IT resilience platform converges disaster recovery, backup, and cloud to meet evolving enterprise demands.
I had the opportunity to speak with Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn, Director of Technical Marketing at Zerto prior to the virtual ZertoCON 2020 keynotes with Ziv Kedem, CEO & Co-Founder, Gil Levonai, CMO & SVP Product, and Oded Kedem, CTO & Chief Architect.
Digital transformation is accelerating during the Covid-19 pandemic since digital is how businesses must interact with their customers at this time. The pandemic has just accelerated the inevitable. Agile businesses will survive. Those that aren't able to transform will just go out of business more quickly.
To facilitate the transformation and protect expanding data and applications, Zerto is expanding the coverage of it’s IT resilience platform that converges disaster recovery (DR), backup, and cloud and on-premises mobility. They use a CDP (continuous data protection) engine and user-based reporting to move data from point A to B with replication between platforms (HyperV to AWS, Azure to AWS, AWS to Azure, et al). GCP is on the product roadmap. This enables enterprises to recover from ransomware attacks with lower RTOs and RPOs than can be achieved with snapshots.
Zerto began by supporting VMs and then added hypervisors and clouds. As more enterprises implement a DevOps methodology, running in containers, enterprises need a converged platform that provides continuous data protection, data recovery, and mobility of VMs and containers across private clouds, MSPs, public cloud IaaS, next-generation PaaS, and SaaS (Office 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow).
The next generation of applications is evolving with containers that need to be managed and orchestrated at scale. This has driven the rapid adoption of Kubernetes (K8s) which Zerto is now supporting.
Zerto will be integrated into K8s and support it in a native way and deploy as K8s entities and pods with persistent volumes. By protecting data between different K8s deployments of AKS or EKS and performs transfers and handles all orchestration with the core CDP. Data protection is provided as code with annotations making DR and DR tests part of CI/CD.
Zerto makes it easier to protect, move, and restore data in K8s. Users are able to avoid platform lock-in and integrate databases into deployment. The challenge is how to protect data. Zerto delivers with a Kube control plugin to automate recovery.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Gijsbert has seen conversations with customers and prospects change as demands have changed. The national zoo in the Netherlands is now doing online booking and ticketing since zoo visits are by appointment only to prevent overcrowding. Prior to Covid-19, the zoo did not take reservations or provide tickets. He is also seeing more targeted ransomware attacks and Zerto is seeing and helping more companies recover from ransomware than before the pandemic.