Navigating Data Resilience with Zerto: Insights from the Global CrowdStrike Outage
In an era where data is the lifeblood of organizations, ensuring its resilience against unexpected outages is paramount. The recent CrowdStrike outage that impacted millions of Microsoft Windows devices worldwide has highlighted vulnerabilities within many companies’ disaster recovery frameworks. This brings the essential role of robust disaster recovery and business continuity solutions like Zerto to the forefront. In this blog, we’ll explore the lessons learned from the outage and how Zerto’s technology can address these challenges.
The Global Outage: A Wake-Up Call
This significant outage that caused devices to blue screen of death (BSOD) brings a harsh reminder that most “disaster” events are not going to be caused by natural disasters, but more likely, human error or cyber-attack. This outage brought many global businesses grinding to a halt and impacted everything and everyone across the globe—from day-to-day operations to long-term strategic initiatives. The extent of the disruption underscored a critical truth: many organizations are ill-prepared for such large-scale incidents.
The harsh reality of this event has highlighted some of the issues that may have delayed prompt recovery.
1. Infrequent Testing of Recovery Plans:
A recovery plan is only as effective as its last test. Unfortunately, many businesses do not conduct regular, comprehensive tests of their disaster recovery plans. The outage revealed gaps in recovery processes that had not been identified due to infrequent testing.
2. Complexity and Fragmentation:
Managing multiple, disparate systems for data protection and recovery can lead to inefficiencies and increased risk. The outage demonstrated that organizations with complex, fragmented recovery solutions struggled more to restore operations quickly.
3. Underestimating Downtime Costs:
The true cost of downtime extends beyond immediate financial losses to include long-term reputational damage and customer trust erosion. Many organizations underestimated these impacts, as the outage made starkly clear.
4. Impact of established RTO and RPO
What happens when your approved RPO and RTO don’t work for the business? Often businesses find themselves in a catch-22 situation. They have invested in business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) plans but then find that the plan is not successful in real life when, for instance, 24 hours’ worth of data loss and 2-3 weeks recovery time becomes a reality and is worse than manually recovering from the outage— if at all possible.
Leveraging Zerto for Enhanced Data Resilience
1. Continuous Data Protection:
Zerto’s technology offers agentless continuous data protection, ensuring that data is replicated in near real-time. This minimizes data loss and enables near-instantaneous recovery to a point just seconds before the disruption occurred.
2. Fully Automated & Orchestrated Recovery
With near instant recovery at scale, Zerto offers organizations the opportunity to recover whole sites impacted by any outage and the ability to recover in just minutes from merely seconds before an incident occurs. This mass data restoration is uniquely designed for disaster and cyber recovery events and is not ideally suited for backup technologies.
3. Frequent & Comprehensive Testing
Zerto allows for automated, non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans. Regular and comprehensive testing ensures that recovery processes are robust and can be executed flawlessly when needed, addressing one of the major shortcomings highlighted by the outage.
4. Patch Management & Sandboxing
Zerto allows for non-impactful sandboxing; this allows organizations to test patches and updates before they go live into production environments. Sandboxes for each individual application can be built within minutes, independent of each other and will only be seconds behind your production environment, offering the most realistic simulation of your production environment as possible.
5. Enhanced Encryption Detection
Although this recent event was not cyber related, the most real threat to all organizations worldwide today is ransomware. Zerto includes advanced algorithmic intelligence for its real-time encryption detection offering detection of anomalies in your environment in just seconds.
Conclusion
The recent global outage serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerabilities that exist within many organizations’ disaster recovery processes. However, it also presents an opportunity to reassess and strengthen data resilience strategies.
Zerto has been a market leader in disaster recovery since 2011 and protects some of the most critical applications in the world with only seconds of RPO. Our advanced technology offers a comprehensive solution to these challenges, providing continuous data protection, fully orchestrated and automated recovery which enables rapid restoration from any outage with seconds of data loss. By leveraging Zerto, businesses can enhance their preparedness for future disruptions, ensuring that they can maintain operations and protect their data no matter what challenges arise.
Now is the time to invest in a resilient future with Zerto. Get in touch with us now!
Chris Rogers
