04 July 2025
Kubernetes has firmly established itself as the cornerstone of enterprise modernisation. Understanding its storage capabilities and challenges is essential…
Kubernetes is no longer an experimental technology; it’s firmly entrenched as the backbone of enterprise modernisation.
“Kubernetes has reached mainstream adoption in the enterprise. It is now the standard platform for container orchestration, with widespread use in production across industries such as finance, healthcare, telecom, and manufacturing,” says Ryan Kaw, VP of Global Sales at Catalogic.
“Kubernetes is the core of cloud-native modernisation, automating deployment, scaling, and managing containerised apps across complex, hybrid IT environments,” agrees Divya Mohan, Principal Technology Advocate at SUSE and one of the maintainers of the Kubernetes project.
Moreover, enterprises are deploying Kubernetes not just in the cloud but also on-premises, as part of hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, supporting agile development, microservices architectures, and scalable infrastructure management.
Demystifying persistent storage
One of the most critical components for enterprise adoption is how Kubernetes handles persistent or non-volatile storage. In Kubernetes, persistent storage provides a way to store data beyond the lifecycle of a pod, ensuring that data is not lost when pods are recreated or rescheduled.
According to Mohan, “Kubernetes has fundamentally transformed how enterprises handle persistent storage by decoupling it from compute through the Persistent Volume subsystem, enabling stateful applications to run reliably and scale seamlessly.”
Kaw explains that persistent storage in Kubernetes is managed via Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs), which abstract the underlying storage infrastructure. Kubernetes supports both static and dynamic provisioning using Storage Classes and Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers, enabling integration with a variety of backends — from cloud-managed disks to on-prem enterprise systems.
“However, Kubernetes does not natively handle data protection tasks such as backup, restore, or disaster recovery. These responsibilities fall outside its core scope, requiring external tools, either commercial solutions or open-source options, to ensure workload durability and compliance,” notes Kaw.
Compatibility, performance, and data protection
When designing Kubernetes storage solutions at scale, several key considerations come into play.
Oni Chakravartti, SVP, Head of Sales for Enterprise, Cloud Business Unit at Rakuten Symphony, lists the critical factors: “time to deploy, hyper-convergence, manageability from a single point across multiple regions, the ability to utilise multiple storage types, auto-scaling without disruption, high availability with three-way replication, and compatibility with existing and new hardware are all essential.”
Since the goal of Kubernetes is to enable a portable, scalable, containerised architecture that supports changing application needs, in the enterprise, this must be supported by a scalable, secure, protected storage solution, that (ideally) can be delivered as software-defined, hardware-defined and cloud-defined.
“Organisations need to factor in reliability, scalability, performance, and security right from the start,” confirms Mohan. “While Kubernetes offers the flexibility to automate and standardise storage with features like Dynamic Volume Provisioning and Storage Classes, it is imperative to complement them with robust backup and disaster recovery strategies to protect the data that is being stored. Given the ever-evolving nature of the threat and regulatory landscapes today, ensuring security and compliance is also non-negotiable, irrespective of the environment. Following best practices such as enforcing strict RBAC, encryption at rest and in transit, and regular key rotation will not only help organisations protect sensitive data but also meet compliance and regulatory requirements.”
Mohan adds that while matching storage requirements with application needs helps with right-sizing storage resources, leveraging observability tools and automation to monitor storage utilisation, throughput, and latency can aid organisations in taking proactive and corrective measures.
However, integrating enterprise storage solutions with Kubernetes often encounters hurdles such as limited CSI driver support, architectural mismatches, operational overhead, and multi-tenancy issues. Mitigation strategies include using Kubernetes-certified CSI drivers with dynamic provisioning, integrating monitoring and alerting into cluster operations, and adopting Kubernetes-native storage projects for deeper control.
Kaw highlights the importance of vendor solutions that are purpose-built: “Bridging the gap between traditional storage paradigms and the dynamic nature of containers requires solutions that are designed for Kubernetes from the ground up, rather than relying on complex, risky open-source workarounds.”
In contrast, Mohan believes that to bridge the gap between traditional storage paradigms and the dynamic, ephemeral nature of containers, open source is key.
“By investing in open source tooling that’s purpose-built for such environments, not only can organisations leverage the benefits of collaborative innovation, but they can also save themselves from being locked to a cloud provider or vendor,” asserts Mohan.
Cloud-managed storage: convenience with caveats
Managed storage services are popular for their ease of use, durability, and integration with cloud-native services. They support dynamic provisioning via CSI, providing seamless operations with minimal overhead.
“Using cloud-managed storage solutions with Kubernetes offers several advantages for enterprises, including minimal administrative overhead, automated scaling, built-in high availability, and seamless integration with cloud native monitoring and backup services,” claims Mohan. “These platforms allow organisations to quickly provision persistent storage, benefit from the cloud provider’s robust infrastructure, and focus on application development rather than storage management.”
Chakravartti reports that “cloud solutions running on hyperscalers have inherent advantage of scale, however enterprises need data at the edge for use cases that need just-in-time inference and actions — this can only be done at the edge. The cost of moving data to cloud and bringing it back is high, and enterprises are seeing this cost continue to rise. For example, sending security files captured by camera to the cloud, processing the image and sending it back for actions does not deliver just-in-time needs. Also, the data movement is very expensive. Enterprises want to bring their cloud cost down, and the only way to do this is to send and store data that is needed on cloud, and inference and actionable data to be processed at the edge.”
And cost isn’t the only issue; enterprises may face limitations in control and customisation, as managed services restrict infrastructure choices and integrations to what the provider supports.
“Organisations risk vendor lock-in, making future migrations or hybrid strategies more complex. Additionally, meeting strict compliance or data residency requirements can be challenging, as complete visibility and control over the underlying storage infrastructure are limited,” warns Mohan.
According to Kaw, “to address these drawbacks, many organisations adopt cloud-agnostic backup solutions or extend open-source tools to manage data across environments, ensuring consistent backup, recovery, and migration workflows.”
Ready for the next step?
Kubernetes is fundamentally reshaping how enterprises think about storage — moving from static, siloed solutions to flexible, scalable, and cloud-native architectures.
And, looking ahead, the enterprise market is expected to accelerate its migration to Kubernetes.
“We expect enterprise to migrate 70% of apps onto Kubernetes platform in the next 2-3 years. Supporting this trend, independent research from IDC forecasts that by 2027, more than 75% of all AI deployments will leverage container technology, and by 2028, 80% of custom software at the edge will run in containers — up from less than 50% today,” says Chakravartti.
As enterprises continue their digital transformation journeys, understanding and harnessing Kubernetes’ storage capabilities will be pivotal. Embracing open standards, leveraging hybrid architectures, and partnering with experienced vendors will help organisations unlock the full potential of containerised enterprise applications.
