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3 Must-Dos: Secure today, evolve for tomorrow and prepare for the worst.
There are three things you HAVE TO get right…and I heard references to them all at last week’s VeeamOnTour in London (Thursday, June 5th, 2025).
- Protect your current assets: the foundation of digital resilience
The most immediate priority is securing your existing infrastructure, applications and data. This is no mean feat. It definitely means you must
- Secure your applications across their entire lifecycle. From development to production, regardless of the cloud environment, ensuring consistent security measures.
- Maintain rigorous backup routines. Regular and reliable backups are non-negotiable for safeguarding your data.
- Verify your restore capabilities. Backups are only as good as your ability to restore from them. Regular testing is essential.
- Prepare for disaster. Develop and practice comprehensive disaster recovery plans to ensure business continuity in any scenario.
This is where Veeam comes in – they’re a market leader in this space, specializing in data protection, backup, and disaster recovery solutions.
- Embrace the future: the power of containers and Kubernetes
Looking ahead, containers (like Docker) and Kubernetes are unequivocally the future of IT. Their widespread adoption is driven by their ability to deliver:
- Agility: Faster development and deployment cycles.
- Scalability: Efficiently scaling applications up or down based on demand, which is critical for cost-effectiveness. Tying scalability to escalating supplier costs can be detrimental, so understanding flexible alternatives is key.
- Efficiency: Optimized resource utilization.
- Consistency: Predictable application behaviour across diverse environments.
3 Must-Dos: Secure today, evolve for tomorrow and prepare for the worst.
This is where our partners Red Hat excel with OpenShift, a solution WM Promus frequently implements for clients. OpenShift takes the powerful core of Kubernetes and transforms it into a commercially supported enterprise platform, layering on enhanced security, developer tools, and advanced operational management.
Complementing this is Kasten by Veeam – it’s designed from the ground up to understand and interact with Kubernetes. This “application-centric” approach means it can discover all components of a Kubernetes application (data, configuration, metadata, services, etc.) and protect them consistently. It’s also known for the ability to move entire Kubernetes applications across different clusters, Kubernetes distributions (e.g., Red Hat OpenShift, Amazon EKS, Google GKE, Azure AKS), and even between public and private clouds for DR, migration, or testing purposes.
- Prepare for the worst: navigating a ransomware attack
Perhaps the most compelling session at VeeamOnTour addressed what to do when, despite best efforts, your organization falls victim to a cyberattack. If an organized group is behind the breach, you’re suddenly in a hostage situation. This is when professional expertise becomes indispensable.
A particularly fascinating account was co-delivered by Royal Mail and Coveware. Coveware (a cyber incident response firm) played a critical role in assisting Royal Mail during their 2023 ransomware attack. The talk disclosed how similar a human kidnapping/hostage situation and a ransomware attack are with strong psychological and strategic parallels. While in many ways less emotionally charged than human hostage negotiations, there is a similar form of negotiation – trying to reduce the ransom amount, confirming the decryption key’s functionality, or extending deadlines. That is, the goal is to make a “deal” to recover the “taken” asset. There was a huge amount packed into just 1 day but WM Promus was really glad we attended. So much of what was discussed – so many of the themes – intersect with the core technology areas and client solutions we focus on at WM Promus. Already looking forward to the next Veeam event!
