7 Key Zerto Features for Ransomware Resilience
Ransomware continues to cause headaches, sleepless nights, disruptions, and heavy financial losses to organizations around the world. What makes ransomware so different and more challenging than other types of malware is its ability to severely disrupt the operations of the organizations it hits. By removing access to data, ransomware is halting IT operations and all the systems that rely on them. The only effective response is a disaster recovery solution that can bring the data and the operations it enables back online as quickly as possible and with the least amount of data loss.
Key Zerto Features You’ll Need to Beat Ransomware
These seven key features of Zerto for ransomware resilience can help you prevent, prepare, and recover. Because ransomware is a disaster scenario, Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, provides data protection that is perfectly suited for minimizing the disruption caused by any ransomware attack and delivering the very best recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) possible. These seven features assist not just in recovering from a ransomware attack, but also in hardening systems and backups to prepare for and prevent ransomware attacks.
- RPO – Recover data with only seconds of loss – Zerto’s continuous data protection (CDP) uses journaling technology to allow you to rewind the state of your workloads to seconds before an attack took place, minimizing data loss and reducing the impact of the attack. Not only can Zerto maintain the journal locally for instant restores, but the same workloads can simultaneously be replicated to a warm recovery site (or to the cloud) using our unique one-to-many capability to provide additional options for recovery.
- RTO – Resume operations within minutes of an attack – When ransomware hits, time is of the essence, and response time matters not only to stop the spread of encryption across the network, but also to minimize the disruption to your business. Local systems and backups can be compromised, making remote recovery the only option left. With Zerto, failover of an entire site can be performed within minutes to a remote site, where data can be recovered quickly from a point in time of your choice.
- Recovery in an isolated network – When data hit by ransomware is recovered, it may still contain malware, so you don’t want to recover the malware directly back into the production environment. Zerto enables a test recovery into an isolated network allowing the opportunity to validate the recovered data and check for malware before recovering the data back to the production network environment.
- Multiple copies of data for recovery – Ransomware relies on recovery being more costly than paying the ransom, and ransomware can attack local backup copies and snapshots to prevent recovery. With Zerto, you can create multiple copies locally or remotely to ensure there is a clean copy to recover from quickly and with minimal data loss. More copies across recovery sites mean more recovery options when needed.
- Immutable data copies – As ransomware may target backup or replica copies, it is possible that even remote recovery data could be targeted by ransomware. Zerto provides the option for immutable replicas that cannot be encrypted nor corrupted by ransomware and are always available for recovery. When all hope seems lost, immutable recovery data can always save the day.
- Non-disruptive DR testing – You’ve implemented a solution, hardened it, made a plan for recovery, but how can you be sure it will work? Testing is vital to any recovery plan and with Zerto, testing can be done quickly and without disrupting production environments. By doing a failover and recovery test into an isolated network in a sandbox environment, the recovery plan can be tested as often as needed to give you the confidence that it will work when it is needed.
- On-demand sandboxes for system hardening and malware scanning – With Zerto, you can create an on-demand sandbox replica of your production environment quickly and non-disruptively. Hardening systems by keeping them up to date with the latest patches and detecting malware before an attack happens are both important in preventing ransomware attacks. Ransomware attacks can lie dormant on systems for days, weeks, or months before attackers decide to activate the malware and they often target known vulnerabilities. Being able to quickly and non-disruptively test security patches and scan for malware in on-demand sandboxes helps you accelerate your preventative measures to keep your systems free of ransomware.
Is Your Organization Ransomware Resilient?
The threat of ransomware is looming over every organization today. Don’t let your organization fall victim because you failed to deploy the right solution to eliminate that threat when it attacks. With these seven powerful features from Zerto, you can defeat any number of ransomware attacks quickly and with minimal cost.
David Paquette 
