The Forrester Wave for Data Resiliency Solutions 2019 – Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees

As everyone knows by now, Zerto is big on the concept of Resilience. So, when Forrester published the Forrester Wave for Data Resiliency Solutions Q3-2019, we took a close look.

We were disappointed to find that under the pretense of “data resilience”, Forrester chose to stay behind and focus on legacy backup. Though the data protection, recovery and backup markets have undergone overwhelming growth in the last few years, including new players, cloud, SLAs, ransomware, changing market dynamics, and nearly complete overhaul of the products being sold by vendors, this report stayed behind.

This is surprising on many levels and does not reflect the way customers are currently buying and using these tools today. What’s become critical today? Aggressive SLAs driving low RTO and RPOs. Proof of recovery testing. Simple failover. Automation of recovery steps. Cloud, cloud, and more cloud. This report compared solutions without taking any of these factors into account.

A few observations on the report:

This is a backup wave, period. It does not measure resilience of the solutions reviewed. Despite the more inclusive “Resiliency” title, Forrester seems to view backing up data as being enough to consider companies resilient.  How can you tell this is a backup wave?

1. In the Recoverability category, should any company with a score of 1.0 (out of 5) be considered a leader or strong performer in Resiliency? Should a company with a score of 0! be included in a Resiliency Solutions Wave at all? And yet there are six (!) companies included in the wave whose recoverability score is a 1 or a 0.

2. Cloud? The report does not mention Azure or AWS once. Can you address resilience in 2019 without cloud being front and center?

3. With ransomware in mind, recovery SLAs become more important than ever. We believe that a resilient IT is one that can recover from ransomware with close to no data loss and downtime. This report does not see recovery SLAs as an important factor, never mentions RTOs and RPOs, testing recovery, or use any criteria to prove security and recoverability steps are demonstrable.

Bottom line, anyone looking at “resilience” as replacing old backup solution with the same type of solution, this report is for you.

But if you are looking for a holistic approach to IT resilience, including continuous availability, workload mobility, cloud adoption and long-term retention, we will be happy to have a chat.

Check out the Forrester Total Economic Impact of Zerto study and learn more about the business benefits enabled by an IT Resilience Platform.