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Kubernetes has crossed the threshold from modern choice to baseline expectation. The 2025 CNCF Annual Cloud Native Survey confirms what platform teams already know from experience: Kubernetes is now the standard infrastructure for containerized workloads, and the organizations running it are no longer early adopters experimenting in a sandbox. Instead, they are enterprises with production-critical applications, complex multi-site environments, regulatory obligations, and no tolerance for unplanned downtime. The infrastructure is mature, but the protection strategies haven’t always kept up.

The gap between Kubernetes deployment maturity and Kubernetes data protection maturity is the defining challenge for platform teams in 2026.

It’s the challenge that brought Aussie Broadband to Veeam Kasten, and it’s the topic that GigaOm’s independent research has been documenting across enterprise Kubernetes users for six consecutive years.

The Aussie Broadband story is a useful lens, because it reflects the same pressures — growth, complexity, legacy tooling, and the need for something that works at scale — that organizations across every industry are navigating right now.

From Regional Challenger to Australia’s Fourth-Largest ISP

Aussie Broadband was founded in 2008 with a clear and deliberate goal: Improve broadband availability in regional Australia, a market that larger carriers had consistently underserved. The company expanded to include National Broadband Network services in 2017 and began building its own fiber network for customers in 2020.

The trajectory from regional challenger to nationally recognized carrier is reflected in the numbers: Aussie Broadband today serves over 780,000 broadband locations, employs around 1,600 people, and holds the distinction of being Australia’s fourth-largest retail internet provider.

That growth didn’t happen slowly or linearly. It occured through a combination of organic expansion and acquisition: The kind of growth that puts immediate, compounding pressure on infrastructure teams. Each new customer cohort, acquired business, and new service added layers of complexity to an IT landscape that was already evolving rapidly.

And at the center of that landscape, Kubernetes was becoming the platform of record: Running the network automation platform that underpins service delivery, the DevOps tooling that supports the engineering team, and the internal business systems (CRM and email, for example) that keep the organization running across primary sites in Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, and Melbourne.

When Kubernetes runs the network automation platform for an ISP serving 780,000 customers, backup is not an optional feature — it’s a service continuity obligation.

The Challenge: Legacy Resilience Tools Can’t Keep Pace with Modern Growth

The challenge Aussie Broadband faced is one that GigaOm’s research identifies repeatedly across enterprise Kubernetes environments: Organizations don’t have the luxury of building protection strategies from scratch on a clean platform. They inherit a complex landscape of existing applications — cloud-native, migrated from legacy infrastructure, or added through acquisition, for example — and they’re expected to protect all of it with consistent policies, recovery guarantees, and operational overhead.

For Aussie Broadband, the inflection point came as growth accelerated. The legacy data resilience platforms the organization had in place couldn’t keep pace with the scale and complexity of what Kubernetes was now running. The risk wasn’t abstract, it was operational. An ISP’s Kubernetes cluster isn’t running stateless demo applications. It’s running the systems that automate network provisioning, track customer accounts, and support the engineering workflows that keep the service running. A protection gap in that environment is a potential service availability gap, and in a competitive Australian broadband market, availability is exactly what Aussie Broadband had built its reputation on.

The problem compounds in multi-site environments. With production Kubernetes running across four cities, the requirement isn’t just to protect individual workloads. The requirement is to maintain consistent protection policies across all workloads, get clear visibility into backup health fleet-wide, and recover confidently from any one of them if something goes wrong. Legacy tools built for a different era of infrastructure simply weren’t designed for this operational model.

The Solution: Kubernetes-Native Protection That Scales with the Business

Aussie Broadband deployed Veeam Kasten to address the protection gap across its Kubernetes estate. The phrase that captures the outcome is one Ben O’Shea, General Manager of Cloud & SRE at Aussie Broadband, used directly: “The organization now builds trust in every connection.” That’s not a marketing line.

For an ISP, trust in every connection means the systems that deliver service, track customers, and support operations are protected in a way that gives the team genuine confidence; not the performance of confidence that comes from having a backup solution installed, but the operational assurance that comes from having one that works the way Kubernetes works.

Kasten’s architecture is Kubernetes-native by design, which matters more than it might sound. A solution that understands Kubernetes — that can discover applications automatically, apply label-based policies, back up not just PersistentVolumes but the full application context (configs, secrets, RBAC, and namespace structure) — operates fundamentally differently from one that was retrofitted to work with container workloads.

For Aussie Broadband’s network automation platform, where the application’s Kubernetes metadata is as important as its data, that distinction is the difference between a backup that can actually be used for recovery and one that only looks complete until you need it.

Across four production sites and a growing list of critical applications, Kasten gave the Aussie Broadband platform team consistent policy-driven protection, clear visibility into backup health across the fleet, and the ability to recover workloads across sites when needed, without requiring the team to manage each cluster independently or stitch together coverage manually. That operational simplicity at scale is where the business value of Kubernetes-native data protection lands.

Six Years of Independent Validation

The GigaOm Kubernetes Data Protection Radar evaluates solutions across 32 attributes — spanning table stakes capabilities, key technical features, emerging features, and business criteria — and has done so annually for six consecutive years.

Veeam Kasten has been recognized as a Leader and Outperformer in each of those reports. That consistency matters in a market where vendor claims are easy to make and independent evaluation is rare. For organizations like Aussie Broadband that need to make infrastructure decisions with long operational lifespans, a six-year track record of independent validation is a meaningful signal.

Among the capabilities GigaOm specifically recognized: Database awareness with application-consistent backups using native Kubernetes and CSI integrations; immutable, encrypted backups with object-lock protection and full audit logging; centralized policy-driven backup across distributed and edge Kubernetes clusters; and storage-native CSI snapshots with incremental backup to minimize performance impact.

Each of those maps directly to the problems Aussie Broadband was solving, and to the challenges every enterprise Kubernetes environment eventually confronts.

What Comes Next: AI, Virtualization, and the Expanding Scope of Kubernetes Resilience

The Aussie Broadband story doesn’t end with containers. The same trajectory that brought Kubernetes from experimental to production-critical is now doing the same thing for two workload categories that will define the next chapter of enterprise Kubernetes: AI applications and KubeVirt virtual machines. Both are arriving on the same clusters that already run containerized workloads. Both bring new data protection requirements. And both are arriving faster than most teams expected.

On the AI side, the numbers are stark: 66% of organizations hosting AI workloads are using Kubernetes to do it, according to the 2025 CNCF Annual Survey. That’s not surprising, as Kubernetes is already where the compute, orchestration, and operational tooling live, but it creates a new class of protection requirement. AI applications are stateful by nature: Model weights, training datasets, vector stores, and inference pipelines. The value of an AI application isn’t just in the code, it’s in the data, the trained state, and the pipeline configuration that took months to build.

Veeam is being built into AI infrastructure as the trust and resilience layer for what are increasingly being called AI Factories: The data and compute environments where AI value is created and needs to be protected.

The value of an AI application lives in its data and trained state. If you can’t protect it, you can’t trust it.

On the virtualization side, OpenShift Virtualization and KubeVirt are bringing VM workloads onto Kubernetes clusters, and the organizations making that transition need protection that covers both containers and VMs from the same platform, without requiring them to start over.

Veeam’s approach is explicit on this: Reuse, don’t replace. Customers keep their existing VBR consoles, repositories, policies, and operational playbooks, and extend them to protect OpenShift Virt VMs natively. For the more than 500,000 organizations already running Veeam Data Platform, that means the path to protecting modern Kubernetes infrastructure — including KubeVirt VMs — runs directly through what they already have, not through a replacement cycle.

For an organization like Aussie Broadband, which is already running multi-site Kubernetes in production and protecting network-critical workloads, the question isn’t whether these workload types will arrive on the platform, it’s whether the protection strategy will be ready when they do. The answer Kasten provides is architectural continuity: The same platform, policies, and operational model, extended to whatever Kubernetes runs next.

Data sovereignty is the third dimension of what’s coming. Regulatory frameworks, like GDPR, national data protection requirements, and the growing body of regional data residency rules, are increasingly specific about where backup data can be stored and under whose jurisdiction it must remain.

For a distributed carrier like Aussie Broadband, operating across multiple Australian cities and subject to local regulatory requirements, this isn’t just a future concern. Kasten’s ability to enforce regional data residency, leverage local cloud providers to keep backups under local jurisdiction, and maintain compliance with regional frameworks is part of the protection story, not an add-on.

The Bottom Line

Aussie Broadband’s journey from regional ISP to national carrier is a story about growth outpacing infrastructure, and then catching up. The Kubernetes data protection challenge they solved is the same problem that enterprises across every industry are confronting: A modern, production-critical platform that expanded faster than the protection strategies built to cover it. Kasten gave them the Kubernetes-native foundation to close that gap, across four cities and a growing list of critical applications, without the operational overhead of managing each environment independently.

The industry context makes that foundation more valuable over time, not less. As AI workloads, KubeVirt VMs, and data sovereignty requirements add new layers to the Kubernetes protection problem, the organizations that will navigate that complexity well are the ones that built their resilience strategy on a platform designed for Kubernetes from the start, not one that’s been retrofitted to keep up.

Kubernetes resilience isn’t a project you complete. It’s a capability you build and extend as the platform grows.

For more information on Aussie Broadband’s journey and the GigaOm Kubernetes Data Protection Radar Report:

Full Aussie Broadband case study

GigaOm Kubernetes Data Protection Radar Report Blog

Aussie Broadband Veeam Webinar

The post How Aussie Broadband Built Kubernetes Resilience at Scale — and What Comes Next appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

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