While ransomware attacks have had a huge impact on traditional applications for years, Kubernetes environments are also at risk. As the number and magnitude of Kubernetes applications increase, so do malicious attacks on those applications.
Ransomware is a serious problem for enterprises — and getting more serious by the minute. In 2020 alone, there were 304 million ransomware attacks worldwide — a 62% increase from 2019. The average amount of ransom demanded? $178,000.
With the recent release of Kasten K10 4.0, Kasten by Veeam is the first industry player to introduce a Ransomware Protection solution, aimed at protecting cloud-native applications that run in Kubernetes environments. In this post, l explain the unique characteristics of cloud-native applications that require a purpose-built solution, and how Kasten’s Ransomware Protection Solution makes it easy to protect your Kubernetes clusters from an attack.
Kubernetes applications have some unique characteristics that must be addressed in a ransomware protection solution.
First of all, deployment patterns are different. Whereas traditional hypervisor-based applications are self-contained — there’s the application, the operating system, and the config files — a cloud-native application is made up of multiple microservices that are stored on different nodes, which may or may not be running hypervisors. To add to the complexity, the microservices are constantly getting rescheduled between different nodes.
Second, cloud-native applications not only include microservices, but also Kubernetes objects that contain the networking compute and storage information (i.e. config maps or secrets). As a result, the number of objects that you need to protect is much larger.
In other words, you’re working in a brand new DevOps environment with a different ecosystem, at an unprecedented scale. This requires not only a technology shift but an operational shift, as well, and the ability to implement the right protection policies without slowing down development or deployment cycles.
Developing Kubernetes applications often involve open-source libraries of code. Sometimes, bugs in the code or misconfigured access permissions can be exploited upon installation or runtime, either accidentally or maliciously, and criminals may seize control of your entire cluster or application. What’s more, as Kubernetes is updated every quarter, and if you don’t stay on top of those updates and patches, your applications may contain vulnerabilities.
At Kasten, we reach out to customers frequently and post content to ensure they’re aware of any available upgrades and patches and help DevOps teams keep their environments up to date.
Surprisingly, many organizations that use Kubernetes don’t yet have a backup and recovery solution in place — which is a last line of defense against an attack. As ransomware becomes more sophisticated, clusters and applications are at risk of being destroyed, and without a means to restore them, you could suffer devastating data and application loss in the case of an attack.
Let’s explore four key requirements for effective Ransomware Protection in Kubernetes environments:
Kasten’s unique approach addresses these four key requirements with a unique approach that provides immutability, automation, simplicity and freedom of choice:
Under the hood, Kasten’s next-generation data engine provides an additional level of efficiency and security, including restricted permissions, so the data stays with you or wherever you want it to be backed up.
Setting up Kasten’s Ransomware Protection is a simple 2-step process. Once you've installed Kasten K10, simply enable immutability when you surrender your target store, then set a protection period to ensure no one can touch your application within your chosen timeframe:
In a recent webinar, I provided a quick demo of how to set up the solution, which can be viewed on-demand here. As you will see, implementing our industry-first Ransomware Protection solution is simple and takes under 5 minutes to complete.
To get started, download a full-featured version of Kasten K10 that enables you to run 10 Kubernetes nodes for free.