Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories, Deployment Types, and Architectures
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Joep Piscaer
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Kubernetes is the industry standard for container orchestration, and it’s being used by born-in-the-cloud startups and cloud-native enterprises alike. It’s found in production on-premises, in the cloud, and at the edge for many different types of applications, including some that Kubernetes wasn’t initially built for.
Kubernetes was never really meant for stateful applications, and by default, it lacks many data management and protection features. However, many organizations are 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 (VMs), do not fit well into the container paradigm. However, vendors are adapting existing solutions or creating new products from scratch that are better aligned with the cloud-native and container worlds.
Many of these solutions include data protection and other data management features, such as data integrity and security, disaster recovery, and heterogeneous data migration capabilities. There’s some overlap among data storage solutions, data protection solutions, and data management solutions in the cloud-native space, with each solution offering some adjacency in terms of features.
We have seen a particular focus on ransomware and other data integrity and security features in the last year, with vendors developing protective measures against different kinds of attacks, including ransomware, abuse of misconfigured cloud resources, and more. The companion Key Criteria report dives into the capabilities we expect to see in this space—namely, cloud-native data storage, protection, security, and migration.
The market for cloud-native data protection is growing rapidly, with both incumbent vendors and challengers in the market competing for completeness of features across the four key pillars. Differences can be observed between those targeting more traditional infrastructure alignment and those targeting fully cloud-native environments.
We continue to see the lines blurring between container-based workloads running on Kubernetes and other cloud services (like using cloud-native services for storage and databases), meaning data protection solutions increasingly must support these cloud services in addition to Kubernetes. The key differentiator observed in this year’s report is the ability to back up application data as a whole across technologies, including VMs, containers, databases (running in a VM, container, or as a cloud service), and storage (across a variety of on-premises, container, and cloud technologies).
Last year’s differentiators—mainly multiplatform, multicloud, multiteam, multiple environment (including edge), and self-service features—are now commonplace, with only a few exceptions.
This GigaOm Radar report highlights key Kubernetes data protection vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating Kubernetes Data Protection Solutions,” we describe in more detail the key features and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.