Kasten is having an upgrade. As a big fan of the Kasten product (See all previous blog posts, including technical guides from here), I thought it was time to post about this update.
According to the 2026 CNCF Annual Cloud Native Survey, Kubernetes has decisively become the default for building scalable systems, with a staggering 82% of container users now deploying it in production—up from 66% in 2023. Kelsey Hightower and Alex Saroyan emphasized in their CNCF piece, “The 2024 Trends on Cloud Computing,” that managing workloads effectively across various hosting locations is a top priority for modern cloud strategy.
When you are in the trenches orchestrating complex infrastructure migrations—especially those massive, multi-week shifts from environments to another- you quickly realize that Kubernetes self-healing features are fantastic for application availability, but they do not guarantee data protection. Traditional volume backups simply aren’t equipped to handle dynamic, cloud-native environments, and Kubernetes clusters are just as vulnerable to ransomware as legacy systems.
This brings us to Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes v9.0. Earning the title of #1 in Kubernetes Data Protection by the GigaOm Radar for 2025, this latest release introduces a unified approach to managing traditional VMs, containerized apps, and AI workloads securely. Let’s break down what makes v9.0 an essential upgrade for enterprise infrastructure.
Enterprise Choice and Unmatched Scale
For those of us leaning heavily into Amazon Web Services, Kasten v9.0 introduces the ability to seamlessly export backups directly to the AWS-backed Veeam Vault. The flexibility doesn’t stop there. You can now increase your backup data resilience by sending those exported backups to multiple repository locations simultaneously.
Veeam has also tightened the integration between Kasten and Veeam Backup & Replication; you can now store complete Kubernetes backups, including metadata, natively within the Veeam format. Add in some serious datamover performance optimizations to reduce resource overhead, and your large-scale exports just got a lot smoother.
Multi-Workload Resilience: Bridging VMs and Containers
IT leaders increasingly need to combine containerized and virtualized infrastructures. Veeam Kasten v9.0 allows you to protect both VMs and containers together seamlessly.
- Label-Based VM Policies: You can dynamically protect virtual machines based on Kubernetes label matching, which is a massive win for policy flexibility.
- OpenShift Virtualization: A new storage-agnostic incremental backup API significantly decreases compute overhead and speeds up backup times for VMs.
- AI and Custom Resources: With the rise of AI orchestration, Kasten now provides blueprints to enable application-consistent backups for critical AI databases and modern data services.
Serious DevSecOps: Security & Observability
If you are managing environments governed by strict regulatory compliance frameworks, security visibility is non-negotiable.
- Hardened Pods: Aligning directly with NIST 800-190 security guidelines, Kasten v9.0 introduces hardened pods running with read-only root filesystems.
- SIEM Integrations: From a DevSecOps perspective, the ability to ingest and aggregate Kasten data into your SIEM platforms allows for real-time threat detection, governance, and analysis.
- Data Command Center & ACM: Kasten enables a single, unified view of your backup coverage, risk, and audit readiness via Data Command Center integration. For Red Hat environments, OpenShift Advanced Cluster Management centralizes observability across multiple Kasten instances.
- Admission Controller Policies: Administrators can enforce highly customizable, environment-specific rules for Kasten Actions and RestorePoints.
The Archtonic Takeaway
Whether you are running Amazon EKS, Google GKE, Oracle OKE, or OpenShift, Kasten provides granular, policy-driven control across the entire ecosystem. It prevents vendor lock-in by enabling cross-cloud portability—allowing you to mobilize applications across namespaces, clusters, and clouds for DR or test/dev at your own pace.
With features like automated application stack recreation for DR , least privilege access assignments per application , and WORM-state encrypted backups to combat ransomware, Kasten v9.0 is a robust toolkit designed for the reality of modern infrastructure.
Former Nuclear Engineer | University Lecturer | Technology Advisor | Digital Transformation evangelist | FinTech | Blockchain | Podcaster | vExpert ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ | VeeamVanguard ⭐️⭐️ | Nutanix SME | MBA | AWS ABW Grant’23
