Zerto disrupts backup and data protection market

Zerto has opened its annual user conference, ZertoCON 2018, with the announcement of its IT Resilience Platform™ to empower its users to build resilient, always-on businesses with backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility converged in a single, simple, scalable platform, which is available now. The company also unveiled its vision for the future of backup with continuous journal based protection to change the way backup gets done. To realise this vision, Zerto pre-announced Zerto 7 and its plans to add an Elastic Journal along with additional features to support this continuous protection. The IT Resilience Platform increases the availability of data and applications, while reducing complexity and meeting the challenges of today’s digital customers.

The Zerto IT Resilience Platform

Embracing digital transformation allows organisations to harness the power of technology to drive efficiencies, create new experiences and ultimately beat the competition. This transformation is adding many layers of complexity to IT and is coupled with an increased need for data security and protection. IT resilience is the ability to seamlessly adapt to new technology and drive IT transformation, while mitigating the risks of downtime, ensuring an “always-on” business and the best customer experience.

The Zerto IT Resilience Platform, with Zerto’s proven continuous data protection (CDP) technology at its core, will solve many of these challenges by converging backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility solutions into one single, simple and scalable platform. Orchestration and automation are built in, giving organisations the ability to modernise and innovate. Analytics and control provide complete visibility across multi-site, multi-cloud environments to ensure business SLAs are met. As a result, companies no longer need separate backup, replication, orchestration and migration tools – with the associated complexities and costs.

“The IT Resilience Platform will fundamentally change the way companies embrace change, protect data and applications and meet the ‘always-on’ demands of the digital customer,” said Ziv Kedem, CEO and co-founder, Zerto. “Instead of forcing IT teams to deal with cumbersome legacy point solutions, Zerto is combining its experience in providing continuous data protection and cloud mobility with enhanced backup capabilities in one platform. This is an ambitious undertaking as it will change the way backup is done, but it's coming at exactly the right time. The markets are converging, and IT teams are ready to embrace a new normal for IT resilience.”

The future of backup – Zerto’s vision

With digital transformation comes the need for speed, performance and an expectation of no downtime, no data loss and no interruption. However, today’s backup technologies do not meet these expectations because they are cumbersome to use and rely on periodic backups. Zerto is unveiling its vision for the future of backup to meet these specific demands and solve the complexities of legacy technology. The foundation of this vision is the IT Resilience Platform and the future of backup will be based on:

• Best of breed CDP technology, which is at the core of delivering IT resilience
• Continuous journal-based protection with a new Elastic Journal that delivers recovery point objectives (RPOs) of seconds at scale for short and long-term data retention eliminating the need for legacy periodic based backups 
• New data protection workflows to automate recovery from any point in time across on-premises and cloud repositories

“Our research shows that customer and end user expectations continue to escalate in today’s ‘always-on’ world, while IT teams are faced with increasingly complex environments. This puts pressure on IT to simplify systems while still delivering continuous availability, growth and innovation,” said Phil Goodwin, Research Director, IDC. “The data protection market is in a state of flux, and providers like Zerto are moving beyond traditional backup to offer uninterrupted access to data and applications that drive the modern digital economy.”

Previewing Zerto 7

Building on its expertise with continuous data protection, Zerto 7 will add new capabilities to its IT Resilience Platform to change the way that backup is done. Specifically, the new key features to be included in Zerto 7 are:

·       The Elastic Journal, a new concept in data protection, merging granular journal technology with long term repositories allowing for a continuous stream of recovery points with search and recovery across data, files or VMs from any point in time from 7 seconds to 7 years

·       Intelligent indexing and search across on-premises or cloud to enable recovery for short and long-term retention

·       Data Protection workflows to automate the recovery from any point in time ensuring application consistency across repositories for short and long-term data retention

Zerto 7 will also introduce incremental, synthetic and full copies to increase efficiency and reduce storage needs, enhancements to its scale out architecture and new on-premises and cloud repository targets.

Additional new capabilities to be added are:

o   Prescriptive Analytic capabilities to analyse past performance to determine optimised business outcomes and answer the “what” is likely to happen with new “what if” capabilities

o   GUI and simplified workflows to further enhance and simplify the user experience

“The IT community is eager for a better, simpler, more cloud-friendly way to do backup, and Zerto has shown us that the answer is not backup at all – at least not in the traditional sense,” said Jayme Williams, Senior Systems Engineer, TenCate. “Zerto’s unique way of doing continuous data protection not only gives us the easy backup alternative we’re looking for, but its ability to combine it with disaster recovery and complete cloud mobility under one platform is like nothing else we have seen. Both traditional leaders and newer players in the backup space do not integrate well with cloud solutions and, as their disaster recovery capabilities are limited in virtual environments, they cannot provide the complete package we’re excited to get from the Zerto platform.”