Zerto Launches Zerto 10 at Keynote Event in Houston, TX
On May 18, at a keynote event in Houston, we announced the launch of Zerto 10, delivering the fastest time to protect, detect, and recover from ransomware. The release enhances Zerto’s already robust suite of cybersecurity capabilities, offering new real-time encryption anomaly detection, a new Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault, and a new secure-hardened Linux appliance. In addition, Zerto 10 offers enhanced support for Microsoft Azure, with a new replication architecture for scale-out efficiency.
Matt Boris, vice president of global-to-go market, and Caroline Seymour, vice president of product marketing, opened the event. As they pointed out, today’s threat environment is worse than it’s ever been, with ransomware attacks routinely increasing in scale and potential destructiveness. Accordingly, newer and smarter solutions are needed if organizations are going to keep themselves safe.
After a quick video introduction from HPE CEO Antonio Neri, Seymour elaborated on the scale of the crisis, highlighting four key challenges that customers face: the ever-evolving threat landscape, the low speed of recovery, the ransomware catch-22 dilemma of “to pay or not,” and keeping pace with compliance and the regulatory landscape.
Seymour highlighted three statistics illustrating the crisis. In cases where companies had to activate a disaster recovery plan, ransomware was the culprit 61% of the time. The average time to recovery for those organizations was a full month. And only 4% of organizations that paid a ransom got all their data back.
Seymour turned to the urgent fact that “detection alone is not enough, and neither is recovery.” Although both are essential, resilience is also required for a protection plan to be complete.
Deepak Verma, vice president of product management, then took the stage to discuss the three pillars of Zerto’s resilience strategy: replicate and detect, isolate and lock, and test and recover.
As Verma made clear, traditional backup is woefully inadequate, reliant on cumbersome snapshots and agents. Zerto, meanwhile, provides continuous replication and real-time detection to alert users at the first moment of impact, not after backing up. This means detection in seconds versus hours or days. Detection also has zero impact on application performance recovery—a crucial innovation, given that even just a few minutes of downtime can have disastrous consequences for many organizations.
“Isolate and lock” promises a separated vault or clean room that is physically air-gapped with immutable data copies on secure, FIPS-validated hardware. “Test and recover” refers to the ease with which Zerto allows users to identify clean restore points and then quickly recover entire multi-VM apps onto high-performance storage, all while maintaining cross-VM consistency at scale.
A discussion about the current threat landscape followed Zerto’s three-pronged resilience strategy. Kevin Cole, director of technical marketing at Zerto, and the keynote’s special guest speaker Kevin Mitnick, CEO at Mitnick Security Consulting, hosted the stimulating, thought-provoking, and in some ways alarming conversation. Once known as “the world’s most famous hacker,” Mitnick has lately gained even more renown for his white-hat endeavors and his work to strengthen organizations globally.
The wide-ranging conversation touched on a number of subjects top of mind for security teams. It drilled home an unpleasant fact: despite promising advances in cybersecurity, systems today are as vulnerable to cybercriminals as they’ve ever been. Using demos, Mitnick demonstrated that only constant, vigilant effort can keep organizations safe. The bad guys’ tactics are evolving constantly, and organizations need to stay one step ahead of them at all times to prevent catastrophe.
Following a Q&A, Seymour pointed out in her closing remarks that the ease with which companies can be breached remains “startling and concerning.” The reality of the new threat landscape only served to underscore why Zerto’s latest product announcements are so significant: new encryption detection provides the earliest warning possible in the event of an attack. The Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault grants users a last-resort option to keep them safe when the inevitable happens. The enhanced Zerto for Azure scales, simplifies, tailors, and secures cloud adoption. All these innovations further extend Zerto’s commitment to keeping its customers safe in a threat environment where peace of mind can be hard to find.
In Seymour’s words: “Our goal and mission is simple: it’s to ensure you have continuous protection for any app, any cloud, and any threat.”
Head over to the Zerto 10 page to watch the full event replay.
