of cloud databases.
Data protection within Kubernetes environments is becoming a bigger concern as more stateful applications are being deployed on Kubernetes clusters. The issue many IT organizations will face is that, over time, many will wind up running different versions of Kubernetes provided by multiple vendors. Rather than acquiring tools for each platform, Catalogic Software is making a case for a centralized SaaS platform capable of supporting any distribution of Kubernetes.
There are, of course, now no shortage of options when it comes to Kubernetes cluster backup and recovery. Each IT team will need to decide for themselves whether they want to rely on legacy platforms and processes to protect those clusters alongside exiting platforms versus shifting to a SaaS platform. Alternatively, they can choose to use a data protection platform specifically designed for Kubernetes environments.
Not every IT organization, of course, is running stateful applications on Kubernetes clusters. There are plenty of IT teams that still prefer to run stateless applications that store data on an external platform. However, as the number of stateful applications running on fleets of Kubernetes clusters continues to increase, there’s a much greater probability that one or more of them will experience some level of disruption because of equipment failure or ransomware attack. The challenge, as always, is determining the simplest way to recover that data as quickly as possible.
