Introducing the Idea of Resilience for Evolving IT

When I joined Zerto less than a year ago, one of the first things I noticed is how inadequate the term “Disaster Recovery” is to describe everything that Zerto can do for you.

It made it very difficult to really explain the value of our solution in such a short time-frame.  Disaster Recovery (DR) isn’t exactly the most exciting subject in the world and it’s sometimes viewed as a kind of unwanted necessity that nobody really wants to deal with (until of course, you need it).

Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) was originally designed to address the needs of DR, but in an ever-shifting virtualised world.  All the benefits that virtualisation had brought to the industry were being stifled by the inadequacy of legacy solutions that didn’t (and in many cases still don’t) allow businesses to realise the full benefits of having a more efficient infrastructure.

One of the biggest drawbacks of these outdated solutions is that they instantaneously remove any freedom, leaving you stuck with two matching sites and no flexibility to change one without the other.  This, in turn, prohibits innovation – technology advances exponentially but the cost of having to update two sites simultaneously puts new technology solutions beyond the budget of many IT departments.  The inflexibility of the infrastructure means that the increasing attractiveness of “X-as-a-Service” models may also be out of reach, as may be the benefits of leveraging cloud services for some parts of the business.

So organisations fall behind the curve and effectively end up paying more to achieve less.

But when it’s done properly, the underlying technology that enables replication and recovery can be leveraged to facilitate a number of other business requirements and help IT teams realise the full potential of their available resources.

Zerto started out by pushing the boundaries of what a disaster recovery solution should do. But as the product has evolved over the last 5 years, so too has the concept of what disaster recovery really is and what it should do for businesses.

Enter the world of IT Resilience…

This trend is picking up momentum with a number of analysts starting to embrace and encourage the concept, having successfully identified the business drivers behind it.  At our inaugural ZertoCON in Boston earlier this year, John Morency from Gartner summed up “IT Resilience” in perhaps one of the most succinct ways I’ve come across yet:

“IT Resilience is sustained availability and agile delivery of IT services as well as integrity, privacy and confidentiality assurance for business information assets”

Let’s boil that down slightly. Businesses need and IT Resilience delivers – Availability, Agility and Security.

Availability

The consistent and sustained delivery of critical IT services, including advanced provision for the prevention of data loss and/or downtime during both unforeseen and planned disruptions.

Agility

The freedom to move, change and adopt new strategies at low cost and without incurring penalties to existing investments or disruption to operations.

Security

For information, assets and investments – future-proof the business and eliminate the risk of disruption, the loss of critical data and the prohibitive cost of innovation.

This is why, with the release of Zerto Virtual Replication 5.0, you’ll be hearing us talking a lot more about IT Resilience than about Disaster Recovery.  Don’t get me wrong, DR is still at the core of what we do – it’s the foundation upon which the rest of our solution lies – and it always will be.  But DR simply does not encompass everything that we do for organisations, nor does it encompass everything that organisations need from us.

Having just returned from VMworld in the US where our booth theme was “Shift Your Thinking,” it’s clear that many of you have already begun the journey towards adopting a preventative, rather than reactive mentality.  It was evident from conversations I had with people that they understand the value in this approach, and of how and why Zerto is evolving the concept of Disaster Recovery and driving to the embrace of IT Resilience.

Zerto is renowned for listening to our customers and acting on their feedback.  It is how and why we continue to push the evolution of not only the product, but the definition of what we do.  With ZVR 5.0, it’s no different – support for Azure, One-to-Many Replication,a Mobile Monitoring App (an industry first), as well as an extended journal and 50% faster pre-seeding/delta-sync times.  All this was built around customer feedback and our desire to enable a truly resilient infrastructure – “A World of Uninterrupted Technology.”

Be on the lookout for more blogs in the next few weeks delving deeper into each of the main features of ZVR 5.0 before its release in November.  But if you’re a particularly eager beaver you can apply for our Beta test release and get your hands on the goodies early! Or join us next week on 9/13 with Forrester’s VP and Research Director, Stephanie Balaouras, to learn the 3 steps to support IT Resilience across your enterprise – sign up here.