Scary DR Stories 2022: Stranger Disasters and Gasping Recoveries
October may have come to an end, but the stranger disasters that organizations face are still happening every day and will continue to rise.
Top Three Cyber Threats of 2022
This year, the top three shared challenges of organizations were:
Ransomware and the rise of RaaS—Ransomware continues to increase yearly, with attacks happening every 11 seconds, and it is estimated to be a $265 billion industry by 2031. On top of that, Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) is eerily taking many cyber criminals to the market per se. Bad actors are creating business models just like Software as a Service (SaaS), where they lease out ransomware and the control infrastructure and provide 24/7 call centers so anyone with malicious intent can successfully attack a business and get paid.
Devastating Downtime and Disruptions—The cost of downtime and disruptions, planned and unplanned, is still wreaking havoc on businesses knowing that each minute down in this highly available world of products and services is not worth the price. If you don’t know the cost of your downtime, you need to start calculating.
Creeping Cloud Complexity—The cloud is looming over each organization’s head right now. Whether you’ve already moved to it or are planning to, sometimes it can feel like a storm is brewing. Finding a DR solution that fits your infrastructure, migrating to it, and getting the most out of their cloud investment can be intimidating.
Top Three Scary DR Stories 2022
This was our fourth year of collecting and sharing scary DR stories from customers, while highlighting the spookiest threats of the year and how Zerto protects against them.
This year we had three prizes to give away to the scariest disaster recovery (DR) stories submitted, and each person was brave enough to share live on the presentation their spine-tingling tales.
1. Total Loss of Power – Beth S.
Years ago, Beth and her team experienced a total loss of power, meaning that even their backup generators didn’t work when the primary power went out in their data center. They didn’t have Zerto in place, so they had to bring everything back on…one at a time.
Today, Beth is a Zerto customer and helps manage their disaster recovery strategy. “We do a monthly DR test, and we use Zerto to bring things up, and it’s just night and day difference from anything else. I can’t speak highly enough about Zerto. When I saw your product out there, it was like ooh. You know, these are the good guys.”
2. Lightning Strikes during the Graveyard Shift – Khan Mohammed, CVS Health
Around 1 a.m., during the middle of a major storm, Khan and his team went for their monthly DR test. Back then, Khan and his team followed protocol where they had to keep all of their cell phones in lockers while running tests. Lightning struck a tree and took out all their power, leaving him and his team in the dark alone with no way to contact anyone. They heard strange screams from a woman and could not even see each other because it was so dark.
After some time, they gathered and got out of the room, went into the data center, and had to turn on all their servers on manually.. This scenario is an absolute nightmare for anyone who knows the time that takes, and as you may have guessed, they did not meet their RTOs.
With Zerto today, CVS Health has 1395 active VMs and is getting RPOs of seven seconds! Khan told me, “To be honest, I really love Zerto. We have all our tier-1 applications on Zerto. I bring up all those servers within less than 30 minutes. No matter how many servers there are.”
3. “The PowerStore Gives Up the Ghost” – Pete Wall, Minneapolis Radiation Oncology
Pete shared one of the most frightening stories and even titled it himself, so we knew we had a good storyteller on our hands. His organization has nine clinics, and at one of the busiest clinics, both nodes on their newly purchased Dell PowerStore arrays experienced simultaneous failure. When they called Dell Support for help, they said they had never seen anything like that and told his team they would have to restore from a backup.
Fortunately, they did have Zerto in place, and since this happened on a dark and stormy Saturday night when no one was working, they didn’t lose much data.
Pete shared on the webinar that he would recommend Zerto to everybody and anybody. Then went on to say, “Zerto greatly reduces the amount of time that we spend migrating from hardware or one hardware platform to another, also just migrating a data center. We did it, we migrated a data center in about 20 minutes.”
Eleven Ways Zerto Protects You and How You Can be Hero
These stories and the “Stranger Things” theme led to Eleven ways that Zerto protects against the major and everyday threats against business continuity. There are three overarching ways Zerto protects against the three major challenges organizations are facing today:
To learn more about these three, plus the other eight ways that Zerto helps companies achieve 24/7 uninterrupted business, and can make you look like a hero, check out the webinar recording.
We encourage you to join customers like ours to learn more about Zerto so you can avoid a scary DR story of your own.
Kyleigh FItzgerald 
