When recording a significant event where every moment matters, would you choose a video camera or a standard camera? A video camera, complete with expansive memory, makes frame-by-frame recording possible. In contrast, a standard camera only takes occasional photos and fails to capture the in-between moments that define an event in its entirety.

For business operations to be complemented by a comprehensive disaster recovery solution, competent IT leaders would prefer a solution that is akin to the video camera analogy. In essence, it is about capturing the entire spectrum of your business processes without unnecessary gaps and blind spots. However, many organizations still use snapshot-based legacy solutions, like the mentioned standard camera, that only capture one single image at a time, potentially missing ongoing events that are critical.

CDP vs Snapshots

Zerto Disaster Recovery (DR) is a leading DR solution due to its modernized approach that utilizes continuous data protection (CDP). CDP involves the capture of all changes as they occur and replicate these changes to backup storage. Remember, continuous recording is the only way that IT leaders can ensure every single data change is captured and recovered.

Yet, there was a time in which organizations accepted less in the form of snapshot protection. Snapshots are point-in-time images of data taken at periodic intervals, capturing data or the state of a system at a particular moment. The problem is that you need more than that one moment in time, and because time is money, you are leaving money on the table when settling for snapshots. Businesses cannot afford periodic recovery. It demands continuous recovery, which is what Zerto delivers.

Recovery Point Objectives

The goal of DR is to swiftly restore an organization’s critical operations following an unforeseen incident, thereby limiting both data loss and downtime. This overarching aim is encapsulated in two key objectives:

• The recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the maximum amount of data loss an organization is willing to accept in the event of a disruption. As an example, an RPO of three hours means that in the event of a disaster, your organization can tolerate losing three hours’ worth of data.
• The recover time objective (RTO) is the duration in which business processes must be restored to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a disruptive event. For example, a company may determine they must recover and resume functions within two hours of a disaster.

Continuous data protection enhances RPO and RTO more effectively than snapshot-based methods by endlessly capturing and replicating data changes in real-time. With CDP, data loss is minimized to almost zero in the event of a disruption, as the most recent changes are already saved, significantly improving the RPO. Additionally, since the data is continuously updated and readily available, the time required to restore operations and data after a disaster is significantly reduced. Whichever way you look at it, CDP leads to faster recovery times and that includes all the pieces to your operations puzzle.

More About Zerto

A longtime partner of WEI, Zerto stands out with its true CDP solution to offer industry-leading RPO and RTO for companies that cannot tolerate business disruption. With Zerto DR, enterprises have the capability to recover anything at any point in time, within a granularity of seconds. What makes this possible is Zerto’s unique journaling technology. This approach not only ensures continuous data availability but also results in storage efficiency by eliminating the need for frequent, heavy snapshots. Key benefits of Zerto’s CDP solution include:

• No negative impact on production performance as Zerto’s CDP process operates seamlessly without affecting the production environment.
• Simplified operations without the need for complex scheduling thanks to Zerto’s continuous and automatic data protection approach.
• Minimized risk of data loss, with comprehensive and gap-free data recording.
• Reduced management overhead for storage arrays, enhancing efficiency and reducing operational complexities.

With Zerto, you gain a robust and efficient disaster recovery solution that addresses common challenges associated with traditional data protection methods.

Zerto Protects Your Applications, Too

Data alone does not do any good if you cannot act on it. It is your mission-critical applications that work with your data and create value from it, which means backing up the application environment is a must. This pertains to not just backing up files and folders, but also your virtual machine environment. This includes items such as the preconfigured boot-order of your VMs or the network and IP address configuration of their network environment. If you want to know just how resilient Zerto is when it comes to VM environments, it can handle VM counts in the five digits. That is what you call an encompassing solution.

Choosing Zerto and GreenLake Together

Choosing Zerto’s journaling technology for effective CDP stands out as a superior alternative to traditional snapshot methods. The decision to adopt this advanced approach is just the first step however, because the next critical choice is determining how best to integrate this technology into your operational environment. This is where the partnership between HPE GreenLake and Zerto becomes pivotal, offering Disaster Recovery CDP as a comprehensive service.

HPE GreenLake, renowned for delivering flexible OPEX solutions, now incorporates Zerto’s CDP, thereby streamlining the adoption process. This collaboration enables a shift away from traditional on-premises deployment or reliance on managed service providers (MSPs), offering a SaaS-based solution that fits into a diverse edge-to-cloud platform. With HPE GreenLake and Zerto, achieving RPOs in seconds and RTOs in minutes becomes a streamlined, efficient process, enhancing your DR capabilities within the HPE GreenLake ecosystem.

The integration with HPE GreenLake also means global accessibility to Disaster Recovery solutions via the Data Services Cloud Console (DSCC). This unified console allows for the management of all mission-critical and business-critical assets in one place, offering a simplified, comprehensive view. By consolidating these functions, HPE GreenLake not only enhances operational efficiency but also optimizes expenditures. With the ease at which these as-a-service solutions can be consumed, any other way of acquiring DR may seem as archaic as, well, snapshotting your environment.

Talk to WEI to learn how HPE GreenLake and Zerto can collaboratively to ensure the relentless progression of your business activities.

The post Is There A Better Way To Consume Disaster Recovery? appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

In the last few years, technology has continued to surge ahead, with many of these new developments taking cybersecurity to new heights. Unfortunately, the same technologies are being used by a growing number of hackers intent on monetizing your personal and professional data. This comes in the form of targeting both traditional and non-traditional devices such as edge devices and virtual cities.

We often assume cyberattacks only happen to mega enterprises such as Walmart, Meta, or Google. These assaults make the front page, but the people most often affected by breaches in data security are not big businesses or countries. Rachel Wilson, a former NSA agent and professional with over 20 years working in cybersecurity, put it best in her recent evaluation of the cybersecurity concerns today, stating, “The key thing for all of us is to recognize that now 70% of that malicious cyber activity is coming after us. It’s coming after anyone with two nickels to rub together.”

Wilson explained that cybercriminals don’t target your enterprise or data for personal reasons. They agnostically target you because you are simply vulnerable. As many cybersecurity professionals already know, it is not a question of if a malicious event will occur, but when.

Contemporary Cybersecurity Concerns

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic made a lot of changes to our physical world, but the virtual landscape also saw immense changes. One published by McAfee in 2020 indicated that the pandemic saw an 81% increase in attempted cyberattacks.

Over the past two years, cybersecurity risks have greatly increased due to what Wilson referred to as the Three Rs:

• Russia – While the situation might not be as dire as some might worry, Russian cybercriminals continue to raid data around the country. Whether those attacks are organized by the government or not, tense relations between the United States and Russia have certainly increased the frequency of cyberattacks.
• Ransomware – This lucrative form of extortion often involves stealing someone’s data, encrypting it, and offering to give it back for an obscenely large fee. In 2021, this form of cyberattack dealt the most damage to the United States economy, costing U.S. businesses a total of . By some estimates, that boils down to a business being attacked once every 10 seconds.
• Resilience – Living through a global pandemic, many of us were, and still are, in a depleted mental state. This often leads to business owners and employees taking risks that make their enterprises even more vulnerable, such as keeping the same passwords, clicking nefarious links, or downloading data from disreputable sources.

These factors, along with the increased amount of remote workers using their own devices, have created ideal opportunities for criminals to compromise valuable data and breach unknown security vulnerabilities. This is particularly nerve wracking when you consider that most hackers need very little time to .

How You Can Improve Your Enterprise’s Cybersecurity

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to improve your chances of avoiding and recovering from a malicious event. We’ve listed a few of our favorites below:

1. Update Your Devices. This might seem like a no-brainer, but you would be surprised by how often people forget to keep their devices up to date. When engineers create an update for a smart device, they work out the bugs and vulnerabilities in the code. All hackers have to do is reverse engineer these fixes to prey on devices without the updates.
2. Create A Backup Strategy. If your data is compromised by a malicious event, you will need to make sure you have access to a journal-style snapshot of your data elsewhere. One of the most common strategies is the “3-2-1 Strategy.” This involves having three copies of your data in two geographically dispersed locations, one of which is removed from your network. Here, you can rest assured that at least one version of your backup is safe from a potential cyberattack.
3. Regularly Restore From Backup. If your system is down because of a cyberattack, every minute you don’t restore your server can have severe impacts on your organization’s finances. Routinely restore from backups so that it is second nature when you need it.

Performing these simple tasks can greatly improve your enterprise’s preparedness for a potential cyberattack. “These cyber threats are coming after all of us,” said Rachel Wilson. “They don’t discriminate, and that means all of us in 2022 (and 2023) need to be raising our game.”

Zerto Provides Assurance In The Event Of A Cyberattack

If you are relying on a backup system, you want to make sure you have one you can feel confident in. That is where HPE’s Zerto comes in.

Contrary to many cloud recovery systems, Zerto is software-based and not bound to a particular provider. In addition to being provider agnostic, Zerto offers strong protection against the growing concern of ransomware in the following ways:

• Cloud Mobility – When Zerto notices a change, they copy it, replicate it, and send it to the cloud space (whether that is private or personal). Most importantly, this does not interfere with production and is always on.
• Journal-style Updates – Rather than using a snapshot feature like many other backup services, Zerto checks every five to ten seconds. This means that if a cyberattack hits at 10:00:00, you can recover to 09:59:55 and lose seconds, instead of hours, of work.
• Stack Applications Into Groups – Virtual memory is not the only concern in a malicious event. Applications are also important. If there is a data set in the VM that supports an application, you can group them into a virtual protection group (VPG). This grouping allows you to recover the VMs back to the same point without compromising write-order fidelity. This allows you to test recovery without impacting your production environment.

There are steps enterprises and individuals can take to improve their security and come out the other side of cyberattacks strong. If you have more questions about how you can integrate HPE’s Zerto into your enterprise, contact WEI today.

Next Steps: WEI and HPE/Zerto recently welcomed Rachel Wilson for an exclusive IT security discussion. Rachel currently serves as the director of cybersecurity for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and is a former NSA senior executive. Experts from WEI and HPE also provided data protection and disaster recovery options to help combat cyber threats to your organization, data, and self. Learn more by watching the full webcast below.

The post How Zerto Can Protect Your Data From Cyberattacks appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

It seems like we never have enough time to get everything done that we need to do during our time off. Before you know it, the weekend’s over and there’s still items left on our “to-do” list. That’s certainly the way it is for . If you’re a backup administrator, you know the routine too well. Full and incremental backups take an enormous amount of time. They also consume a lot of resources and bandwidth. Because of their negative impact on production environments, we schedule backup jobs during off-peak hours. The problem is that window just never seems to be quite long enough and with burgeoning data repositories and an expanding application portfolio, that window seems to only get smaller. Face it, scheduling backups in the hope they complete in time without interfering with one another is stressful. Administrators can only hope the last backup job completes before users begin to trickle in Monday morning. If not, users will be competing with those same backup jobs for network bandwidth and server utilization resources and the help desk phones begin to ring.

Complexity and Cost

And then there is the complexity of everything we have to protect. Applications are increasingly dispersed across multiple VMs along with an under layer of dependencies, creating complex application chains that must be completely restored to fully recover from an incident. To address the challenge of narrowing backup windows, traditional backup vendors have created their own distributed solutions, further adding to the complexity of it all. All of this adds to the nervous question of whether a speedy recovery on demand is truly possible, whether that’s a complete restore or the granular recovery of a few files. That’s why so much time is spent monitoring the backup processes, time that could be better spent creating value for the organization. 

Zerto Eliminates the Backup Window

and protection software takes the stress out of backing up your data. There’s no need to sweat about whether the backup job will finish in time. That’s because their continuous data replication is constantly working, replicating every change that is generated within your environment in real time. No more mammoth backup streams being pushed through your network. Zerto backs up little bits at a time, creating what is referred to as recovery point objectives every few seconds. In other words, the slightest data change creates an RPO. No more intense backup processes that consume the resources of the servers you are trying to protect either.

Granular and Accurate Recovery

Let’s face it, backup restoration using point-in-time copies used in traditional backup technology is like taking a spin at the roulette wheel. It’s impossible to avoid recovery gaps as data changes since the last backup job are lost. Then there is the wasted time of restoring more data than you need to restore. Zerto eliminates these large recovery gaps and wasted labors because every data change is replicated in real time. This gives you the ability to restore your data down to the precise second. If a disruption occurred at 9:45 AM, you can restore your data back to 9:44 AM. At most, you lose windows of seconds, not hours, as is the case with traditional backups.

The ability to restore back with pinpoint accuracy is critically important for consistent recovery efforts of multi-VM applications that must be protected as one logical entity. Now you can spin up each application VM from the exact same recovery point, ensuring application consistency. Of course, not every instance calls for this type of split-second recovery. copies are still relevant for those organization needing to store data for long retention periods due to compliance requirements. For those longer retention periods, traditional backup copies are offloaded to secondary storage according to your schedule needs.

Simplified Backup Architecture

Zerto was created with simplicity in mind. It’s designed to fit into nearly any environment regardless of infrastructure because its technology is agnostic. Its purpose-built software appliance installs on any host where virtual or Kubernetes applications are to be protected so it doesn’t require dedicated hardware. It’s small footprint and low overhead components make it easy to scale out to potentially protecting petabytes of data and thousands of VMS. Despite its vast coverage potential, it doesn’t require weeks of intensive training to master it. is a single software experience that can accommodate a full slate of needs across the entire data management and protection spectrum. All of this translates into a future-proof solution and a reduced TCO.

The Power of Zerto and HPE Together

It’s easy to see how is changing the backup technology landscape. That’s why HPE recently completed its acquisition of Zerto. Says Tom Black, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE Storage:

“Our customers continue to face complexity in managing and protecting their data. Zerto’s best-in-class talent and technology expands HPE’s data management and disaster recovery capabilities, giving customers the ability to protect their data and recover in minutes from ransomware attacks. We are thrilled to welcome Zerto to the HPE family.” 

Zerto’s cloud data management and protection software will remain available as a standalone service, but is also available now as a service through the HPE GreenLake platform and the Data Services Cloud Console. If you’d like to learn how Zerto can help you de-stress about your backups and disaster recovery efforts, then contact us at WEI where our storage SMEs can educate you about this exciting backup methodology and architecture that is reshaping the industry.

Next Steps: Learn more about how to effectively plan for backup recovery strategies in our white paper below.

The post HPE Introduces a Less Stressful Approach to Backups appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.