Case Study: Zerto Dramatically Improves DR Outcomes for Large Insurance Company 

Saw a 97% reduction in RTOs and 99% reduction in RPOs 

The pressure is on IT departments, which must recover critical data to minimize data loss and return their organizations to normal operations as quickly as possible. The Zerto platform, built on a continuous data protection (CDP) foundation, enables organizations to meet these requirements and keep their data—and company—intact in a disaster.

A new IDC ExpertROI® SPOTLIGHT* case study examines Zerto’s impact at one large North American insurance company that chose the platform for their disaster recovery (DR) solution. The results are impressive.

Saving Thousands of Hours
Minimizing recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) should be factored into any DR plan since they provide benchmarks for maintaining critical business operations.

IDC found that, prior to Zerto, the insurance company had been depending on a traditional backup solution, with DR testing taking more than a week and recovering a server taking up to two days. With this traditional backup, the company’s RTO was 48 hours, and only 75% of data recovery efforts were completed within that time.

Since the organization implemented the Zerto platform, recovery time has plummeted from days to minutes. The staff time needed for data recovery has been cut from 96 hours to 90 minutes, or a 97% reduction. The RTO itself has also been reduced 97%, from 48 hours to 1.5 hours. In addition, Zerto reduced the RPO from 23 hours to 5 to 6 seconds—an incredible 99% reduction. Instead of losing a day of data in the event of a disaster, the organization will only lose seconds of it.

Testing has gotten easier and faster too, and that’s where they’re seeing immediate ROI. “Now we can finish everything [for a DR test] within 24 hours,” the enterprise data management supervisor said in the IDC case study. “We also shorten the downtime from two weeks to two days. We bring the machines up on day one, and we’re ready to begin testing by lunchtime. By the end of day two, we’re done, saving 3,000 hours of downtime.”

Increased Productivity for IT Team
The company has seen a correlated increase in productivity, with fewer resources required to run DR. Members of the supervisor’s team and six other individuals involved with DR have become 25% more productive when it comes to DR activities, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives.

“On a weekend, I don’t need a server person, a network person, and a storage person,” the supervisor said. “It can just be myself and one other person to verify that the machine is up and running.”

Improved ROI
Zerto’s value is demonstrated not just through benefits to the IT team but by quantifying ROI. How do increased productivity, time savings, and shorter RTOs/RPOs affect ROI?

IDC conducted an analysis of the benefits and investment of the insurance company’s Zerto deployment to determine the ROI and payback period. IDC calculated the ROI period in a three-step process, taking into account the increased productivity and reduced RTOs over time. They found that from the projected savings, the company would recognize a projected 1.5 times ROI over five years with the Zerto platform.

Ten Out of Ten
Through Zerto’s ease of implementation, scalability, and substantially reduced RTOs and RPOs, the insurance company can now avoid productivity loss and potential harm to the company’s reputation and customer satisfaction. It has also minimized the risk of data loss and downtime, the costs of which can be staggering. All of this, combined with high ROI, led the supervisor to say, “If you’re not impressed by the results, I would be surprised…. I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.”

How could Zerto deliver a similar DR experience for your organization? Download the case study to read the rest of the study’s findings.

*“IDC ExpertROI® SPOTLIGHT, sponsored by Zerto, Zerto Enables Better Operations for Large Insurance Company, # US47812721 June 2021”