Data management firm Veritas Technologies LLC said today it’s expanding its ransomware data protection hardware and services to cover more environments, including Kubernetes and public cloud platforms.

Veritas is well-known in the information technology space for its data services, helping organizations protect their most critical information. As well as data protection, it also provides services around data management in the cloud and on-premises, compliance readiness and storage optimization.

Today’s updates pertain to its flagship NetBackup software offering and are designed to offer more comprehensive safeguards against ransomware for container environments. Ransomware is a growing malware threat that locks up company data and makes it inaccessible unless victims pay a ransom to regain access to it. Veritas says that’s becoming a more pressing issue for companies that use containers, which host the components of modern applications.

To help enterprises cope with what is becoming a very real threat, Veritas is updating NetBackup to provide native protection across multiple Kubernetes distributions and layers, including clusters, namespaces, custom resources and persistent volumes, providing full protection and a range of recovery options. NetBackup now offers ransomware protection for Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Tanzu and Google Kubernetes Engine. That alone means NetBackup offers unparalleled support for Kubernetes data protection, the company said, but it won’t rest on its laurels since it’s planning support for more distributions to follow.

Veritas Vice President of Product Management Doug Matthews said ransomware is a growing threat for mission-critical infrastructure such as oil and gas, healthcare and telecommunications. “Our newest NetBackup release represents a significant advancement in Veritas’ leadership of backup and recovery solutions by further protecting customers against increasingly prevalent ransomware attacks, irrespective of where their data resides: cloud, containers or on-premises,” he said.

The new release extends considerably more ransomware protection to the cloud as well. The new cloud resource autoscaling feature, for example, provides more cost-effective resilience by automatically provisioning or de-provisioning cloud resources as and when they are required, helping ensure that backups don’t fail from a lack of them. The cloud-based intelligent policies, meanwhile, are designed to offer automatic protection to new workloads the moment they come online, preventing any data protection gaps, the company said.

Veritas’ specialized NetBackup hardware has also been updated with a new offering that’s configured specifically to provide better ransomware safeguards. The new NetBackup Flex 5350 appliance delivers a 300% improvement in backup performance, the company said, with twice the capacity of its closest competitor.

Various other improvements round out today’s updates. For instance, NetBackup now has integrated artificial intelligence and machine learning-based anomaly detection to provide alerts for any backup-related issues. That helps ensure data can always be recovered, the company explained.

Customers also gain the ability to define and automatically execute multiple service level objectives, including specifying the recovery technique and data to be recovered for each application. That capability is available now with VMware applications, and will soon expand to any application, Veritas said. Finally, VMware users gain continuous data protection and instant rollback capabilities that ensure they can recover from a ransomware attack in just minutes instead of hours, the company said.

Evaluator Group analyst Krista Macomber said the growing adoption of containers in the enterprise creates a much more complex and heterogeneous environment that must be protected in new ways.

“This complexity can lead to poor data practices, where information is mismanaged or overlooked, and winds up unprotected,” Macomber said. “We hear from customers that being able to oversee, protect and manage all environments from a single platform would greatly reduce their risk of data loss.”

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