How exciting can backup and recovery really be? I’m sure you’re asking yourself that question as your laptop computer backs up silently to a hard drive somewhere or while your mobile device magically sends all its data to the cloud every night when you plug it in. Honestly? Backup isn’t that exciting. But recovery is a whole different story. If you’ve ever found yourself in a situation where you need data now you know how crazy the world of getting your stuff back can be.
Data protection is the best way to refer to the act of ensuring your critical data is stored somewhere safe and able to be retrieved when you need it. Zerto is a company that has spent a lot of time figuring out the best way to move your data to somewhere safe and keep it there until you find yourself in need of it. They recently debuted their latest release, version 8.0, during a stream at Tech Field Day 21. You can take a look at the features in this great video:
Deepak Verma does a great job of running down the new features that are present in the release. One of the key things that you should definitely pick up on during the discussion is that data protection is no longer a box full of tapes being shuffled back and forth to a secured vault somewhere. The present status of data protection and disaster recovery (DR) lives in the cloud.
Zerto 8.0 is full of enhancements to existing features designed to work better with the cloud. Support for things like the VMware Engine in Google Cloud, Azure generation 2 VMs, AWS Storage Gateway support, and automation fallback configuration for both Azure and AWS are just the tip of the iceberg. Integration of your DR plan with the cloud is going to be a critical point going forward to ensure you’re capable of meeting your recovery point goals.
Disaster Dice-Rolling
Imagine one of the following scenarios if you want a little primer on how cloud needs to be integrated into what you do:
- Your data is stored in a remote vault on hard drives that are rotated monthly. You need to retrieve the set that allows you to restore a file from last week. But the vault that stores the hard drives isn’t staffed due to the outbreak of a virus that has things shut down. You can’t restore because the drives are offline. Your recovery point objective is essentially infinite at this point since you can’t compel the staffers of the location to come let you in without defying orders to stay home.
- Your data center is hit by a natural disaster, such as a hurricane. This disaster impacts your ability to retrieve data from your warm site or offsite storage locations due to travel restrictions. You can’t bring your flooded or destroyed data center back online without backups. Your recovery point objective is a failure and you remain offline, losing money and customers.
Granted, both of those situations sound difficult to believe. But you’d be surprised the number of times that people have had to grab boxes of backup tapes while running out the door to avoid being blown away by a tornado. Or how crazy the likelihood of shutting down large portions of the country was just six weeks ago. And yet here we are.
If your business relies on tight recovery point objectives, you need to have the cloud as the first line of defense in your data protection scheme. You need to ensure that you are utilizing all of the tools that Microsoft and Amazon are giving you to keep your data secure and safe. Moreover, you need to have a proven partner that is constantly innovating on the technology they’ve built to keep you online and capable of resuming business as quickly as possible.
This whole conversation becomes even more important when you realize the shift of workloads moving into the cloud. It’s one thing to back up your on-premises data center with traditional techniques. It’s another thing entirely when your data doesn’t even live in the same ZIP code. How can you ensure that your data is secure and protected in a place you don’t even have access to? And, if the answer to your question is something along the lines of “the cloud is always on”, you need to spend more time researching what happens when people take portions of it offline on accident.
Bringing It All Together
I’m excited to see the new features in Zerto 8.0. They’re really starting to lean into the cloud aspects of IT. We need to protect data by using the cloud. No matter where that data lives we need to leverage the tools we have to protect it and keep it safe. With a company like Zerto continuing to innovate on their technology and incorporate new tools into the toolbox, you can rest assured that no matter what form our IT lives take over the course of the next year Zerto will ensure that our data is well protected.
For more information about Zerto and their data protection platform, make sure to check out http://Zerto.com.
