Items Tagged: Zerto

Available Now

Towards the Ultimate Goal of IT Resilience: A Look at the Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform

We live in a digital world where online services, applications and data must always be available. Yet the modern data center remains very susceptible to interruptions. These opposing realities are challenging traditional backup applications and disaster recovery solutions and causing companies to rethink what is needed to ensure 100% uptime of their IT environments.

The need for availability goes well beyond recovering from disasters. Companies must be able to rapidly recover from many real world disruptions such as ransomware, device failures and power outages as well as natural disasters. Add to this the dynamic nature of virtualization and cloud computing, and it’s not hard to see the difficulty of providing continuous availability while managing a highly variable IT environment that is susceptible to trouble.

Some companies feel their backup devices will give them adequate data protection and others believe their disaster recovery solutions will help them restore normal business operations if an incident occurs. Regrettably, far too often these solutions fall short of meeting user expectations because they don’t provide the rapid recovery and agility needed for full business continuance.

Fortunately, there is a way to ensure a consistent experience in an inconsistent world. It’s called IT resilience. IT resilience is the ability to ensure business services are always on, applications are available and data is accessible no matter what human errors, events, failures or disasters occur. And true IT resilience goes a step further to provide continuous data protection (CDP), end-to-end recovery automation irrespective of the makeup of a company’s IT environment and the flexibility to evolve IT strategies and incorporate new technology.

Intrigued by the promise of IT resilience, companies are seeking data protection solutions that can withstand any disaster to enable a reliable online experience and excellent business performance. In a recent Taneja Group survey, nearly half the companies selected “high availability and resilient infrastructure” as one of their top two IT priorities. In the same survey, 67% of respondents also indicated that unplanned application downtime compromised their ability to satisfy customer needs, meet partner and supplier commitments and close new business.

This strong customer interest in IT resilience has many data protection vendors talking about “resilience.” Unfortunately, many backup and disaster recovery solutions don’t provide continuous data protection plus hardware independence, strong virtualization support and tight cloud integration. This is a tough combination and presents a big challenge for data protection vendors striving to provide enterprise-grade IT resilience.

There is however one data protection vendor that has replication and disaster recovery technologies designed from the ground up for IT resilience. The Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform built on Zerto Virtual Replication offers CDP, failover (for higher availability), end-to-end process automation, heterogeneous hypervisor support and native cloud integration. As a result, IT resilience with continuous availability, rapid recovery and agility is a core strength of the Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform.

This paper will explore the functionality needed to tackle modern data protection requirements. We will also discuss the challenges of traditional backup and disaster recovery solutions, outline the key aspects of IT resilience and provide an overview of the Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform as well as the hypervisor-based replication that Zerto pioneered.