I can quickly restore data by reverting anything with more or less a nightly backup. I can pretty much have the data through recovery checkpoints, and each of the checkpoints can only be around five seconds apart.
When I need to work a lot with VPGs, it has a lot of capabilities for that. Monitoring is also very important for us. We do work with Splunk, and I am looking a lot around for logs, metrics, and traces. The capabilities that I get are system throughput, and CPU and RAM input/output.
I have used Zerto for immutable data copies. I have pretty much followed a 3-2-1 strategy. We have three copies of production data and two backup copies. We have two different media and then one off-site copy. It has this offering there.
It's helping very much in terms of the malware. They have a ransomware protection capability.
I have used other solutions jointly with Zerto. What is happening is that they have a focus on isolating and locking with a cyber resiliency vault, and what I have been doing more or less around the vault is working with the Delinea Privileged Access Manager solution. So, some areas have intersections with other tools in our stack. I would love to continue seeing more use cases out of Zerto so that I do not have to defer this anywhere else.
It has enabled us to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud, rather than in a physical data center. I think of it as a cloud migration tool. Having DR in the cloud is very important for our organization. I use it with Microsoft Azure.
With Zerto, I have seen five-second near-synchronous replication, so there are thousands of checkpoints in one day, and then afterward, I can have a periodic backup. I can space it out between twelve-hour snapshots. We can have one to three checkpoints per day. I can recover to the state seconds before any sort of attack, and I can utilize Zerto's in-built orchestration and automation. I could easily fail over the entire site without any sort of disruption. Those are the things I see very much in terms of positives. There is a lot of information that it can gather with synchronous replication. The other thing is that I have seen other disaster and backup service offerings, and they very much focus on getting a container image installed or some sort of binary file and then deployment from there afterward.
I find it easy to migrate the data. Once somebody understands how Zerto works, particularly around areas for analytics and automation, with the reference architecture, they will be able to quickly deploy it.
I see a lot of visibility in terms of proactive management with SLA monitoring, run metrics, and other things. We are able to test infrastructure using live and personalized data. It, in turn, becomes very much of a team effort.
Zerto provides complete visibility in terms of storage and consumption data. We get to know the capacity and application volumes. I can also address compliance aspects, such as PCI DSS which is important for us as part of the RPO.
They have an intelligent, predictive infrastructure, so I can just pretty much determine the required compute storage and other server networking resources, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud.
It also saves recovery time. We pretty much monitor that information. In terms of time savings, we are able to ensure that we can set up a backup quickly, figure out the integration details with the use of APIs, and meet our requirements around client security. Afterward, there is the cost consideration. Better documentation on the restoration process would be helpful.
Ransomware is one area where we are using Zerto. If we were utilizing another solution, that might have only been AWS-specific, and we might have not gotten much assistance in proceeding with their public cloud vendor as a result. We might have to figure out what we can do around working with an XDR or another mode of ingesting that data for any vulnerabilities and how to focus on encryption thereafter. If we were to consider another vendor, some of them may not have support for Azure. They might be AWS-focused.
Zerto has helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. We can create failover tests seamlessly, and we can do this routinely. We are able to save time and look at how we can discern between RTO and RPO.
Zerto has not reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management. Our team size is still roughly the same. We have not seen our headcount change as a result, but we do not need to hire external consultants to support a project.
If I wanted to focus on operational recovery, which may be recovering instances in the database with a 15-second data loss, there are systems administrators designed to take care of that. With Zerto's offering, someone can utilize the Zerto solution as opposed to depending on any sort of manual human intervention.