New global research from Veritas Technologies reveals that the majority of organizations are under prepared to face threats against their Kubernetes environments. Despite 89% of the survey respondents saying that ransomware attacks on Kubernetes environments are an issue for their organizations today — only 33% of those that have deployed the technology have protection in place within these environments to help mitigate data loss incidents such as ransomware. 

The situation in the U.S. is slightly better, with 42% reporting they have data protection in place for their Kubernetes environments. However, 55% of U.S. respondents at organizations that have deployed Kubernetes say they have already experienced a ransomware attack on their containerized environments, versus 48% globally.

The problem is limited to organizations that have deployed Kubernetes — which the survey found to be 42% in the U.S. It could become much more widespread, as another 56% of U.S. organizations say they plan to deploy the technology within the next five years.

“Kubernetes is easy for organizations to deploy, and quickly improves affordability, flexibility and scalability,” said Anthony Cusimano, a Kubernetes expert at Veritas. “But because deployment is so simple, organizations can easily surge ahead faster with their Kubernetes implementation than their Kubernetes protection.”

The news isn’t all bad, though. U.S. organizations report they plan to increase spending on protection for containerized data from an average of $194,469 to $496,313 over the next five years — a 155% increase. Globally, organizations anticipate spending 49% more in this area. 

However, concern remains for the interim period.

“It’s clear that organizations understand the value of protecting the mission-critical data that they’re using in their Kubernetes environments,” Cusimano said. “And it’s great that it seems they’ll eventually get the protection that they need. However, if a week is a long time in politics, five years is a very long time in data protection, and we expect to see more ransomware variants emerge over that time that target Kubernetes. Too many organizations are missing the simple solution to extend their current data protection to their Kubernetes environments today.”

Read the full report by Veritas Technologies.