Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Every piece of data your organization stores lives in a specific server, facility, and country. Data residency refers to where that data physically sits, and governments increasingly care about the answer. The EU, India, Brazil, and dozens of other jurisdictions now enforce strict rules about storage locations. Get it wrong, and you’re looking at regulatory fines, lost contracts, or both.

The gap between your last backup and a failure defines exactly how much data disappears. That gap is your recovery point objective (RPO), and teams running production workloads on OpenShift and KubeVirt find that most traditional DR tools simply don’t understand the environment well enough to close it. Near-zero RPO requires synchronous replication at the block level. Data must hit both your primary and DR site simultaneously.

Running one Kubernetes cluster is complex enough. Running five across AWS, GCP, and an on-prem data center without a unified control plane gets painful fast. Kubernetes Federation v2 (KubeFed) was built to solve this problem: managing federated Kubernetes clusters from a single point of control and distributing workloads across regions and providers without duplicating YAML files for every environment.

A few weeks ago I was on a call with a financial services customer who had moved a credit-decisioning model into production on Red Hat OpenShift AI. They were happy with the platform. They were less happy with the answer they had for a question their risk officer had just asked: “If an attacker encrypts the cluster tomorrow, what do we need to bring back to be inference-ready by Monday morning?” The team started listing the obvious things — the model artifact, the serving endpoint.

Every time a user submits a form, uploads a file, or completes a transaction, that data has to live somewhere, and governments increasingly want that “somewhere” to be within their own borders. Data localization has moved from a niche regulatory concern to a core infrastructure decision for any organization operating across jurisdictions.

Most teams can get OpenStack running, but keeping it running without burning out your engineers is the harder problem. Mirantis OpenStack packages upstream OpenStack with the validated builds, deployment tooling, and vendor support that platform teams need for stability. With Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK), the architecture goes even further.

Your database crashes at 2 PM, but your last backup ran at midnight. That’s 14 hours of lost transactions, customer records, and operational data. The gap between your last usable backup and the moment disaster strikes is exactly what the recovery point objective (RPO) defines. Most organizations don’t think seriously about it until they’re already staring at the damage. RPO in disaster recovery planning determines whether you lose five minutes of data or five days of it.

Something significant is happening across enterprise IT right now — and I do not think it has been fully reckoned with yet. More than 5,000 organizations are actively evaluating or executing a migration away from VMware. The Broadcom acquisition changed the economics of VMware dramatically and abruptly. Licensing costs surged. Bundling decisions eliminated flexibility.

Storing data in a specific country doesn’t automatically mean that that country’s laws are the only ones that apply. This disconnect catches a lot of organizations off guard, and it’s exactly where the confusion between data sovereignty vs. data residency begins. One is about where your data physically lives. The other is about which laws govern it, regardless of location.

You have backups. That’s a start. But when primary infrastructure fails, can your business actually keep running? That’s the core difference between DRaaS and BaaS. Backup as a service copies and stores your data. Disaster recovery as a service spins up your entire environment so that operations continue during an outage. They solve different problems, and treating them as interchangeable is how recovery plans fail when it matters most.