Data protection disconnect?

As containers continue to rise in popularity, organisations need to understand that they are uniquely designed and consequently require a specialised data protection strategy. However, the survey reveals a major disconnect in data protection strategies across enterprises with 75% believing container-based applications can be backed up the same way as individual applications are backed up. This disconnect not only risks increasing key RTO and RPO tolerances, but it also adds to the time and resources required for container-based application development and delivery.

For example, the survey showed that the average Recovery Time Objective (RTO) tolerance rates across survey respondents is 2.87 hours and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) tolerance rate is an average of 22 minutes. But just functioning at a rate that is tolerable isn’t an organisation functioning at its best. Businesses can do far better, and ideal time frames should be accelerated RTO in minutes and RPO in seconds. By employing container-native disaster recovery and backup solutions, recovery can be done quickly to a point in time—seconds before a cyber threat such as ransomware occurs, significantly improving organisational resilience and performance.

“Delivering security and resilience is key to the successful adoption of containers, and selecting the right data protection solution makes a substantial difference to an organisation’s agility,” commented Deepak Verma, director of product strategy, Zerto. “The research findings underline the need for organisations to adopt container-native data protection technologies that are integrated into the application deployment lifecycle from the inception, so applications are born protected and remain that way. This equates to less work for developers and consistency in protection of containerised applications, which will need to adhere to business requirements.”

Moreover, the research underlined that hybrid and multi-cloud strategies are intricately linked to container deployments. With 21% confirming they have deployed or plan to deploy container-based applications in a public cloud environment only and 71% saying they have deployed or plan to deploy container-based applications in a hybrid-cloud strategy, it’s clear to see why 57% of respondents indicated multi-cloud support as one of the most important features when it comes to backing up their organisation’s container environments.

However, nearly two-thirds of respondents indicated the biggest challenge in managing backup/disaster recovery in container environments is managing them in hybrid cloud environments (44%) and/or across multiple public clouds (39%).

“Opting for non-native solutions from legacy backup and disaster recovery providers will only add time, resources, and barriers to application development and delivery. Selecting the right data protection solution makes a substantial difference in an organisation’s agility. Using a native solution, however, can help drive a ‘data protection as code’ strategy,” said Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at ESG and author of the report.

“This means data protection and disaster recovery operations are integrated into the application development lifecycle from the start and applications are born protected. As a result, organisations using this approach will be able to ensure the resilience of their applications without sacrificing the agility, speed, and scale of containerised applications.”