In addition to providing immutability against ransomware attacks, the new version of Kasten K10 adds ease of use enhancements and new vendor integrations.

Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery solution Kasten by Veeam has added Kubernetes native ransomware protection capabilities in their Kasten K10 v4.0 release, which is available today. This native protection adds necessary immutability against ransomware attacks.

Veeam acquired Kasten in late 2020, part of the flurry of acquisitions of Kubernetes specialist companies that took place against the acceleration in that technology’s use last year. Niraj Tolia, who was Kasten’s founder and CEO, and is now President and General Manager, Kasten by Veeam, said Kasten’s business has strongly accelerated since the acquisition.

“For our quarter ending in March, we beat the forecast by over 30%, which was over 2x sales of the previous quarter,” he told a media and analyst call. “The average deal size was over $90,000, and that was a mix of large new deals and smaller renewals – which can more properly be termed expansions. Now we are seeing increased action from customers around ransomware, and Kubernetes recovery is complex in this environment.”

Gaurav Rishi, VP of Product at Kasten by Veeam, reviewed the new anti-ransomware enhancements within the context of Kasten’s development, starting with the emphasis on security and ease of use in Kasten 2.0.

“Some of these same themes show up but in different ways in 4.0, which provides new security around ransomware to deliver the industry’s first Kubernetes native ransomware solution,” Rishi said. “Kubernetes is a young ecosystem. We don’t expect people to be Kubernetes experts.”

Rishi emphasized that containers have specific vulnerabilities to ransomware that had to be addressed in this release.

“One is overpermissioning during installs, which result in a lack of privilege separation, that is important,” he said. “Hackers exploit that.” He also noted that containers are often not kept up to date during ongoing operations, and that many applications around containers are often not covered by Backup and Recovery policy, leaving them vulnerable as attacks get more sophisticated.

Rishi then reviewed the key requirements customers had impressed on them that needed to be in their Kubernetes ransomware protection.

“They want to make sure that backup integrity is preserved,” he stated. “They want easy operation scaling across multiple clusters. They want accelerated recovery, for easy restoration, and they want it all to be cost-effective, since the goal here is to get the ransom out of ransomware.”

Rishi emphasized that Kasten K10 v4.0 achieves this by making immutability possible for protection against ransomware, malicious insider attacks, and accidental deletions.

“The immutability is core, and uses object store backup with WORM support,” he said. “We also achieve simplicity, having it up and running in under 10 minutes.”

Rishi also noted that Kasten by Veeam provides freedom of choice in deployment architectures and storage vendors here.

“We don’t take sides,” he said.

Rishi then reviewed other elements of Kasten K10 v4.0 besides the ransomware headliner.

“This is a very feature-rich release,” he indicated. “We have key new partnerships, including a new one with HPE new one around their Ezmeral container platform. We are now Red Hat OpenShift Operator certified, and have a new integration with Nutanix Karbon. We have also extended our Microsoft Azure support beyond cloud protection to on-prem with Azure Stack.”

Ease of use enhancements include making multi-cluster operations even simpler, and policies for authorized namespaces to eliminate a common ransomware exploit. Easier backup and restore is facilitated by adding NFS as a target, and allowing stacking of licenses with cluster sizes.

Danny Allan, Veeam’s CTO, then explained how Kasten by Veeam fits into Veeam’s corporate strategy, and its evolving definition of modern data protection.

“We have moved from VMware, to Office 365, to IaaS and cloud, and now to Kubernetes and container-based infrastructure,” he said. “Our core strategy is that we always try to have a native interface for the environment we are protecting. We want a specific solution that is native for that environment. This gives us two specific advantages. It provides a standalone solution designed for the specific administration, in this case running Kubernetes. We can also integrate it more quickly, so that we have native standalone solutions like Kasten K10 that can roll up to the Veeam platform and be offered up to our service providers.”

Allan also threw some hints of forthcoming Veeam-Kasten integrations.

“It takes some time to do integration,” he said. “Look for some exciting things at VeeamON next month.”