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Aerosmena seeks investors to make its cargo airship project a reality

Naushad K. Cherrayil
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Aerosmena seeks investors to make its cargo airship project a reality
  • Venture investors risk investing in such large projects.
  • Aerosmena’s long-term goal is to build a family of flying saucers for transporting payloads, ranging from 22 tonnes to 660 tonnes, and creating door-to-door logistics links.

New heavy-duty airship projects are being actively developed globally and will appear in the sky in the near future to ship hundreds of tonnes of payloads.

After nearly a decade of unfulfilled hype about flying robots dropping orders at your doorstep, a handful of companies have started commercial operations in the US, involving dozens or hundreds of deliveries a day at each location.

One Russian heavy-duty cargo airship company – Airship Initiative Design Bureaus Aerosmena (AIDBA), also known as Aerosmena – has entered the bandwagon and wants to surprise mankind with their ability to transport tens and even hundreds of tonnes of payload, and fly in winds up to 35 metres per second, and even worst on speed 100-250 kilometres per hour on the range 5,000 km and even more.

Sergei V. Bendin, CEO of AIDBA, expert chez aeronautic field, vice-chief of Moscow branch of Aeronautic Committee chez Geographical Society of Russia, told TechChannel News that transport heavy-duty airship projects are actively developed in different countries and the declared projects were Airlander – 10 (HAV), LMH – 1 (Lockheed Martin), LCA60T (Flying Whale), Varialifter, Voliris (NATAC).

AIDBA developed an independent team of engineers who previously worked in the Russian aerospace industry (design bureaus of Tupolev, Yakovlev aviation firms, and Dolgoprudnensky design bureaus of automation, specialising in aeronautical technology since 1932 and in closed aerospace organisations).

 “Developers of hi-tech airship projects are confident that such image is not an empty dream but closest perspective for regular reality,” he said.

Reliable transportation

Aerosmena’s long-term goal is to build a family of aeroplatforms for transporting payloads, ranging from 22 tonnes to 660 tonnes, and create door-to-door logistics links, including those in communities in remote regions with poor or no roads or other reliable transportation infrastructure.

A team of Russian engineers at AIDBA are already proactively offering investors to own the multifunctional thermo-ballasting heavy-payload aeroplatforms.

The largest airship of the Aerosmena project, Bendin said will be able to carry 600 tonnes of payload onboard.

The diametre of the lenticular airship will be about 220 metres and with a height of more than 50 metres, making it to cover a distance of 8000km at a speed of 250kmph non-stop.

Bendin said that 5,000 people can comfortably make an impressive transcontinental flight between Washington and Moscow, which people can only dream of today.

The Aerosmena project started in 1993 when the famous Russian project “Thermoplan” was launched by the Moscow Aviation Institute engineers’ team. The 40-metres diametre airship was manufactured in the Ulyanovsk Aviation Plant.

However, Bendin said that it could not fly due to the poor design.

“During the first field test, this aircraft was deformed, and soon after the incident, this project was cancelled. However, many engineers on the project “Thermoplan” met again in 2005 under the project “Locomosky” brand to develop a heavy-airship for delivery of mini-plants for LNG to remote hydrocarbon deposits,” he said.

The Locomosky project developers finished R&D, and even tested the “UFO” model in both the TsAGI’s (Central Institute of Aerohydrodynamics in Russia) wind tunnel and using computer simulation in the MAI’s (Moscow Aviation Institute) laboratories. In 2007 and 2009, the lenticular Locomosky airship demonstrators were exhibited at the International Aviation and Space Salon MAKS.

Determination

Later in 2009, the Russian President at a special government meeting in Ulyanovsk called the Locomosky project a promising and brilliant example of innovation.

Already in 2010, the Locomosky Co has recorded bankruptcy so the project stopped again.

Meanwhile, part of the development team has continued to design under head Orfey Kozlov (who died due to Covid-19 in 2020), and the new team had named itself AIDBA in 2015,

Bendin said the strategy is to focus on the multi-functional thermo-ballasting heavy-payload aeroplatforms to provide the competitiveness of current air-transport infrastructure.

Even though, he said the startup has already attracted the attention of some potential customers who would like to purchase “flying saucers” as ready produce, but refused entirely to fund the Aerosmena project because three years of the project development they value today as a long-term investment.

“If a business angel supports the AIDBA team today, the first Aerosmena aeroplatform will be ready for operation in 2026. We are actively looking for an investor and without any investment, we could not build or present any prototype,” he said.

So far, he said that venture investors have not risked investing in such large projects.

Projects which failed to take off

In 2005, the US military, through the DARPA structure, ordered the design of airships as part of the WALRUS project.

DARPA directed special grants for airship designers from Aeros Worldwide and Lockheed Martin who could build prototypes.

But since 2009, the WALRUS program has been closed, and the company’s project participant prototypes had be allowed to be used for the commercial market as flying hotels.

However, since 2015, any data about these prototypes has disappeared from the information field.

Bendin said the single unit construction cost of the aeroplatform A20 will be between $45-50 million while the A60 could be worth $65-70 million, and A200 will cost $70-75 million.

However, with mass production, he said the costs will come down drastically.

The cost of the Lockheed C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft program with a carrying capacity of 37 tonnes was $1.4 billion. The cost of the program for the development and production of an Airbus Beluga XL aircraft with a carrying capacity of 50.5 tonnes was more than $1.1 billion.

“We plan to first finance a demonstration aeroplatform with a payload of only four tonnes and will require an investment of $15 million,” he said.

Bendin added that a future passenger version would even be capable of “round-the-world travel in luxury flying hotel conditions.”

ZorroSign makes waves in digital signature space using blockchain

Naushad K. Cherrayil
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ZorroSign makes waves in digital signature space using blockchain
  • Startup safeguards privacy and security of digital documents and provides an immutable chain of custody for transactions.
  • Finds a way to manage blockchain more securely and cost-effectively than any other solution provider.

There are many big and small players in the digital signature space globally but one startup which is making its mark felt is – ZorroSign.

Headquartered in Dubai and with bases in many countries, ZorroSign has already signed big contracts with the governments and organisations in the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) countries.

There are huge players in the digital signature space, Shamsh Hadi, CEO of ZorroSign, said in an exclusive interview with Tech Channel News but none of them has figured out how to cost-effectively map their legacy software in technologies and evolve it into Web 3.0 and blockchain solutions today.

“In an interview, Daniel Springer, CEO of DocuSign, in December of 2020, admitted that blockchain is just too expensive for them to incorporate or adopt.

“So, we have solved all these problems such as bringing blockchain to digital signatures, entirely on blockchain from the ground up. Not like other competitors, big and small, who tried to add blockchain onto their legacy software.”

Blockchain is not a piece of cloth where you can put it on when it is raining or boots when it is cold, he said, but it needs to be addressed properly from the ground up.

Standing out from the crowd

Shamsh Hadi, CEO of ZorroSign.

“We have pioneered a way to manage blockchain more securely and more cost-effectively than any other solution providers out there today. We can scale our architecture to meet our customers’ needs, in a way that big providers will not be able to solve due to the cost factor,” Hadi said.

Blockchain came to the world with a big splash and started off with cryptocurrency and the hot topic now is NFTs (non-fungible tokens).  

“In my opinion, blockchain does not have regulations and regulations come into place depending on the use cases. In terms of data and transacting data, there are data sovereignty rules in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and globally,” Hadi said.

When it comes to cryptocurrency, he said that a lot of governments have already rolled out or are rolling out initial draft laws.  

“The UAE already has a basic law in place and will evolve over time. So, you will not see regulation for blockchain in common but for the different uses where blockchain technology has been monetised.”

The UAE has launched several programmes that include a blockchain platform for government entities and a legislative sandbox for fintech startups.

GCC: A unique place

“GCC is a very unique place and forward-thinking region. This part of the world knows that the future is based on technology and is willing to spend their money to develop their platforms and continue to re-develop their platforms over and over again to be competitive. They have the information at their fingertips and that is why they can make these decisions,” Hadi said.

The UAE Government adopted blockchain technology in conducting its transactions in 2018 and launched the Emirates Blockchain Strategy 2021 and Dubai Blockchain Strategy in 2016. 

In the 1990s, Hadi’s co-founder introduced an innovative new technology for electronic signatures, in government agencies and companies, mostly in the US, such as UPS, American Express, etc.

Former US President Bill Clinton signed an e-act in 2000 using this technology.

 “The platform was invented to move documentation, digital transactions from a relationship built on trust to a relationship built on truth, providing customers the ability to positively impact the environment to sustainable practices and securely transform their paper-based workloads to digital in a bid to remove errors and increase productivity,” Hadi said.

Advancing sustainability

ZorroSign is very much out there to set a trend to advance sustainability while advancing technology, he said and added that they are a multi-chain blockchain platform that not only integrates digital signatures but also integrates AI and machine learning from completion, identity as a service, patented fraud prevention to ensure user authentication and document verification that adheres to global privacy and security standards.

Every industry can benefit from digital signatures, but he said that ZorroSign focused initially on financial services, legal services and IT space, which are the early adopters of this technology.

Being an advisor to the US Government and regularly getting called upon to the House and the Senate, Hadi said that a lot of feedback they give to them is to address or patch on solutions to a very legacy and old technology. “They have technologies running from the 1970s and 1980s, still at the Federal level. They have not quickly evolved and that is why the GCC countries are going to be far ahead in the game in the future,” he said.

Moreover, he said that Saudi Arabia is catching up fast but the other smaller countries in the Gulf are slowly waking up. The two countries that are pushing forward are the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

The blockchain platform ZorroSign was founded in Dubai, UAE, in 2015.

Playing a key role

 “Governments in the GCC are playing a key role while the UAE and Saudi Arabia have passed the laws for electronic transactions and commerce, including e-signatures, was there from 2006,” Hadi said.

In terms of blockchain, he said that they already have governments in the UAE, who are their customers, who are looking specifically for blockchain solutions.

“We are also catering to one government entity in Oman and Saudi Arabia,” he said.

When asked about breaches taking place on the blockchain platform, he said: “I don’t think any company can claim that their technology is hackproof. There are ways to protect ourselves and blockchain technology surely does that because it uses multiple nodes and the infrastructure and architecture help us do that.”

When platforms roll out solutions based on blockchain, he said that they may use different architectures but the blockchain is not a policeman that protects them.  

“If a solution has holes and if a breach happens, blockchain is not the one to be blamed. Blockchain has a ledger to show the actual proof but it depends on the type and the ways they have used the methodology of blockchain. If they have used a private and permission-based, you will not have access to it.”

Ultimately, he said that it is the platform that everything was built on, from trust-based to the truth based, and it is now on how, we as organisations, experts and individuals, roll it out and have proper use cases for it.

Great for zero-trust environment

“Blockchain came into the world with cryptocurrency with very little education and still the general public does not have enough education on why blockchain is important. Data is where, even the quantum computers, have not been able to be manipulated,” Hadi said.

Covid, he said has boosted the adoption of blockchain technology and virtual networks as they are great for zero-trust environments.

The US is the biggest market for the startup but India is catching up to the US market but Hadi wants the Middle East to be the biggest in the near future.

The Middle East contributes 15 per cent to the user base.

Hadi said that ZorroSign, still bootstrapped, is looking to raise about $20 million in Series A funding later this year or early next year to venture into newer sectors and expand its platform and reach.

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Wa’ed Ventures and Maydan to change face of Saudi’s fintech startups

Mohammed Fahad
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Wa’ed Ventures and Maydan to change face of Saudi’s fintech startups
  • Sign deal to support ethical tech companies in the Kingdom.
  • The two companies will coordinate and collaborate on finding, backing and mentoring founders.

Early-stage fintech startups in Saudi Arabia are going to get a boost with the deal signing between Wa’ed Ventures, the venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Centre, and UK-based Maydan Capital.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed at Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Saudi Arabia, where investors, policymakers and community leaders from around the world came together to find ways to rebuild the global economy, which had been negatively impacted by the pandemic. 

 “With a shift toward the globalisation of fintech, this strategic partnership will allow early-stage Saudi fintech startups to leverage the global experience of the Maydan team in ethical investment,” Muhammad Zeeshan Hassan, Chief Investment Officer of Wa’ed Ventures, said.

Supporting economic diversification

Through this partnership with Wa’ed Ventures, Maydan will be offering its members the opportunity to co-invest alongside Wa’ed Ventures into innovative Saudi-based startups.

The two companies will coordinate and collaborate on finding, backing and mentoring founders as they launch and grow their ethically-focused startups.  

The goal will be to boost the growing startup ecosystem in Saudi Arabia and create a world-class hub that is focused on championing companies that develop ethical and inclusive financial services. 

The partnership will also play an important role in supporting economic diversification in the country, in alignment with the Kingdom’s strategic goal of creating a knowledge-based economy. 

 “More than ever we need to prioritise a more sustainable sector and the only way to achieve this is by collaborating with organisations that share our vision for the future.  We look forward to finding the best talent and shaping a better financial services sector that reflects the morals and values of consumers,” Safdar Alam, CEO of Maydan, said.

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Will machines be able to talk like humans with 6G networks?

Naushad K. Cherrayil
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Will machines be able to talk like humans with 6G networks?
  • Researchers hope to inspire collaboration across various disciplines, including information theory, machine learning, cognitive science, logic and control theory.
  • In the future, larger chunks of the radio spectrum could be replaced with shared understanding.

Researchers are inventing the next machine-learning-based communication protocols and have been exploring how the old ideas of Bell Labs researchers – Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver – could lead to better networks.

Bell Labs researchers outlined a basic framework for constructing communication networks in 1949 and many of their core ideas laid the foundations for the staggering improvements in communications networks and computers over the ensuing decades.

They introduced three levels of communication as part of their theory. The technical level focused on encoding information more efficiently or with appropriate redundancy in case of noise or loss.

The semantic level considered the accuracy and efficiency of transmitting meaning while the effectiveness level explored the ability of communication to affect the behaviour and conduct of the receiver.

Existing radio networks have only seriously considered the technical aspects.

But seminal ideas around the semantics and effectiveness of communications were glossed over at the time, partly because the computers and networks were too primitive to explore seriously.

Consuming less wireless spectrum

Technology Innovation Institute’s AI and Telecommunication Systems research group of Prof. Merouane Debbah in the UAE, part of the project team, said that semantic communications will be at the heart of the next 6G revolution which will focus on connected intelligence.

“This could allow wireless networks to scale in capacity and performance while consuming less wireless spectrum,” he said.

Mehdi Bennis, Professor at the University of Oulu, Head of the Intelligent Connectivity and Networks/Systems Group (ICON) who is also working on the project, said: “We cannot continue to scale things up with more bandwidth and more base stations. Rather, we need to leverage data semantics and knowledge to communicate more resiliently and efficiently.”

But Mehdi Bennis believes that achieving the next level of efficiency will also require including semantics and effectiveness as part of engineering design.

 “With 6G, we need to be thinking about the ability to communicate meaning or intent from source to destination, and then the receiver’s ability to act on it,” he said.

Semantics has traditionally been more of a focus of linguistics and philosophy researchers rather than engineers. Their research pointed to some of the underlying challenges in making sense of the world and communicating it with others but never formalised it in a mathematical framework accessible to communications engineers.

 “Our contribution was to formalise things in a more principled manner,” Bennis said.

Specifically, the team has developed a mathematical framework for semantic communication among two agents (a speaker and listener), in which a speaker extracts concepts from observations in the world and symbolises them to help the listener infer the intent of the speaker.

Putting semantics into practice

In real life, semantics underpins communications among people. A small child often knows to look for the expression on their mom’s face to see if his behaviour is OK.

Existing communication protocols are hard-coded in terms of rules and vocabulary. An AI-based approach lies in developing emergent and dynamic protocols that arise from the data. This requires developing new vocabulary and rules for communicating and sharing spectrum.

In the case of communication networks, the team said that these techniques might help develop “new models” for communicating meaning between things like wireless network base stations.

For example, two base stations might be able to communicate about the causes of network interference, the importance of different messages, or changes in traffic patterns in a way that helps improve communications for users.

This vision of the future could replace larger chunks of the radio spectrum with shared understanding. If the receiver can infer the semantics of the message, then the transmitter needs to send far less data to get the meaning across and this will lead to better energy efficiency and greater resilience.

The researchers hope to inspire collaboration across various disciplines, including information theory, machine learning, cognitive science, logic and control theory.

“This will require various kinds of multidisciplinary research,” Bennis said.

Moving to the cloud is the basis of a good business continuity plan

Contributor
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Moving to the cloud is the basis of a good business continuity plan
  • There is a tremendous amount of risk out there for businesses with online assets, from cyberattacks and ransomware to natural disasters and power outages.
  • The cloud is nothing new but it is undoubtedly one of the most transformational changes entities can make to aid both security and operational efficiency. 
  • A BCP is a thorough and complex plan to fight the ever-present and ever-costly risk of downtime and moving operations to the cloud is the best shortcut to take. 

A business continuity plan (BCP) is, broadly speaking; a set of processes and principles to improve resilience and ensure a business can continue functioning. Due to the importance of IT to productivity for almost every organisation in the 21st century – downtime, when IT systems are offline, is its antithesis. 

Thanks to the rapid adoption of digital tools spurred on by the pandemic and the general move online we have seen throughout the world, there is a tremendous amount of risk out there for businesses with online assets, from cyberattacks and ransomware to natural disasters and power outages.

Amir Hashmi, CEO and founder of cloud and managed technology services zsah.

However, using cloud-based IT assets such as remote desktops, SaaS applications, and cloud storage of data can be a shortcut to protecting their continuity – and therefore the continuity of your business.

According to Veeam’s 2021 Data Protection Report, the average cost of downtime is $84,650 per hour – that’s $1,410 per minute. 

Naturally, this figure is skewed by larger organisations reporting higher sums. Still, small and medium businesses are increasingly impacted as they are seen as easier targets – and they have far less capital to absorb the blow. 

Although downtime has an infinite number of causes, from natural disasters to cyberattacks, two factors remain consistent: it is costly for modern businesses and often preventable. 

The key to this prevention is a good business continuity plan. Suppose we disregard the part of BCPs that consider the physical security of assets and focus on the digital continuity of IT systems.

In that case, we can say that a good BCP focuses on three things, and according to IBM, these are:

High availability: The systems provided in a business allow the enterprise to have access to applications that allow it to still operate even if it experiences local failures in areas such as IT, processes, and physical facilities. 

Continuous operations: The system a business has in place that allows the business to run smoothly during times when disruption or maintenance takes place either planned or otherwise.

Disaster recovery: The system a business has in place that allows it to recover its data centre at another location safely and securely if there is a significant event which means the current site is either damaged beyond repair or inoperable. 

Of course, this is not a universally prescriptive solution – as businesses have varied sizes and needs, and one size never fits all. However, many of these essential issues are automatically covered if enterprises move storage, desktops, and digital tools to the cloud rather than store and operate them from on-site servers or even on personal devices. 

Firstly, cloud providers automatically encrypt and protect your information through extensive cybersecurity measures and often duplicate it across multiple sites, areas, or even time zones to protect it against physical or cyber damage. Doing this yourself is a costly and time-consuming task with huge risks if not done correctly.

Automated protection measures

Here, you benefit from the economy of scale, as huge deep pockets develop and invest in the most thorough, innovative, and automated protection measures. 

This means that your data, your applications, and therefore the continuity of your business are protected from all but the most apocalyptic and unforeseen of circumstances – including data loss, power outages, ransomware attacks, and many other causes of downtime. 

You are now (nearly) continuously operable and, just as importantly, are operable from anywhere. This, in turn, makes hybrid or working from home a far easier and safer experience for new and existing members of your team – with cybersecurity measures and encryption embedded in your teams’ operating systems and tools, no matter what device they use. 

As the ability to hybrid work is seen as an expectation of staff across the board, and in most of the modern, industrialised world, making this process more accessible is a wise investment to attract and retain future employees. 

It’s not a magic cure, but it’s a start

The cloud is the obvious answer for a company that requires always-accessible and always-operational data storage and applications. 

This is true whether you use public cloud resources or a dedicated, off-premises private cloud server operated by a dedicated IT team on your behalf. 

The cloud is nothing new, and it certainly is not a single-point cure to IT pain points. Still, it is undoubtedly one of the most transformational changes you can make to aid both security and operational efficiency. 

However, if you want to avoid unmonitored cloud usage causing a surge in costs – make sure you have the resources to dedicate to its use. 

Better yet, outsource to experts: an IT managed service provider will ensure that your move onto the cloud, and its continued use, will be managed effectively.

  • Amir Hashmi is the CEO and founder of cloud and managed technology services zsah.

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A lot of education needed to drive simplification of Kubernetes deployment

Contributor
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A lot of education needed to drive simplification of Kubernetes deployment
  • One of the top challenges identified by organisations looking to deploy Kubernetes is that they lack the necessary in-house skills.
  • The number of learning opportunities is expected to increase in the next year as the industry looks to address the emerging skills gap.
  • The move towards Kubernetes-as-a-Service will significantly drive-up adoption and enjoy the benefits of delivering applications faster, at a greater scale, and with greater accuracy.

Kubernetes is still in its early educational phase as a technology. On Gartner’s Hype Cycle, container management currently sits on top of the peak of inflated expectations. 

If Kubernetes and other technologies within this category follow the expected trajectory, they will enter the Trough of Disillusionment in the next 12 months – before climbing the Slope of Enlightenment. 

This aligns fairly well with where Kubernetes currently is in terms of business deployment. In the Middle East, organisations are waking up to their potential and developing an understanding of where they can deliver real competitive advantage, in the light of the increasing rate of adoption of containers. According to Veeam’s Data Protection Report, 2022 69 per cent of organisations in the UAE and 76 per cent of organisations in Saudi are already running containers in production, while 29 per cent and 22 per cent respectively plan to do so in the next 12 months. 

Claude Schuck, Regional Director for the Middle East at Veeam Software.

However, there is a lot of education to be done before IT teams have fully got to grips with how best to deploy Kubernetes. 

Over the next 12 months, we will see two things happen that will shift perceptions around Kubernetes. The first is that those deploying the technology will start to understand it more, gain confidence in building the business case, and start to demonstrate real ROI. 

The second is that cloud providers will find simpler ways to serve Kubernetes to organisations, reducing the need for deep technical understanding to deploy it effectively.

Education and enlightenment

Much of the appetite for learning about how to successfully deploy Kubernetes and the benefits of doing so comes from within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) community. 

The technical barriers to entry are still relatively high, which is why one of the top challenges identified by organisations looking to deploy Kubernetes is that they lack the necessary in-house skills. 

It is often the case that relatively new technologies which experience unprecedented spurts of adoption outpace the market in terms of the skills and infrastructure required to support growth. 

However, when it comes to Kubernetes, we’re talking about one of the fastest-growing open-source technologies of all time in terms of early adoption. It’s important, therefore, that this process of educating the technical community gathers pace. 

Over the 12 months, we will see the number of learning opportunities increase as the industry looks to address the emerging skills next gap. 

An example of such an initiative is Learning.kasten.io, a Kubernetes learning platform from Kasten by Veeam. The programme aims to equip technical professionals looking to upskill the next generation of tech talent with at least a basic understanding of Kubernetes. 

This will shorten the learning curve for both experienced and entry-level technologists – burnishing enterprises with a pool of talent that understands Kubernetes and how to get the best out of it.

Making Kubernetes easy

As well as building a solid pipeline of people who understand and can capably consult businesses on Kubernetes, cloud providers are working on ways to make it easier for IT teams to consume and deploy them without in-house technical proficiency. 

This will ultimately be one of the major driving forces that take Kubernetes from being an emerging technology in its experimental stages to established enterprise technology. The success of Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) proves that organisations are demanding simpler ways to consume and deploy IT through the cloud. Kubernetes will be no exception to this rule. 

Currently, Kubernetes is acting as a management platform for containers and among the earliest adopters are established and regulated industries such as banking and financial services. 

Businesses from other industries are currently evaluating the pros and cons of Kubernetes, looking at whether they can incorporate it into their networks. 

To accelerate the growing interest of the broader market, major cloud service providers are beginning to offer Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) – making it possible to operate Kubernetes as a managed service. KaaS is commonly provided via the public cloud, but as its penetration grows, organisations will be able to consume similar services through local managed service providers (MSPs) or deploy them on-premises. 

The move towards KaaS will significantly drive-up Kubernetes adoption, taking away some of the initial pain and investment required to deploy Kubernetes and enjoy the benefits of delivering applications faster, at a greater scale, and with greater accuracy. 

No matter how Kubernetes is consumed, organisations looking to take advantage of the opportunity it offers must be aware of the data protection requirements which accompany it. Kubernetes does not significantly change the threat landscape or bridge any cybersecurity gaps. 

It requires the same modern data protection capabilities as any other type of data on any other type of platform. 

Fundamentally, the infrastructure is now closer to the applications with the help of containers, and data backup must be carried out differently to align with this. 

The number of workloads using stateful data in container environments is increasing alongside data services being deployed within the Kubernetes cluster. 

Data protection

Other public cloud tools can be connected to applications running within Kubernetes, which changes the way data is protected. Simply put, backup works differently for Kubernetes than virtualized environments. 

This is where specialised data protection solutions for backup and recovery of Kubernetes environments such as Kasten by Veeam come into play. 

Over the next 12 months, more businesses will get to grips with the many benefits of deploying Kubernetes, while cloud providers find more consumable ways of serving up Kubernetes including KaaS.

As well as investing in the skills required to maximize RoI, businesses must seek the advice of data protection experts when deploying Kubernetes to ensure that they are not becoming exposed to new risks. 

Organisations in the Middle East must be equipped with modern data protection solutions to ensure their data is protected across physical, virtual, cloud, SaaS and Kubernetes environments at all times. 

  • Claude Schuck is the Regional Director for the Middle East at Veeam Software.

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