Zerto’s Top 5 Technology Challenges and Predictions for 2019

As 2018 turns into 2019, we won’t be leaving behind the technology challenges of past year. However, we welcome the opportunity for a fresh look at how we’re solving the problems facing businesses today, as well as where we can push ourselves to innovate for the problems businesses will face in the future.

As Zerto looks to drive backup and disaster recovery to new heights in 2019, it’s going to be an exciting year for us, and the technology industry as a whole. With so much change ahead, we asked some of our Zertonians what 2019 has in store. Here’s what they said:

Ziv Kedem, CEO

“In 2018, we saw organizations dreaming about making new services ‘born in the cloud,’ but facing challenges getting the data there with minimal disruption. In 2019, we’ll see more business begin to make this dream a reality. Protecting workloads once they’re in a public or multi cloud environment can often be a big challenge that people just don’t think about. It’s easy to assume that once your data is out there, it’s already safe, and the platform won’t go down. However, this simply isn’t the case. Businesses need to be actively looking to protect and monitor data wherever it is, and understand what role mobility can play in this. As workloads needs change, businesses will need to make sure they have a way to move data to, from and between different infrastructures without interruption, to ensure the organization is able to seamlessly adapt and protect itself. It is important not to make downtime vulnerability an ‘acceptable’ risk, in order to focus on continuous development, speed and performance. In 2019, more business leaders will opt for technologies that provide assurances that all workloads, data, and applications are protected no matter where they reside, where they are moved to or what outside influences impact them. Achieving this, without slowing the pace of business transformation, will be the great technology challenge that business leaders should look to overcome in 2019.”

Rob Strechay, SVP, Product

“The big challenge for backup vendors is how to minimize the impact frequent backups can have on production. To solve this, the absolute fundamentals of backup are going to have to change. Organizations want real convergence of solutions with fast recovery and more granularity without the negative impact on compute or network bandwidth. In 2019, whether businesses want to roll back seven seconds, or seven days, their backup system should let them do this quickly and easily – minimizing the disruption of data loss from any cause.”

Caroline Seymour, Director, Product Marketing

“This year, as ransomware attacks get bigger and more dangerous, it’s crucial that businesses don’t become overwhelmed by them, but instead continue to do everything they can to prepare. In order to stay protected and competitive, organizations need to focus on remaining ‘always on’ – weathering the disruption and getting back online within seconds. With this sort of reliable data availability, businesses can finally rest and let concerns about ransomware take a back seat to a more positive focus on digital transformation.”

Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn, Technology Evangelist

“In 2018, we saw hardware vendors trying to converge the software layer into their product offering, but all they’ve really created is a new era of vendor lock-in – a hyper-lock-in in many ways. In 2019 organizations will rethink what converged solutions mean. As IT professionals increasingly look for out-of-the-box ready solutions to simplify operations, we’ll see technology vendors work together to bring more vendor-agnostic, comprehensive converged systems to market.”

Mariah West, Director of Global Marketing Programs and Operations

“In 2019, we’re going to see an acceleration in the convergence of the backup and disaster recovery markets, and with this, some new emerging channel/vendor strategies. As cloud is driving technology convergence through the mobility of applications, today’s customers are looking for fewer point solutions, more scalable platforms, and IT teams are ready to embrace modern strategies that eliminate cumbersome legacy solutions and reduce complexities and costs. In the coming year, opportunity will arise for vendors and channel partners to join forces and provide simpler and more well-rounded IT strategies that combine and converge technologies. All-in-all, this allows end users to remove unnecessary costs, adopt new technologies easily, all while limiting disruption and moving IT modernization and the business forward.”   Interested in learning what else Zerto has in store for 2019? Register here to get a sneak peek of the latest features coming in Zerto 7 and check out what’s happening at ZertoCON, our IT resilience conference in Nashville, May 20-22.