Why Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault?
Ransomware threats and cyberattacks continue to grow in frequency, severity, and sophistication. A recent study by IDC found most disaster recovery incidents in the last 12 months were triggered by ransomware and malware. The cost of executing an attack continues to fall thanks to the rise of ransomware as a service, and successful ransom payments are fuelling the development of next-gen malware.
The most common methods for building cyber resilience against ransomware attacks typically rely on legacy data protection technologies and architectures, like vaults. Most of these vault solutions combine a mix of hardware and security software to create a data vault that helps protects critical data, mitigates the impact of ransomware, and complies with regulatory requirements for data security. However, there are many drawbacks to these types of solutions, including slow recovery, network exposure, expensive administration, and more.
For each of these drawbacks, there is a better solution. The new Cyber Resilience Vault from Zerto provides ironclad protection and rapid air-gapped recovery. Its near-synchronous replication, physical isolation, decentralized management, and real-time encryption detection scanning give you the best in cyber resilience. Here are some of the core differentiators that the Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault brings to the forefront of vault solutions.
Rapid Recovery
Data vault solutions typically prioritize data integrity and security for ransomware resilience. However, vault-based recovery from ransomware can be cumbersome and time consuming. Vault technologies typically use legacy recovery methods, which involve lower tier backup-grade storage, rehydration processes, and file-based security scanning. These processes are inherently slow and dramatically increase recovery time objectives (RTOs) due to lengthy backup windows, aging backup replicas, and prolonged scans.
The Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault outpaces legacy recovery methods with several unique capabilities that shorten recovery times, minimizing downtime for organizations. Zerto leverages a combination of robust integrated orchestration and automation, near-synchronous replication, and streaming encryption detection to deliver unmatched rapid recovery.
Additionally, the Cyber Resilience Vault leverages production-grade flash storage from HPE Alletra to temporarily run any workload in the vault without compromising on performance. Alletra can predict and prevent disruptions across storage, services, and virtual machines (VMs), saving hours of lost productivity from downtime. Coupled with a 99.9999% guaranteed data availability, these features radically reduce data loss and downtime and recover within minutes or hours, not days or weeks.
Secure Air-Gapping
Many vault solutions claim complete isolation, or air gap, from outside networks. But most vaults have numerous connections to outside networks for replication and management, providing only partial network isolation. Vaults that offer an SaaS control plane, for example, are always connected to the internet. This unnecessary connectivity exposes organizations to risk and undermines the purpose of a data vault.
The Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault is a true separated vault that leverages physical and logical air gaps to guarantee full isolation from other networks. It stores immutable data copies on secure, FIPS-validated hardware with tamper-proof NTP protection. This ensures that if attackers compromise your production and initial recovery environments, they cannot penetrate the isolated walls of the vault and thus cannot attack your vaulted data. The Cyber Resilience Vault doesn’t depend on firewalls for isolation or physical outside connections requiring management, letting you rest assured that your data is always safe and secure from outside threats.
Decentralized Zero Trust Architectures
Securely and effectively managing vault solutions can be a struggle. Because of this, most vault offerings sacrifice security by using a centralized or SaaS control plane, which requires network ports to be persistently open, creating another attack vector for ransomware. Other vault solutions have rigid architectures, forcing IT into specific configurations rather than supporting business-driven customizations.
The Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault leverages decentralized, zero trust methodologies that can be flexibly defined and redefined to meet diverse business and technical requirements. For example, the Cyber Resilience vault can be physically located at either production or secondary sites. It supports replication from cloud (e.g., Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services), and it can be combined with backup solutions to maximize its power.
Real-Time, In-Line Encryption Security Scanning
Most vault solutions offer ransomware scanning or detection to ensure that data written to the vault is in a secure, uncompromised, usable state when needed for recovery. Many vault solutions offer periodic security scanning with the data living on a dedicated backup appliance, but this throttles scanning speed. These scans happen before and during recovery processes, which can significantly increase RTOs.
The Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault use real-time encryption detection scanning, leveraging the power of continuous data protection (CDP) to validate the security and integrity of your data. Because this is done in line as the data streams in, there is no delayed validation of your data. Zerto’s unique position in the data path also avoids performance impact and doesn’t hamper normal application or storage operations while the encryption detection is occurring.
Zerto exposes its encryption analyses via API to enable a defense-in-depth strategy—what’s known as composable security. Since the scanning data is not locked into the closed black box that many vault offerings use, enterprises can easily integrate Zerto with their existing security stack and leverage the combined power of its detection right alongside their SIEMs, SOARs, or other security solutions.
Cost-Effective
There is no hiding that there is a cost to ransomware resilience. Vault technologies typically leverage expensive, dedicated backup storage appliances, security software, and professional services to administer the vault. But the solutions available today don’t include everything needed for cyber resilience either, often requiring paid add-ons to complete the package. There are high indirect costs as well, such as the downtime costs from extended RTOs and the need to move restored data from the vault back to a production-grade storage after an attack.
The Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault implements a cost-effective, production-grade solution that has a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Not only is this vault a secure repository for your most critical data, but it also enables you to quickly restore and run your applications on the same infrastructure for extended periods of time when recovery occurs. Unlike other vaults, the Cyber Resilience Vault is available as an all-in-one bundle that includes everything needed for the complete solution.
The Superior Vault Solution
It’s clear that cyberthreats and ransomware attacks pose a significant risk to organizations worldwide. While many vault solutions may seem like a viable option to protect data, they have slow recovery times, limited security, and high costs—all while running on non-production grade storage.
The Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault offers a superior solution to safeguard against cyberthreats. Its advanced features, such as rapid recovery capabilities, secure air gapping, decentralized management, and real-time, in-line security scanning, provide organizations with the necessary tools to protect their data effectively.
Contact us to see a demo, get bundle pricing, and hear what ransomware resilience can mean for your business.
Andrew Silva 
