The Kubernetes landscape expands every year with more clusters, more workloads, and more AI. However, one constant remains: the Veeam Kasten juggernaut. For the sixth year in a row, Veeam has been named a leader and outperformer in the newest edition of the GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Data Protection Report, setting the standard for Kubernetes resilience. This makes Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes the only solution to have achieved these results each year since the report’s inception. Veeam is also the only vendor designated as an “Outperformer” in this year’s report. Read on to find out why you should trust this industry-leading solution to protect your critical applications.
Kubernetes Data Protection Market Evolution
In the ever-evolving world of containerization and cloud-native infrastructure, protecting data in Kubernetes environments has become even more mission-critical. Kubernetes has matured as a platform, and it’s running applications that power your business, including revenue systems, analytics pipelines, payment services, AI models, compliance workloads, and more. With that shift comes a reality many teams feel every day — that the complexity of modern environments has outgrown legacy backups. Enterprises now demand protection that spans virtual machines (VMs), containers, edge clusters, and hybrid cloud deployments. Data resilience solutions must match this pace of innovation.
Why This Report Matters
The GigaOm Radar Report for Kubernetes Data Protection is widely regarded as one of the most authoritative third-party evaluations of vendor approaches to data protection for containerized workloads. Each year, it reviews vendors across multiple dimensions, including table stakes, key features, emerging features, and business criteria, testing for real-world readiness rather than idealized use cases. The report also considers how the market has evolved in the past year and analyzes which vendors have made real progress.
While anyone can claim leadership, not everyone can prove it under the scrutiny of an independent study. Being named a “Leader” and “Outperformer” in this report isn’t about marketing — it signals maturity, robustness, and reliability.
Why Veeam Won
Veeam won because its platform delivers exceptional strength across not one, but several categories.
- It ranked at the top of the “Innovation/Platform Play” quadrant.
- It achieved the highest average score for both the “Key Features” and “Business Criteria” categories and tied for first in “Emerging Features”.
- It was the only solution in the report to receive “Exceptional” ratings in these key categories:
- Database awareness: Veeam automatically discovers Kubernetes-hosted databases and delivers application-aware, consistent backups using native Kubernetes and CSI integrations.
- Data integrity: Veeam enforces immutable, encrypted backups with object-lock protection, role-based access control, and full audit logging.
- Edge Kubernetes: Veeam centrally manages policy-driven backup and recovery across distributed edge Kubernetes clusters.
- Efficiency: Kasten leverages storage-native CSI snapshots and incremental backups to minimize performance impact and reduce data storage cost.
Other categories in which Veeam rated “Exceptional” included:
- Primary and secondary storage support: Veeam supports a wide array of primary and secondary storage across on-prem and cloud storage.
- Scalability: Veeam scales up and down efficiently as resources are needed for backups and other data migration operations.
- Security: Veeam excels in security both from an operational perspective (how secure the data protection solution is) and a data integrity perspective (how secure the backup data is).
Overall: Veeam achieved seven “Exceptional” rankings out of 16 judged feature categories.
In short, across functionality, performance, security, scalability, and business-readiness, Veeam excelled.
What Makes Veeam Stand Out: Market-Leading Innovation
In 2025, Veeam had two strong product releases to accelerate its leadership. In May, Veeam enhanced Kubernetes-native data protection with the v8.0 release, which introduced enterprise scale with modern virtualization features, security everywhere, and broad customer freedom of choice.
Veeam also finished the year strong with v8.5, released in November, which introduced new capabilities that provide advanced VM control, enterprise scale and automation, secure operations, and AI workload protection.
As the report’s author, Joep Piscaer, noted:
“Veeam is positioned as a Leader and Outperformer in the Innovation/Platform Play Quadrant of the Kubernetes data protection Radar chart. Veeam was classified as an outperformer given its continued pace of innovation in the market, especially in the security and compliance arena, delivering many market-leading features and certifications. New in 2025 is Kasten’s support for file level recovery of KubeVirt-based virtual machines, as well as a deeper integration of Kasten with Veeam Data Platform, notably, the ability to ship incremental backups to Veeam Backup & Replication.”
Solution Insights
Piscaer’s analysis detailed many of Veeam Kasten’s differentiators, which include but are not limited to:
Database awareness: “The solution excels here due to Kasten’s application and database auto discovery and awareness powered by the Kanister framework, giving organizations an exceptional out-of-the-box experience for database- and application-aware backups.”
Data integrity: “The vendor provides robust ransomware protection, tamper analytics and protection, and deep integrations with various SIEM solutions. It offers verified recoverability in isolated recovery environments and instant recovery for workloads from those environments.”
Edge Kubernetes: “Kasten’s architecture and policy-based approach lend it well to edge use cases, including centralized policy management, low resource usage, and optimized deployment for decentralized and edge clusters.”
What Veeam’s Success Means for You: Beyond the “Badge”
1. Demonstration of Real-World, Enterprise-Grade Readiness
The GigaOm Radar tests real-world needs like multi-cluster, cross-platform, and hybrid-cloud, security, compliance, disaster recovery (DR), scale, and complexity. Veeam’s consistent top-tier performance — six years in a row — signals that Veeam is shaping the standard. This means that enterprises can confidently go with this industry leader.
2. Reduced Risk in Cloud-Native Transformation
As organizations transition from monoliths and VM-based workloads to microservices, containers, and cloud-native architectures (which are often mixed with legacy systems), the challenge isn’t just how to build; it’s how to protect. Veeam’s unified, cross-platform backup provides a safety net as they transform.
3. Protected Stateful Workloads, not Just Stateless Ones
Many early Kubernetes users ran stateless applications, but the real value (e.g., databases, queues, storage services, stateful business logic) demands stateful orchestration. Having a mature, consistent, and secure way to backup, DR, migrate, and restore stateful workloads is essential.
4. Compliance, Security, and Confidence Against Threats
In an era of ransomware, supply-chain threats, and regulatory requirements (especially in finance, healthcare, and government), backups must be more than just snapshots. They need to be immutable, auditable, and compliance ready. Therefore, Veeam’s strong security and integrity posture is a major plus.
Find Out How You Can Benefit from Veeam’s Winning Solution Today!
The GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Data Protection does more than list vendors — it evaluates them against real-world requirements, increasingly stringent standards, and evolving enterprise needs.
The fact that Veeam has not only maintained its leadership for the sixth year in a row, but outpaced competitors in critical categories speaks volumes. See for yourself how you can take advantage of Veeam’s industry-leading solution to secure your environment today by viewing the report here .
Try Veeam Kasten today – free!