The hits keep coming! For the fifth year in a row, Veeam has been named a leader and outperformer in the newest edition of GigaOm’s Radar Report for Kubernetes Data Protection v5.0. This makes Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes the only solution to have achieved these results each year since the report’s inception.
This annual report builds on last year’s results and explains how the market has continued to evolve and what key features continue to be top-of-mind for Kubernetes customers.
Kubernetes Data Protection Market Evolution
As Kubernetes data protection matures, some key trends have emerged.
- Mere Kubernetes support is not enough for a solution to stand out. Support for a wide variety of technologies including cloud-native services, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, and VMware is crucial. Data protection for application data distributed across these technologies is important too, as well as the ability for auto discovery in both on-premises and in cloud environments.
- Application data migration and mobility continue to be key needs in more organizations. They must be able to migrate stateful data easily between platforms as they plan to migrate more legacy applications to Kubernetes directly.
- Data integrity is crucial to both enterprise and governmental environments, and standards for the latter often become table stakes for the former, especially those with a public sector business. Ransomware protection and tamper analytics and protection stand out as key features.
- Cloud data service backup, advanced data management, migration workflows, and disaster recovery (DR) are becoming must-haves.
The GigaOm report tests five key Kubernetes data protection solution providers and compares them across various feature categories, including table stakes, key features, emerging features, and business criteria. The report then grades the solutions according to performance in the latter three categories. As the report criteria become more stringent, fewer vendors qualify to be considered.
Veeam Kasten came out on top by:
- Placing in the top quadrant in Innovation and Platform Play yet again.
- Achieving high average scores for Key Features, Emerging Features, and Business Criteria.
- Garnering the highest average score among all vendors in both the Key Features and Business Criteria categories.
- Being the only solution to rank Exceptional in the following categories:
- (SaaS) Database-aware Backups
- Data Integrity
- Primary and Secondary Storage Support
- Edge Kubernetes
- Recoverability Verification
- Scalability
- Backup Process and Data Efficiency
- Ease of Use
- Security
This amounts to nine exceptional rankings out of the 18 feature categories judged.
Setting the Pace for Innovation
In 2024, Veeam had two strong product releases to accelerate its leadership. In May 2024, Veeam Kasten v7.0 enhanced Kubernetes-native data protection with expanded virtual machine (VM) and cloud-native support for Red Hat OpenShift and Microsoft environments. This release also added security capabilities to enhance ransomware protection and industry-first FIPS compliance.
Veeam also finished the year on a high note with Veeam Kasten v7.5, released in November 2024, which introduced new features that enhance enterprise-scale resilience, expand security and compliance, and support modern virtualization in mixed container and legacy virtualized deployments.
As the report’s author, Joep Piscaer, noted: “Veeam is positioned as Leader and Outperformer in the Innovation/Platform Play Quadrant…Veeam was classified as an Outperformer given its incredible pace of innovation across enterprise resilience, security, and modern virtualization.”
Solution Insights
Piscaer’s analysis highlighted many of Veeam Kasten’s differentiators, including but not limited to:
Heterogenous Environment Support
“Kasten is well suited to protect large and complex applications spanning container, cloud-native, and VM base deployments. In recent years, Kasten’s focus on security and compliance has become notable.”
Kubernetes-native
“(Kasten) K10 natively discovers data services, including MySQL, MongoDB, Amazon RDS, Kafka, and Cassandra as part of the larger applications context. Using Kanister, an open-source data management framework originally developed by Veeam to create an industry standard for stateful data management, Kasten automatically applies the appropriate data management policies, like quiescing during backups, to ensure data consistency.”
Data Integrity
“Veeam has top notch ransomware protection and tamper analytics and protection, as well as deep integrations with various SIEM solutions.”
Recoverability Verification
“Veeam stands out due to Kasten’s functionality to verify recoverability in an isolated recovery environment, as well as its ability to do instant recovery for workloads from the recovery environment.”
Protect your Kubernetes Deployment with the Proven Leader
In summary, this latest report confirms that the market has become even more selective, and Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes continues to lead. See for yourself how you can take advantage of our industry-leading solution to secure your environment today by viewing the entirety of the report here. Try Veeam Kasten today – free!